In Review

Speakers of a language rely on its words to carry out even the most mundane acts of communication. But the same words are poets’ medium of creation.

How do poets turn bare utterance into art?

James Longenbach, the Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English, provides an answer with his newest book, How Poems Get Made (W. W. Norton, 2018). The volume grows out of his decades of teaching poetry. “I was pushing myself to be able to find a way to describe how we work with the most basic elements of the poem,” he says.

Longenbach calls poetry a “sonic drama.” A poet uses language to create patterns of sound—within and between the sentences, the words, and the syllables—that are pleasurable to hear.

Here’s some of what to listen for.

Diction

Diction is the words a poet chooses. Longenbach looks at English-language poems specifically, and English is shaped by the interplay of words from its Germanic roots and Latinate words that began entering the language following the Norman invasion of England in the 11th century.

English words with Germanic origins tend to be blunter; Latinate words are more ornate. Poets exploit those differences for dramatic effect. And the etymological diversity of the language can make it feel as if “the act of writing in English were already an act of translation,” says Longenbach.

Syntax

Syntax is the way the words are arranged. Sentences and lines can have a simple structure or a complex one, with multiple phrases or clauses. Poets deploy syntax as they do diction, using structure—and contrasts in structure—to create drama through sound.

Figure

Figures are the metaphors, similes, and other nonliteral forms of description. Daily speech is full of them: “budget your time” or “hold your tongue,” for example. Longenbach writes that “everyone is a master of metaphor. Yet often we remain unaware of a metaphor’s implications—until a poem asks us to become aware.”

Rhythm

Rhythm is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables created by diction and syntax. Old English poets, for instance, used lines with four alliterative stresses; Shakespeare wrote lines of five stressed syllables. Just as poets use the sounds of words and lines to create drama, so they shape the poem through the ways they establish and disrupt rhythm.

Echo

The French fashion for rhyming poems came to England with the Normans in the 11th century. John Milton threw some readers for a loop 600 years later, when he cast aside rhyme in Paradise Lost. But echo is more than rhyming final words in a line. Syllables that sound alike, or sound different, create patterns in a poem, and “the vitality of our poems still depends on such echoes,” Longenbach notes.

Poems aren’t simply vehicles for conveying information. They’re sonic and temporal events, sound and meaning unfolding in time. “People who love poems,” he writes, “. . . reread them not to acquire new knowledge but to reinhabit the enactment of what they already know, that enactment growing richer to the degree that they’re seduced by the movement of the medium.”