The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song BY Ellen Bryant Voigt (Graywolf Press, 2009) From the Publisher: “Ellen Bryant Voigt parses out the deft and alluring shape of poetic language in The Art of Syntax. Through… readings of poems by Bishop, Frost, Kunitz, Lawrence, and others, Voigt examines the signature musical scoring writers deploy to orchestrate meaning. ‘This structure — this architecture — is the essential drama of the poem’s composition,’ she argues.”

“For the past one hundred years,” writes Ellen Bryant Voigt in The Art of Syntax, “poets have been… fretting about the poetic line, what it can do, when released from a priori patterns” (pp. 20-21). As part of The Art of Syntax, one of Graywolf Press’s The Art of series that is edited by Charles Baxter, this book looks at the syntactic structure buried in all verse, from Robert Frost’s controlled iambics to D. H. Lawrence’s ecstatic lines in “The Snake.” Revelatory as a study of how poets manipulate their sentences in subtle, yet crucial ways to create “surprise and energy,” The Art of Syntax is a worthwhile book on craft. The first chapter, “Language, Literacy, and Literature,” reminds us that “In English, the fundamental building blocks are subject, verb and optional verb object” (p. 6). This structure provides the “crucial unit of coherence and relation,” that is, the sentence, upon which all spoken and written communication depends. With the sentence as its engine, language moves to literacy, and literacy to literature, a natural progression from speaking to reading and writing. This first chapter lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, a detailed explication of the sentence’s role in poetry. Poets and scholars alike will learn from Chapter 2, “The Sentence and the Line,” which explores how phrasing, meter and pulse exist in both musical measures and poetic lines. Voigt wisely states that “Poetic meter is more dissimilar than similar to musical meter” (p.24), but musical measures and poetic lineation both demonstrate where and when a phrase begins and ends. Using Stanley Kunitz’s poem “King of the River,” she leads us through lineation that is used in a firm, logical way; most lines are end-stopped or pause at a natural caesura, and the poem lacks enjambments. “King of the River,” for all its free-form lines and meandering appearance, is tightly structured; each stanza ends in a period, a complete unit. Kunitz once said, “You cannot write a poem until you hit upon its rhythm. That rhythm belongs to the subject matter… You can ride on that rhythm, it will carry you someplace strange” (p. 42). This quote emphasizes Voigt’s point that line and syntax must work together or in opposition, and that this “dynamic interplay” makes the best poetry in the English language.

The author also shows us how this interplay does not depend on form or meter. In Chapter 3, “Meter and Phrase,” she counters Frost’s famous line about free verse (“like playing tennis with the net down”) with an observation from Charles Wright: free verse is “the high wire act without the net.” Free verse lacks nothing essential. Form exists in free verse to the same degree as it does in formal poetry, and it is no solution to the challenges that face all poets: working the tools of language to make good poems. Through the work of D. H. Lawrence, Bryant demonstrates how to discern “large-scale phrasing;” Lawrence, especially, creates a “torrent” of words, almost too much to absorb – the whole phrase floods the reader. For example, in stanza 15 of “The Snake,” the lines move with increasing speed down the page:

This stanza has just the right blend of seduction and apprehension; the repetition of “slowly” empowers the snake while trapping the observer, who is unable to move. In “The Snake,” Lawrence gives each sentence a numbered stanza; some are very short, as in stanza 12: “I felt so honored,” and some, like stanza 15 above, contain several lines. The imposition of a pattern containing numbered stanzas of greatly varying length keeps the poem off-balance.

The English language has a distinct sound and pattern, and Voigt succinctly summarizes its charms and challenges with this sentence:

All the more impressive is the triumph of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, which begins: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state” (p. 54). It succeeds because it depends on a very flexible metrical landscape, what Voigt calls a “grid.” Its phrasing comes from Shakespeare’s mastery of spoken English’s syntactical structure, not from a rigid adherence to a strict iambic formula.

In Chapter 7, “Off the Grid,” another section of particular interest as a craft lesson, Voigt asks the essential question: do poets set out to create poems of such deliberate syntactical choices? Is all of this on purpose, or just accidental? The answer, it seems, is both. “The making of a poem is not a performance but an adventure, an act of discovery” (p. 121). Choices in writing are a combination of instinct and intention, influenced in no small part by the poet’s trained ear. The importance of sound and speech is clear enough in Frost’s poetry, but what about a poem like Lawrence’s “The Snake?” The author deciphers its code with just as much skill as she did Frost and Kunitz, though the effect is a bit dense due to the amount of explanation required. Even a poem as deliberately un-metrical, as self-consciously free of formal restraints as “The Snake” contains syntax, sound, and deliberate uses of lineation.

Voigt makes her most significant point near the end of the book:

In other words, poetry is in a state of evolution, which is natural, not revolutionary. Syntax in poetry creates lines that may or may not mimic human speech, but rhythm and line function essentially the same in poetry. The “ongoing spats” between formalists, experimental and traditional poets, seem irrelevant. Poetry will move ahead, spurred on by poets who continually test its boundaries, and by extension, expand the possibilities of language.