What's the Most Important Line?

Dawn Potter
Line is, at its most obvious level, a visual cue on the page: it announces, “This is a poem you’re about to read!” But historically it is more closely tied to sound than to sight. Line is poetry’s direct link to song. In the words of Baron Wormser and David Cappella, it is “the bearer of rhythm” in which “accents, sounds and pauses all consort within the propulsive line that moves steadily forward in time.” While this musical heritage is clearest in formal poems, with their steady metrical pulse and their often-predictable rhyme schemes, it remains fundamentally important in the speech-driven cadences of much contemporary free verse.

Walt Whitman, the great stylistic innovator of the nineteenth century, “recognized that the loose structure of his poetry had precedent in a wide variety of cultural styles between which he was trying to negotiate”—sermons, everyday conversation, dime novels, minstrel shows, newspaper articles, as well as the eloquence of poets such as Shakespeare, many of whose plays he knew by heart. His long, flexible lines incorporate the crowded immediacy of his century yet retain a dense rhythmic power that recalls the bard-like incantations of the world’s most ancient poetry.

            Whitman’s contemporary, Emily Dickinson, was in certain ways his mirror opposite: small where he was large, secretive where he was expansive. Yet her poems, like his, forever changed our understanding of line. In the poem “Amherst,” Amy Clampitt sought to pinpoint Dickinson’s idiosyncratic, hinting manipulations; the clutching grip of her ironies:

such

stoppered prodigies, compressions and

devastations within the atom—all this

world contains: his face—the civil

wars of just one stanza.

“Behind these poems lurks a terrible question that has no answer,” wrote Federico García Lorca. Though his subject was Andalusian traditional music, he might have been speaking of Dickinson’s work. What is it about her lines that makes them both so compelling and so difficult? There is something essentially unpredictable about their syntax; their cadence; their prim, implacable, often ghoulish word choice; their stuttering gaps of silence. When I ask myself, “What’s the most important line?” in a Dickinson poem, I feel I am attempting to untangle a mystery, not by teasing out the poem’s meanings but by looking at the way in which it was constructed. Why is this poem so simple yet so strange? Which lines seem most crucial to the poet’s transmission of pervading, unnerving, sly peculiarity? “What’s the most important line?” could be rephrased as “What’s the weirdest line?”

A sense of puzzlement is often hard for us to admit. If we’re teachers, we feel vulnerable about revealing our ignorance to our students. If we’re students, we worry that the teacher is mocking our stupidity. If we’re alone with a poem, we imagine that we’re the only reader in the world who’s ever been confused and bewildered by it. But you should always feel entitled to announce that you’re mystified. As Lorca’s remark reminds us, great art doesn’t have answers. What it does is push us to ask questions—to examine a piece curiously, to measure it against our own evolving emotions and experiences. If the poem were a mysterious piece of wood, you’d turn it end over end between your hands; you’d rub its roughness with your fingers; you’d let your eyes track the shifting stripes of the grain. You’d make your sense of puzzlement the centerpiece of your exploration. That approach works just as well with poetry.

[This has been another installment from the draft of The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet, currently under heavy construction and forthcoming in 2014 from Autumn House Press.]