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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鈥� 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. 鈥淚 was pushing myself to be able to find a way to describe how we work with the most basic elements of the poem,鈥� he says.

Longenbach calls poetry a 鈥渟onic drama.鈥� A poet uses language to create patterns of sound鈥攚ithin and between the sentences, the words, and the syllables鈥攖hat are pleasurable to hear.

Here鈥檚 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 鈥渢he act of writing in English were already an act of translation,鈥� 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鈥攁nd contrasts in structure鈥攖o create drama through sound.

Figure

Figures are the metaphors, similes, and other nonliteral forms of description. Daily speech is full of them: 鈥渂udget your time鈥� or 鈥渉old your tongue,鈥� for example. Longenbach writes that 鈥渆veryone is a master of metaphor. Yet often we remain unaware of a metaphor鈥檚 implications鈥攗ntil a poem asks us to become aware.鈥�

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 鈥渢he vitality of our poems still depends on such echoes,鈥� Longenbach notes.

Poems aren鈥檛 simply vehicles for conveying information. They鈥檙e sonic and temporal events, sound and meaning unfolding in time. 鈥淧eople who love poems,鈥� he writes, 鈥�. . . 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鈥檙e seduced by the movement of the medium.鈥�