Many writers cite Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the mother and father of contemporary poetry – or perhaps more accurately, as its queer, brilliant aunt and uncle. The two writers may at first seem to have little in common—Whitman is as expansive as Dickinson is compressed, as wild as she is precise. But they share a deeply passionate, deeply strange ear for the rhythm of American speech, its sources and its resonance.
And so, when asked to write a blog post about what copywriters can learn from poetry, I thought first about concision and compression, and my mind turned to Dickinson. But eventually Walt came knocking, insisting on his version of things, on the words coming in like the tides, the ebb and flow of a sentence’s rhythm, the power of crashing surf.
If you love sentences—and even those of us who spend most of our time crafting case studies and white papers got into this racket because we do—you know what I’m talking about. When you write, you’re guided by meaning but also by sound. And when you’re writing well? You get in the groove, channel that inner rhythm, fit the words to it so they resonate. And the excess rises to the surface, and is washed away.
This post is not a how-to. Rather, it is an example by immersion, and a practice for the ear. A reminder that when we read, we listen; when we write, we draw from what we have heard.
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Emily Dickinson wrote poems that, in their time, were considered basically unpublishable. Those few that were published were changed by their editors to force them into line with contemporary tastes (though the well-known editor as bad guy tale turns out to be more complex than originally thought). She punctuated her work with a complex system of dashes large and small, a score for the reader’s ear and eye.
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away –
And now We roam in Sovreign Woods –
And now We hunt the Doe –
And every time I speak for Him
The Mountains straight reply –
This is deeply strange, and deeply compelling. There is nothing wasted. But, even as the emotion of the poem enters you, listen to the rhythm: It is ballad meter, at base as familiar to us as it was to readers of its time. Each stanza consists of fourteen accented beats, in a 4/3/4/3 pattern—the rhythm of both “America the Beautiful” and the Gilligan’s Island theme song. Dickinson channels familiarity at the level of our ear, our heartbeats. But then she does something else: makes that rhythm her own, makes it bend to fit its contents. Look at that dash in the first line:
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
and imagine the line without it… all the energy would simply leak out. But Dickinson knows how to keep the line drawn tight, weaving her elliptical, compressed language through the loom of each stanza:
…
To foe of His – I’m deadly foe –
None stir the second time –
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye –
Or an emphatic Thumb –
Though I than He – may longer live
He longer must – than I –
For I have but the power to kill,
Without – the power to die –
I could go on and on, and of course others have. But just take a moment to appreciate how the flow of the meter, and its collision with the dashed breaks inside the line, heighten and intensify the mystery at the core of this poem: “For I have but the power to kill, / Without – the power to die –“ That brief breath after “Without,” paired with the dash at the end of the poem, is a lesson in itself.
Maybe you need a little air at this point? Let’s turn to Whitman, and these flowing, rustling lines from Leaves of Grass:
A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
When we think about Whitman and rhythm, we need to pull back, see the currents from on high. This is indeed “free verse,” no rhyme scheme or syllabic count to constrain and guide it—and yet it feels deeply inevitable. Part of what makes it so is another echo whose source is deeply embedded in our culture: the language of the King James Bible. Look at the parallel structure of “I guess… I guess…,” the lines of varying lengths spiraling out from their source, but always coming back to the origin. The listing of names of rivers, and how it elevates the ordinary, makes it shimmer. The mirroring of “I give them the same, I receive them the same.”
These are rhythms many of us heard growing up, whether Christian or not, religious or not. They are the rhetoric of the political stump speech, the solemnity of the marriage vow. They hold us aloft, satisfy us. They tune our ear for the next thing.
And when the next thing comes, and it is not what we expected—
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
—because the rhythm starts out the same then ends abruptly, it only strengthens that part of us that is reading for meaning, that is brought up short by the power of the image.
And then there is a breath, and then (because it is Whitman, because the grass keeps on growing), the poem sets out again on its next journey, carrying us onward.
Nice!