Geoff Page is Out of Form

Virtues and limitations of formal poetry

In March 2021, Geoff Page reviewed a collection of poems by Stephen Edgar, Australia’s “pre-eminent and most consistent formalist.” Although Mr Page’s review is mostly positive, one of its paragraphs is suspect:

It is worth pausing here for a moment to consider the virtues and limitations of closely rhymed and metred verse when free verse is available as an alternative. Free verse can have a directness and rhetorical (even metaphorical) energy that highly formal poetry often lacks. Tightly rhymed poems (even when as subtle as Edgar’s) can occasionally have an ‘ingenious’ quality about them, where the reader is paying more attention to the technique than to the ‘substance’ of the poem. They can also involve complex syntax that can sound more like a legal argument than an outburst of lyricism. The reader’s reward for successfully negotiating such a poem may have more in common with the successful completion of a Times Literary Supplement crossword than with the ‘spontaneous overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquillity’ of which Wordsworth spoke.

One gets the feeling that Mr Page is blinded by his own talents. His free verse poems are energetic and lyrical, but it doesn’t follow that any other poet will attain these qualities by abandoning rhyme and metre. Look at the poems published in most literary journals today: generally, they are in free verse. Generally, they are rhetorically and intellectually flaccid.

Despite pausing for a moment to “consider the virtues and limitations” of “closely rhymed and metred verse,” Mr Page’s summary doesn’t mention anything positive about formal poetry. Is it possible that rhyme and metre can increase the rhetorical force or emotional directness of a poem? Mr Page doesn’t have to read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, or Milton to consider the thought; he only has to read Stephen Edgar.

Look at Mr Edgar’s stunning poem, Man on the Moon. The speaker describes how a love affair that seemed to be a “secret destiny planned in advance” eventually failed: “The paths that I imagined to have come / Together and for good have simply crossed / And carried on.”

The poem is in iambic pentametre quatrains with an ABAB rhyming structure. As the Apollo space mission (mentioned early in the poem) was meticulously planned, so too was the poem, and so too (the speaker thought) was the love affair with the addressee. The regularity and predictability of the poem’s form match the speaker’s earlier feelings of being in a destined relationship. Hold the champagne. The relationship ended. The regular form becomes bitterly ironic in contrast with the speaker’s claim: “really, it’s all chance / And the special one might have been anyone.” Nonetheless, the addressee remains the special one: the rhyme scheme pulls the reader back to previous lines, just as the speaker can’t stop thinking about a previous lover.

In this poem (as in many others), the formal sophistication is necessary for the emotional sophistication. If Mr Page feels only a sense of ingenious accomplishment after reading such a poem, then I pity him.