'The Rhapsodic Fallacy' is an essay by

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

poet

Mary Kinzie Mary Kinzie (born September 30, 1944) is an American poet. Life She received her B.A. from Northwestern University in 1967, and returned there to teach in 1975. She won Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson fellowships to do graduate work at the Free U ...

in which she defines and attacks a "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. It was first published in '' Salmagundi'' of Fall 1984 and was collected in ''The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling,'' and a somewhat shorter version of the essay was later anthologized in ''Twentieth-Century American Poetics'' The essay was one of several of the mid-1980s that sparked a heated discussion over the role of form in American poetry, and was thus implicated in the formation of the

New Formalism New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels an ...

movement.

The rhapsodic conception of poetry

Kinzie begins the essay by identifying two contradictory strands in the critical writing and poetry of

Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wide ...

which she perceives as "begetting" the "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. These strands are: #"intensity can only be achieved in spontaneous, fragmented utterance", and #"the mental epic is viable" She moves on to lament the loss of many forms or genres of poetry that were widely used in earlier times, including

satire Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming ...

, the

epistle An epistle (; el, ἐπιστολή, ''epistolē,'' "letter") is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people, usually an elegant and formal didactic letter. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as par ...

georgic The ''Georgics'' ( ; ) is a poem by Latin poet Virgil, likely published in 29 BCE. As the name suggests (from the Greek word , ''geōrgika'', i.e. "agricultural (things)") the subject of the poem is agriculture; but far from being an example ...

pastoral A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music (pastorale) that depicts ...

allegory As a literary device or artistic form, an allegory is a narrative or visual representation in which a character, place, or event can be interpreted to represent a hidden meaning with moral or political significance. Authors have used allegory th ...

, philosophical poem,

epic Epic commonly refers to: * Epic poetry, a long narrative poem celebrating heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation * Epic film, a genre of film with heroic elements Epic or EPIC may also refer to: Arts, entertainment, and medi ...

verse drama Verse drama is any drama written significantly in verse (that is: with line endings) to be performed by an actor before an audience. Although verse drama does not need to be ''primarily'' in verse to be considered verse drama, significant portion ...

, and

tragedy Tragedy (from the grc-gre, τραγῳδία, ''tragōidia'', ''tragōidia'') is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy ...

, and quotes an essay by

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n poet

A. D. Hope Alec Derwent Hope (21 July 190713 July 2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic. He was referred to in an American journal as "the 20th century's greatest 18th-centur ...

: "One after another the great forms disappear".A. D. Hope, "The Discursive Mode: Reflections on the Ecology of Poetry" Kinzie sees free verse as the "great equalizer" and ushering in an age of reduced scope and ambition. "When poems not only set themselves at a uniform pitch, but also contract themselves to recurrent, predictable five- or ten-line climaxes, pretty soon the surprises do not surprise us any more. The new prosaic-lyrical effusion is organized to get us into and out of the poem with extraordinary rapidity and no lasting effects." Kinzie proceeds to identify three main contemporary "substyles" of the prosaic-rhapsodic: #the Objective Style #the Mixed Ironic Style #the Innocuous Surreal Style

The objective style

Kinzie describes the Objective Style as gaining its effects from "the cumulative effect of a string of brief, bland declarative sentences". She lists the tools of the style as being: juxtaposition, portent, non sequitur, and passivity. The last of these, she notes, claims "a kind of reportorial honesty" for the poem.

The mixed ironic style

In the Mixed Ironic Style the poet injects into the work a "stylistic agitation that at first feel rich, sensitive, conscious, attentive to response". Kinzie regards

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

as a prime example of a poet of this style.

The innocuous surreal style

In the third style described by Kinzie, the Innocuous Surreal Style, the poet whimsically and abruptly "violates" the "realistic surface" of the poem. Kinzie describes variants of this style: the Muted Innocuous Surreal and the Comic Surreal.

Footnotes

External links

Essays about poetry 1984 essays {{poetry-essay-stub