This post might end up being quite lengthy, which is rather ironic. Here’s the long and short of it: I’m going to explore short poetry, and wait till you see what I’ve uncovered. The fact of the matter is, I suspect I will have more to share than my average post length, so I believe I could end up with a Part 2 to this Part 1. Who knows – maybe even a Part 3?
My investigation began after reading Helen Vendler’s analysis of Dickinson’s “In the name of the bee,” three lines thought by early editors to be too short to be a poem. As a result, the work was tacked onto the lines of two other poems to become, in Vendler’s words, a “compound assembly.” I wrote about the three separate poems just yesterday, HERE.
In her commentary, Vendler wrote, “in fact such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all.”
Using the three-line work as an example, Vendler speculated, “we could say that what a poem needs above all is imagination. In this tiny poem we see a first, second, third, and fourth effort of imagination.”
Before I specify Vendler’s evidentiary foursome for “In the name of the Bee,” let me repeat again Vendler’s “above all” need for a poem to be a poem: inagmination. We’re going to need more than a bit of imagination for what I’ve come across in my exploration of short poems. But – I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me push on with Vendler’s tetrad.
First: “The poet invents the idea of a parody of a Christian form of words.”
Second: “The poet decides on the three nouns to be substituted for teh three Persons of the Trinity.”
Third: “The poet has to make her trinity of nouns ‘mean something’ in relation to one another.”
Fourth: “The nouns chosen must have a ‘spiritual’ quality, must be symbolic as well as ‘real.’”
Vendler offers more. This is just a bare-bones summary of her remarks and for her initial query, “what counts as a poem at all.”
I’ve written about short poems before. The three that immediately popped into my mind were the following (and all definitely meet the criteria of having to deal with imagination):
My investigation began after reading Helen Vendler’s analysis of Dickinson’s “In the name of the bee,” three lines thought by early editors to be too short to be a poem. As a result, the work was tacked onto the lines of two other poems to become, in Vendler’s words, a “compound assembly.” I wrote about the three separate poems just yesterday, HERE.
In her commentary, Vendler wrote, “in fact such a short poem raises the question of what counts as a poem at all.”
Using the three-line work as an example, Vendler speculated, “we could say that what a poem needs above all is imagination. In this tiny poem we see a first, second, third, and fourth effort of imagination.”
Before I specify Vendler’s evidentiary foursome for “In the name of the Bee,” let me repeat again Vendler’s “above all” need for a poem to be a poem: inagmination. We’re going to need more than a bit of imagination for what I’ve come across in my exploration of short poems. But – I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me push on with Vendler’s tetrad.
First: “The poet invents the idea of a parody of a Christian form of words.”
Second: “The poet decides on the three nouns to be substituted for teh three Persons of the Trinity.”
Third: “The poet has to make her trinity of nouns ‘mean something’ in relation to one another.”
Fourth: “The nouns chosen must have a ‘spiritual’ quality, must be symbolic as well as ‘real.’”
Vendler offers more. This is just a bare-bones summary of her remarks and for her initial query, “what counts as a poem at all.”
I’ve written about short poems before. The three that immediately popped into my mind were the following (and all definitely meet the criteria of having to deal with imagination):
| E. E. Cummings: l(a This poem – one of my favorites – is so clever, and I’ve written about it many times. One such post is HERE. |  |
 | William Carlos Williams: so much depends I’ve also written about this oft-debated poem many times. One instance is HERE. |
Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro
I haven’t discussed this poem in detail, thought to be the origin of imagism and verbless poetry, but I have mentioned it a couple of times. One post where I did cite the poem is HERE (toward the bottom of the page):
Based on Vendler’s remarks, I did further exploration into short poetry – above and beyond types of short works like haiku. I’ll report on some of that tomorrow, and in short – you won’t believe what I came across. For now, I’ll close with this:
Haikus are easy.
All you have to include are
Seventeen sylla –
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