Modern Age - Summer 2017 - 188

Modern Age

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Summer 2017

few suggestions may be offered. "Cruising with the Beach Boys"
comprises four eight-line stanzas in blank verse with rhymes but
no set rhyme scheme. One long and widely recognized purpose
of such formal elements is mnemonic: a metrical, rhyming poem
is easier to remember than a patch of prose. A Beach Boys song
has both rhyme and meter reinforced by the pounding rhythm
of the song, features that doubtless contribute to the speaker's
amazed realization: "I can't believe I know the words by heart."
Gioia does something more specific and telling with the formal elements, however: although the poem as a whole has no
fixed rhyme scheme, each of the last three eight-line stanzas
closes with an abab quatrain, as in the passage quoted above,
with rhymes on "fall" / "shelf" / "all"/ "myself." This device of finishing up a stretch of randomly rhyming verse with a tight pattern
recalls Milton's Lycidas, which finishes with a perfect ottava rima
stanza at the end of more than 180 lines of iambic pentameter
with interspersed trimeter lines and sporadic rhymes. This is not
to say that Gioia was thinking of Milton, or that most readers
would notice; but in each case the technique of increasing formal
orderliness implies a growth of clarity in the mind of the meditative speaker.
The goal of part 2, "Notes Toward a Definition of Poetry" (I suppose the echo of Wallace Stevens's title, "Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction," is deliberate), is explicit:
Equipped with the account of reason we find in Aristotle, I shall
undertake a brief examination of the literary theories of Henri
Brémond, W. K. Wimsatt, Jacques Maritain, John Hollander, and
J. V. Cunningham, all of which will set the stage for my own historical account of what poetry is. This I will conduct in two ways.

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Modern Age - Summer 2017

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