On Leaving the Garden of Eden

The Edenic myth is about growing beyond and out of cultural comfort zones.  First, we had to deal with exposure as we forsook temperate climates.  "Adam and Eve" clothed themselves out of necessity, not modesty, as they learned how to survive harsher environments.  Modesty followed custom, not vice versa.

Then we learned how to produce and store enough food to last through longer and harsher winters; next we learned how to transport goods, including by sea and eventually air, to facilitate production, storage and distribution of essential goods.

What we learned in the second half of the 20th century is how to inhabit extremes of atmospheric pressure--from the vacuum of space to the breathing of compressed gases underwater.

Each of these advances takes us out of the "Garden of Eden" of our species' current comfort zone, always carrying with us the tools we learned to use in previous advances.

It makes me wonder where the next advance will take us....  Somewhere, no doubt, where outer space, inner space, and cyberspace converge.

And, of course, as individuals we are continually cast out of the Garden as we learn to be ashamed of our previous ignorance/innocence.

The serpent in the Garden is the urge to continually advance, to grow in knowledge, which eventuates in wisdom.  The forbidden fruit is knowledge itself, the fruit of our seemingly unwise desire to leave Eden in search of additional knowledge and greater wisdom.

Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 2

Jaron Lanier ends his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his gig as a philosopher of the early 21st Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

The phase of life we call "childhood" was greatly expanded in connection with the rise of literacy, because it takes time to learn to read. [...] It has even been claimed that the widespread acceptance of childhood as a familiar phase of human life only occurred in conjunction with the spread of the printing press. (180)

Lanier takes pains to show a physiological basis for metaphor, for metaphor is the route by which we get closer and closer to the nature of consciousness, and that brings us full circle to Chapter 1.

The Part and the Whole

The many in the one is the characteristic of universality;

The many not being the one is the characteristic of particularity;

The universal is formed by many species which are in themselves identical;

Their identity is shown in the difference of each in its own essence;

The principle of the interdependent origination of the one and the many is wonderful integration;

Disintegration means that each retains its own character and does not become the whole.

This all belongs to the realm of wisdom and is not said from the standpoint of worldly knowledge.

By means of this skillful device, you can understand Hua-yen.

Adapted from a verse by Fa-tsang (643-712 CE)
in Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra
by Francis H. Cook

The Reconnection

I.

picking the itch
a defrocked flower and
an Indian maid
with a third ear
middle

faceless alabaster
slides head first
into the silty stream as
a pumpkin sun
sets on cattails


II.

starwheel
throwing off suns
helping to remember
stolen dreams

collapsible staircase
ascending
approval
one-on-one

a pair on bikes
"We could catch up."
kaleidoscopic
mushroom cloud

so glad to see
the Blue
amid a whirling field
of stars

There is something more.

a panther in silhouette
against the sunset

a turquoise fly
transmogrifies and

a ruby-throated hummingbird
flies on by


— by Chris "Starbaby" Hayden

as transcribed by Sally Paradise in The Kharma Comes

Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 1

Jaron Lanier begins his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his day job as a technologist of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). (5)

This would have been yesterday's news to McLuhan, whose 1964 opus, Understanding Media, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.

Lanier, however, is aware of his ironic position, and takes pains to separate himself from the hive mentality that dominates Web 2.0 and all of its adherents (including contributors to the blogosphere). And since his own subtitle is "A Manifesto," which would seem to indicate a high level of public importance, Lanier provides a self-help list of do's and don'ts for those addicted to the superficiality of Web 2.0 reductionism:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
(21)

That's some good advice. If we all adhered to Lanier's dicta, we would be spared the vituperative trash that infects topical forums, Wikipedia would be useful background to the real story, websites would be windows into our souls, YouTube would be worth watching, more blogs would be worth reading, and Twitter might actually be interesting. Imagine the kind of Singularity we could then produce!

In 1991, Brian Eno famously quipped that "Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets, and bad taste." Lanier sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in a section called "Schlock Defended." Again, he can see the irony of YouTube, and suggests that, while it could--and should--be of much higher quality, the motivation to create schlock is inarguably human.

Lanier then takes on computationalism in his chapter titled "I Am a Contrarian Loop," an obvious spoof on our own Doug Hofstadter's work. Lanier critiques the three "flavors" of computationalism that are supposed to result in the Singularity--the awakening of the web. First there's the notion that sheer quantities of data held in databases such as Google's will somehow wake up to some kind of cosmic consciousness. A second flavor--that proferred by Hofstadter--requires self-aware recursion--a "strange loop"--in order to qualify as consciousness. Finally, there is Web 2.0 computationalism, which holds to a new twist on the Turing test: if you buy music based on the recommendations of the hive "then the hive is effectively a person" (156). Lanier then suggests that human evolution is, in fact, realistic computationalism, and we could construct a myth, a creation tale, "to think computationally that isn't as vulnerable to the confusion brought about by our ideas about ideal computers" (157). For McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express Lanier's realistic computationalism.

To be continued...

[NOTE: This blog post was four weeks in the making. Part 2 could be four more. :dj]

from "Nixon's Kids (My Generation)"

In fifth grade, an experiment
        Was tried on some of us to see
        If more kids simultaneously
In class was more efficient.

We had not one or two but four
        (To teach us all according to
        The strengths of every student who
Had tested high or low before

On various subjects) one of which
        turned out to be the niece of that
        old Presidential candidate
They'd kicked around: Old Tricky Dick

Himself, who also happened to
        Have lived just down the street from us
        In Yorba Linda. So what does
One do, but hold a vote to choose

Our own class president? It soon
        Got ugly, way beyond just signs
        And slogans, promises and lines,
Until we nearly, once at noon,

Had us a riot by the bars
        At recess when some seven guys
        Deplored the war we fought disguised
As just containment of Karl Marx.

I can't recall who won that day
        But never mind: Miss Nixon went
        To the inauguration bent
On stating America's way.

But having for one's teacher the
        Niece of one so powerful
        Had merit undeniable
And took me places unforeseen.

For instance, once when Nixon flew
        To the southland for a stay
        In his new place in San Clemente,
I dragged my parents, joined those who

Went out to see if Air Force One
        Would sink into the tarmac of
        Our little airstrip. Heads above
The rest he waved, the favorite son,

And I was quite inspired to write
        A news account of that great day.
        I showed it to Miss Nixon, a
Great source for her of no small pride;

She sent it off to Uncle Dick,
        Who sent it to his pilot: shall
        Lt. Col. Ralph B. Al-
Bertazzie tour his bailiwick?

And so we went, my parents and
        The press and I to El Toro
        Where Air Force One awaited for
Our entourage. I took a stand

From that day forth: I'd try to train,
        Become a pilot, hopefully,
        Serve God and country faithfully
And told Miss Nixon of my aim.

But then one day at recess I
        Observed a sonic boom fly by
        When we'd just learned astronomy
And all about the speed of light.

I ran across the asphalt lea
        To my beloved, said in glee:
        "Miss Nixon, everything we see
Is in the past!" She looked at me

And said with utmost certainty,
        "No, it's not!" I turned away
        And never held her in that way
Again. I still think she delayed me.

Consider That

The Sun never rises;
our star never sets.
It appears in the east
as Earth turns from west.

Consider This

Every day, the largest nuclear reactor in the solar system appears on the eastern horizon; in fact, it is constantly doing so somewhere on the planet. This star alone is responsible for the reserves of energetic capital that we are rapidly depleting through our heavy reliance on fossil fuel technologies. We must now remember how to live solely on our solar income, tapping into our savings only when absolutely necessary.

A Sense of the Divine

Toward a Coherent Life

What, exactly, would a coherent life look like? How can we make all the parts of a life add up to something that hangs together and seems logically connected? And how can we earn a decent living, all at the same time? Matthew B. Crawford takes an interesting stab at questions like these in Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Crawford teases his reader with only the barest of glimpses into his own life, but it seems as though it went something like this: Grew up with mom and sis on a California commune, did not attend high school (which may explain his later success), took his undergrad in physics (just like his dad), earned a master's degree in philosophy (unlike his dad), then terminated with a doctorate in the philosophy of politics; worked for an information services firm, ran a thinktank, and now makes his living as a motorcycle mechanic, the only job he's ever really enjoyed. "[F]ixing bikes is more meaningful," he writes, "because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence" (196).

Here we see the concrete supporting the abstract--a competent wrench supporting grace on wheels and the need for speed. Contrast this with his previous positions, first as a writer of abstracts for an academic database of journal articles (most of which he could not understand and was not given enough time to even try to understand), then as the director of a thinktank whose mission it was to make arguments against the case for global warming appear to be scholarly. There's simply no room for that kind of bullshit in motorcycle maintenance--either the power and handling are there, or they're not.

My point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular, nor to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some understanding of the good life. This understanding may be hard to articulate; bringing it more fully into view is the task of moral inquiry. Such inquiry may be helped along by practical activities in company with others, a sort of conversation in deed. In this conversation lies the potential of work to bring some measure of coherence to our lives. (197)

I would suggest that this conversation in deed is one conversation in which we all should engage. And I would recommend letting Matthew B. Crawford lead the discussion.

Scenario Universe

In Synergetics, R. Buckminster Fuller succinctly lays out his definition of Universe and humanity's place therein. The problem with that opening sentence, however, is that Universe is not some system within which one exists.

As Bucky sees it, "Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciouly apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences" (81). Note that, by definition, Universe requires conscious apprehension and communication, without which it would not exist. In the ultimate self-referential recursion, Universe requires humanity to experience Universe as much as humanity requires Universe as the ground against which we experience life. "We have only one counterpart of total complexity," Bucky says, "and that is Universe itself (85).

Thus mutually dependent, Universe and humanity are but components of one eventuation, or, as Bucky notes, "Universe is technology--the most comprehensively complex technology. Human organisms are Universe's most complex local technologies" (85).

At the same time, Universe is not a system. If it were a system, we could stand outside of it and say "There is the Universe"; but that is not the case. Anywhere humanity goes, there is Universe; thus Universe is a scenario, not a system. Furthermore, "Universe and its experiences cannot be considered as being physical, for they balance out as weightless," and "weightless experience is metaphysical" [emphasis added] (84).

Having declared that reality is thus metaphysical, we can look to Joseph Campbell for insight into how humanity experiences this Fuller Universe. "Our eyes are the eyes of this earth," Campbell writes in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion; "our knowledge is the earth's knowledge. And the earth, as we now know, is a production of space" (2). Obviously Bucky would substitute Universe for earth, but he would undoubtedly assent to Campbell's earth as "a production of space"--production as in artistic performance.

Campbell refers to Immanuel Kant's four-term analogy to make this clear: a:b::c:x "where x represents a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable--which is to say, is metaphysical" (29), the point on which Bucky and Campbell converge. Moreover, Campbell notes, "as Jesus also is reported to have declared (in the recently discovered and translated Gnostic Gospel of Thomas): 'The Kingdom is within you'" (53).

To conclude, while Shakespeare's cliched theatrical analogy--"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players"--certainly has some merit, it would be more instructive to consider the fact that the play resides in the minds of the players, even as the players inhabit the play: scenario Universe.

Environmental Consciousness

If every person on Earth planted and cared for at least two tree seedlings each year, the world could make up for the loss of trees to deforestation over the previous 10 years in the next 10 years.

-- Al Gore, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

Reduce your carbon footprint, and eat well too!

1. Eat less meat.


2. Eat from local agricultural sources as much as possible.


3. Support farmers' markets. (21)

To which I would add: Grow your own!

Bucky Fuller's Requirements for a Dwelling Advantage

File under features no home should be without:

Universal Requirements of a Dwelling Advantage

III. A. Provision of ready mechanical means, complementing or implementing, all development requirements of the individual's potential growth phenomena--allowing the facile, scientifically efficient, no-energy-or-time-loss--spontaneous development of self-disciplined education, by means of

1. Conning*, i.e., selectively stimulated awareness of the momentary interactions of universal progressions accomplished by means of facile reference to vital data on
• history
• news
• forecasts

calls for a conning facility combining book and periodical library, radio, television facilities, systematically arranged incoming reports on
1. current supply and demand conditions
2. current dynamic conditions -- weather -- earthquakes--latest scientific research findings
3. social dynamics-surfacing of commonweal problems of comprehensive readjustment to new potential and concomitant obsolescense factors
4. latest technical reference in
   • texts
   • movie documentation
   • television university (soon evoluting to increasing importance and reliability as the Autonomous Dwelling Facility becomes widely available) (52)

from No More Secondhand God and other writings
by R. Buckminster Fuller (1971)

While this list may well describe the home of the later 21st Century, it probably best describes a research center in the first decade of that century.

* Bucky takes his definition for conning from his days in the Naval War College, meaning to examine or study, but also to steer a ship. :dj

Time Consciousness and the Role of Dominant Myths

Having been a fan of both Brian Eno (see "Stars: the Consciousness of Cool," below) and Stewart Brand since the '70s, I was surprised to learn that the two had come together in the '90s, collaborating on the project described in Brand's book of the same name: The Clock of the Long Now.

Here we find Eno master of time as well as space. Brand credits Eno with coining "the long now," which, says Eno, extends "our concept of the present in both directions, making the present longer" (29). Then Brand and Eno take the long now into the realm of myth, for The Clock of the Long Now, with its associated 10,000-Year Library,

aims for the mythic depth to become, as Brian Eno puts it, "one of those system-level ideas which sets in motion all sorts of behavior without ever having to be referred to directly again. This is what dominant myths do: they make some sorts of behavior ring with recognition and familiarity and value and a sense of goodness, and thus lay deep templates for social cohesion about what would otherwise be very hard-to-discuss topics." (49)

Or as James P. Carse would say in Finite and Infinite Games:

• “We resonate with myth when it resounds in us.”
• “Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.”
• “Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.”

Just imagine what kind of civilization might arise from the myth of a long now...

Future Consciousness

Some thoughts from Howard Gardner:

Five Minds for the Future

[T]he world of the future--with its ubiquitous search engines, robots, and other computational devices--will demand capacities that until now have been mere options. To meet this new world on its own terms, we should begin to cultivate these capacities now. (2)

In the future, we need a less ritualistic, more deeply internalized form of discipline. (41)

Perhaps, as educator Vartan Gregorian has suggested, we need a specialization in becoming a generalist. Such a specialization would target promising candidates and devote resources toward the enhancement of synthesizing capacities. (75)

Corporate visionary John Seely Brown has quipped that, in the world of tomorrow, people will say, "I create; therefore I am." (77)

If one wishes to raise individuals who are respectful of differences across groups, a special burden is accordingly placed on education in the social sciences, the human sciences, the arts and literature. (114)

I would like to live in a world characterized by "good work": work that is excellent, ethical, and engaging. (127)

[A]nyone who aims to cultivate these minds must have a concept of what it means to be successful and what it means to fail. (164)

Data Consciousness

Digital history may be overwritten, but it is never lost. Just as in language, the past is held etymologically in the present.

On Cloud Computing

Cloud computing relies upon virtual machines to meet the elastic demands of network processing. Need another server? Instantiate another virtual machine.

But a virtual machine is just a file, a file that contains every bit required to represent the main memory of an actual computer--an operating system, an application, and some data. Then, in the ultimate case of code-generation, a program branches to that file and immediately begins to behave as a separate computer, the computer defined by that file.

Similarly, a book is just a file. When the brain reads the text in that file, the interpreter that is the mind branches to the code in the file and executes it as though it is a separate mind, the mind defined by that book.

The question, then, is this:

What analogy exists in the virtual private cloud?

The Solemn Cadence

I recently encountered McLuhan's concept of tetrads, which present "not sequential but simultaneous facets of media effects" -- that is, "they are right-hemisphere in character, and each tetrad comprises two figures and two grounds in proportion to each other" (McLuhan and McLuhan, 1988, 127).

This led me to re-read R. Buckminster Fuller's section on the tetrahedron in Synergetics, in which he writes:

The tetrahedron occurs conceptually independent of events and independent of relative size. By tetrahedron, we mean the minimum thinkable set that would subdivide Universe and have interconnectedness where it comes back upon itself. The four points have six interrelatednesses. There are two kinds of number systems involved: four being prime number two and six being prime number three. So there are two very important kinds of oscillating quantities numberwise, and they begin to generate all kinds of fundamentally useful mathematics. The basic structural unit of physical Universe quantation, tetrahedron has the fundamental prime number oneness. (1982, 333)

In pondering the relationship between tetrads and tetrahedra, I recalled my own previous work on iambic tetrameter, the four-foot line that has sometimes been called "the solemn cadence." I present it here as preface to some sort of hermeneutic, to follow.

The Solemn Cadence

Introduction

Is there some force inherent in a four-foot line of rising meter that lends greatness to poetry written in iambic tetrameter? I want to suggest that there is. Consider this: Despite the preponderance of iambic pentameter in English poetry, a disproportionate number of the poems we call great are written in iambic tetrameter. Consider this: Poets respond to one another in four-footed lines; even Marlowe, for all of his blank verse, is best remembered, both in anthologies and poetic responses, for "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," written in quatrains of iambic tetrameter. Consider this: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate, would use the meter in quatrains rhyming abba to produce what may well be the most powerful poetry in the English language: "In Memoriam, A.H.H." How is it that great poetry is so often written in rhymed quatrains of iambic tetrameter?

To seek an answer to this question I will briefly discuss versification in general, then iambic tetrameter and long metered quatrains such as the In Memoriam stanza in particular. I will analyze poetic responses written in iambic tetrameter, then look at what writers in other genres have to say about iambic tetrameter before examining how that meter may be perceived more easily by the brain, thus allowing it to impact the mind more readily.

Background

T.S. Eliot wrote that "the conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing [of poetry] are more those of a quasi-musical nature, in the arrangement of metric and pattern, than of a conscious exposition of ideas" (qtd in Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy lxi). The craft of creating this quasi-musical nature is called versification, which consists of four primary components: rhythm, meter, rhyme, and form — each of which contributes to the repetitious nature of poetry. The first component, rhythm, is concerned with the sequence in which emphasized syllables are heard by the human ear. Though there are multiple theories on how many gradations of emphasis are actually perceived, it is safe to say that there are at least two: stressed and unstressed. Thus we may scan a line of language, poetic or not, and note the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables as in this line by Tennyson:

I held it truth, with him who sings

in which the first syllable of each pair is unstressed, the second is stressed. A regular, that is, repeating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables produces meter, the recurrence of approximately equal units in a poem's rhythm (lxii). There are four metrical systems used in English poetry: accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic, and quantitative — of which accentual-syllabic is by far the most common (lxii). Because I am here concerned primarily with iambic tetrameter, I will discuss only accentual-syllabic meter in this paper, and will not discuss the other three. Accentual-syllabic meter takes as its basic unit the metrical foot, a set of two or three stressed and/or unstressed syllables (lxiii). According to Ferguson, Salter, and Saltworthy, the six possible permutations of metrical feet are:

Foot	Description
Iambic	One unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable
Trochaic	One stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable
Anapestic	Two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
Dactylic	One stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
Spondaic	Two successive syllables of equally strong stress
Pyrrhic	Two successive syllables of equally light stress

This system of English metrics is not without its detractors, however. Robert Wallace, in his essay "Meters in English," claims there is only one meter, accentual-syllabic, and within that one meter there is an iambic norm. All other variants are the result of feminine endings, the placement of an extra syllable on a line, or decapitation, the omission of the first syllable on an otherwise iambic line. Wallace accepts anapests and dactyls as legitimate substitutions to the iambic norm, but argues that anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic meters do not exist (Baker 4-28). I disagree, as do Ferguson, Salter, and Saltworthy, but here I am concerned only with Wallace's assertion of an iambic norm in English poetry. I believe such a norm is demonstrable beyond debate.

Once the meter is established, a poet may adhere to a specific line length throughout the poem. The most common line lengths in English poetry are:

Line Length	Description
Monometer	One metrical foot per line
Dimeter	Two metrical feet per line
Trimeter	Three metrical feet per line
Tetrameter	Four metrical feet per line
Pentameter	Five metrical feet per line
Hexameter	Six metrical feet per line
Heptameter	Seven metrical feet per line
Octameter	Eight metrical feet per line

Of these fixed line lengths, pentameter is by far the most popular (Ferguson, Salter, and Saltworthy lxv) and is the basis for several important forms in English poetry: blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) and heroic couplets (rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines). This brings up another component of repetition in English poetry — rhyme — the concurrence of the last stressed vowel and all speech sounds following that vowel (lxix). While not devaluing the importance of rhyme, I am not going to discuss it at length here because I am concerned primarily with meter, but I do want to discuss rhyme in terms of several forms that I consider paramount in English poetry, especially various forms of quatrains, poetic stanzas of four lines each. Quatrains, whether rhymed or not, are the most commonly used stanzas in English poetry, but themselves fall into several types, based on meter, line lengths, and rhyme scheme. The most common quatrain is the ballad stanza with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, often rhyming abcb or, less commonly, abab. The ballad stanza is epitomized in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's literary ballad, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," as well as many of Emily Dickinson's poems. When the second and fourth lines of the ballad stanza are lengthened to iambic tetrameter those quatrains are known as long meter and may be seen in Thomas Hardy's "Channel Firing" (lxxii). Finally, a long meter quatrain rhyming abba is known as the In Memoriam stanza, as it was epitomized by Tennyson's "In Memoriam, A.H.H."

This long diversion into the mechanical elements of poetry is important because each element — rhythm, meter, rhyme, and form — contributes more or less to the repetitive quality of any poem. Even irregular forms or open forms, so called free verse, rely completely on these four components for their prosody, their versification, their rendering of prose into poetry. My argument is that greatness in English poetry is (aside from the poem's subject) largely a matter of strict adherence to short repetitive units, especially the long metered quatrain. In confirmation of this thesis, let us now look at several of the most important poems in the English canon.

Confirmation

In spite of the preponderance of poems written in iambic pentameter, it may be argued that the greatest poems in the canon are all written in iambic tetrameter. I believe greatness in poetry may be measured by the response to a given poem, and that response can be quantified in two major ways: first, the degree to which a poem is anthologized, that is, how often editors of collected works intending to demonstrate the most remarkable specimens of the craft include a particular poem in their anthologies; and second, the degree to which other great poets respond to a particular poem.

It has been said that the three most anthologized poems of their respective eras are "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe, "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud" by William Wordsworth, and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. To this list I would add "In Memoriam A.H.H." by Alfred, Lord Tennyson as it is now excerpted in every anthology of poetry and Victorian literature that I have encountered, which are many. This seems somewhat strange when one considers the miles and miles of blank verse that Marlowe wrote, including his many plays, or the many pentameter sonnets of William Shakespeare, or the fact that Wordsworth wrote "The Prelude" in iambic pentameter. How is it that the poems most often anthologized in their respective times are those written in iambic tetrameter? Well, one might suggest that poems written in quatrains of long meter are typically short or easily excerpted, and therefore lend themselves more readily to books of collected works. This may well be true, but I believe there other factors compelling editors to include these poems in their anthologies. First, poems of this form are readily committed to memory. Second, they are set to music more often than other forms. And third, they are often written to memorialize the dead and thus hold a special place in the hearts of editors and their readers. These three factors are not unrelated. As I will soon show, the musical quality of these poems is precisely what makes them easier to memorize, and is also precisely what endears them to editors and readers alike.

The second major way in which poetic greatness may be measured is by the number of responses that other artists make to a given piece of poetry or form. To discuss this, I will first look at several responses to "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe, which is included in Appendix A, below.

In "The Passionate Shepherd," Marlowe uses long metered quatrains rhyming aabb to create a pastoral poem in which a mythical universe is set up and everything surrounding the passionate shepherd is imbued with beauty unmatched by anything found on this planet, a place where "shepherds feed their flocks, / By shallow rivers to whose falls / Melodious birds sing madrigals." Sir Walter Ralegh took exception to this view, and took the point of view of the passionate shepherd's love but retained the form when he responded with "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (Appendix B, below). Ralegh reminds Marlowe that all of these beauteous material things will fade with age, "But could youth last, and love still breed, / Had joys no date, nor age no need, / Then these delights my mind might move / To live with thee, and be thy love." John Donne, possibly the smartest of the English poets, then responds with a complex fishing metaphor (see Appendix C, below) in which the poet is himself ensnared by his love: "For thou thyself art thine own bait, / That fish, that is not catched thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I." Finally, C. Day Lewis responds to all three poets simultaneously with the second of his "Two Songs" (Appendix D, below). In his caustic critique of pre-World War II reality, Lewis begins with the first two lines of Marlowe's original poem, "Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will some new pleasures prove" but, rather than taking the voice of his love interest, Lewis' narrator remarks on the environment, the "sour canals" by which the couple sits and hopes "to hear some madrigals." It is not time alone that hinders Lewis but the times themselves for "Hunger shall make thy modest zone / And cheat fond death of all but bone — / If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me and be my love." Through these four poems, four great poets have led us from a scene of pastoral beauty, through a reminder that beauty fades with age and is in itself a trap, to a world in which there is no beauty whatsoever. And they did it all using long metered quatrains rhyming aabb.

Another poem that recent poets often respond to is Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H." Tennyson uses abba quatrains of iambic tetrameter to create what I believe is the most important single poem in the English language. It is important because of its self-conscious use of memory, in which, ultimately, all poetry takes place. Today, we usually translate the Latin in memoriam as in remembrance, but I believe Tennyson is referring to the first definition of memoria, which is simply memory. Tennyson is not so much remembering his friend Arthur Hallam in the past as he is living with Hallam in his own memory, which is fully alive in the poet's present mind. The relationship between thought and memory is reciprocal. Neuropsychologist J.W. Brown describes it this way:

Thought and memory are different terms for a common process. Thinking is a way of characterizing certain aspects of memory, while remembering is a way of characterizing certain forms of thought. (99)

We see this in the interaction that takes place when Tennyson reads letters from Hallam while in the process of writing "In Memoriam." The poet reflects upon his friend, that is, he engages with that memory, such that "The dead man touch'd me from the past, / And all at once it seem'd at last / The living soul was flash'd on mine [...] but ah, how hard to frame / In matter-moulded forms of speech, / Or ev'n for intellect to reach / Thro' memory that which I became" (XCV). Tennyson reads Hallam into memory, comes to understand that unification of mind — memory and thought — becomes one with his "strange friend" and expresses his thoughts in poetic verse.

It is through poetry, then, that Tennyson extends his memory, which now includes Hallam as well as himself, into perpetuity. Tennyson refers to this potential in section VIII, written near the beginning of the poem's sixteen-year incubation, when he places "this poor flower of poesy" on Hallam's tomb, "That if it can it there may bloom" (VIII). Tennyson is recording his own thoughts and his memories of Hallam. That text becomes a poetic event when an engaged reader encounters it and reads it into memory. The reader can then access and include that memory in future thoughts. Hallam and Tennyson are now one in the reader — past, present, and to be — and it is only through the function of memory that this afterlife can occur.

Recent responses to "In Memoriam" include Craig Arnold's "Ubi Sunt . . . ?" (Appendix E, below), in which the 1999 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets eulogizes a deceased poet of his own time. He remarks upon his mentor, a "poet who could smooth / the language like a sheet over / the body of a dying lover, / who made me realize how soothe / meant show the truth." Arnold is talking about craft, the craft of utilizing olden forms to contain ideals that are themselves ageless. After a recent reading of his work, I asked Arnold how he came to choose the In Memoriam stanza for his elegy, especially that particular meter. He said, "I just like the pulse, the way it swings." While I had been hoping for a more academic response, his statement points out the musical qualities of iambic tetrameter, qualities to which I will soon return.

But poets are not the only ones to respond to iambic tetrameter — musicians and novelists, too, have responded in their own ways. In 1916, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry set William Blake's "And Did Those Feet" to music, called it "Jerusalem" and created one of the most popular hymns in the Anglican hymnal. It was even covered by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and released on their 1973 album, Brain Salad Surgery. In Middlemarch, novelist George Eliot refers to iambic tetrameter as the "solemn cadence" (210). In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy refers to the musical qualities of iambic tetrameter when he has Angel Clare recall and ponder a stanza from "In Memoriam" itself:

Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
    Her early Heaven, her happy views;
    Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but he gladly conformed to it now (201).

Hardy, through Angel Clare, is remarking not only on the cadence of iambic tetrameter, but also on its power to convince, its power to stay in one's memory and its power to influence one's life, a life that takes place, of course, entirely in memory. Edgar Allan Poe also noted the importance of music in poetry when he said:

Contenting myself with the certainty that music, in its various modes of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be wisely rejected — is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance — I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality (qtd. in Baker v).

But if Poe did not feel compelled to discuss the musical qualities essential to poetry, I do. Boomsliter, Creel, and Hastings have studied the relationship of perceiver to perception, and point to findings that "the mind not only 'craves measure,' but requires it in order to have data usable by perception and memory" (200). They go on to describe how that process works in poems as units of expectancy patterns: "When we speak of a stanza as an expectancy pattern we mean that the organization allows us to predict one part from another, and that in fact we do predict. The metrical stanza arouses expectation and then satisfies it. Rhyme often serves to mark the target of expectancy" (203). They go on to discuss the human brain's desire for expectancy patterns in order to make sense of the world:

A brain has a marvelous memory, which works effortlessly, and a very efficient kind of access to what is stored there. But a brain is not a quick processor. [...] We should assume that slowness and confusion of patterns in auditory sequence is normal for a brain. We escape the confusion in speech and music because they are designed for cheating, they are the domain of prefabricated system, based on efficient principles, organized and stored in memory. [...] Rhythmic organization is in the nervous system of the perceiver. It is a tool that he is using to construct a unity, and this tool is used constantly. It is an aspect of syntax that serves organization of meaning in poetry, in daily speech, in music, and in many other activities (205).

We see now that Poe was not merely waxing philosophical in his discussion of the musical qualities of poetry. Musical poetry allows the brain to more easily process the incoming information such that greater meaning may be perceived more easily..

Proposition

Before discussing Milton's versification, Samuel Johnson found it necessary to make the following statement about rhythm in poetry:

However minute the employment may appear, of analysing lines into syllables, and whatever ridicule may be incurred by a solemn deliberation upon accents and pauses, it is certain, that without this petty knowledge no man can be a poet; and that from the proper disposition of single sounds results that harmony that adds force to reason, and gives grace to sublimity; that shackles attention, and governs passion [emphasis is mine] (qtd. in Baker 221).

I suggest that rhymed quatrains of iambic tetrameter, with their shorter lines of even-numbered feet and frequently occurring rhymes are the form best suited for easing the brain's workload when interpreting poetry. They allow the mind to transcend incoming information more readily and reach realms of thought more difficult to attain through other forms. Furthermore, I would assert that the English-speaking human mind has an affinity for iambic tetrameter unmatched by other meters. That is why the most anthologized poems in the language are written in iambic tetrameter. That is why poets so often respond to one another in iambic tetrameter. That is why composers like to set poems written in iambic tetrameter to music. That is why novelists wax poetic over a particular meter...

Counter Arguments

Now, I know there will be those who disagree, especially those with a fondness for sonnets, heroic couplets, or even free verse. It is true, as Annie Finch points out, that "Each of the non-iambic meters, also, has its own character, music, and history, however subtle or intermittent. [And] trochaic poems, from Macbeth's witches to 'The Tyger' to 'The Raven' and even 'Hiawatha' have a history of supernatural and exotic subject matter" (in Baker 61). Which is why I disagree with Wallace when he claims there is no such thing as a trochaic meter. I would point out, however, that of these "The Tyger" is written in trochaic tetrameter, "The Raven" in trochaic octameter (trochaic tetrameter times two with a caesura in each line, most of them punctuated), and "The Song of Hiawatha," (With the rushing of great rivers, / With their frequent repetitions, / And their wild reverberations) is written primarily in trochaic tetrameter. I agree with John Frederick Nims when he says, "Most poetry in English is iambic, like our language itself and like the heartbeat which, months before we are born, first tells us we exist" (in Baker 171). My point is that iambic tetrameter lends itself most readily to greatness.

Conclusion

Iambic tetrameter, especially when housed in rhymed quatrains, sets up and satisfies mental expectancy patterns better than any other meter in the history of English poetry. By better satisfying mental expectancy patterns, long metered quatrains deliver greater information packets, allowing the reader to more easily perceive the integrated symbolic messages contained within them. This is confirmed by looking at the most anthologized poems of all time. It is confirmed by the frequency with which poets respond to one another in this form. It is confirmed by composers, novelists, and essayists. Search your own memory; I believe it will be confirmed there as well.

Works Cited

• Baker, David, ed. Meter in English: A Critical Engagement.
  Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press. 1996.


• Boomsliter, Paul C., Warren Creel, George S. Hastings, Jr. "Perception and English Poetic Meter." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 88 (1973): 200-208.


• Brown, J.W. Mind, Brain, and Consciousness: The Neuropsychology of Cognition. New York: Academic Press. 1977.


• Eliot, George. Middlemarch.
  1871. New York: The Modern Library, 2000.


• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Fourth Edition.
  New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 1996.


• Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
  1891. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 1996.

Appendix A

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

Appendix B

"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"

Appendix C

"The Bait"

Appendix D

"Two Songs (Part II)"

Come, live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of peace and plenty, bed and board,
That chance employment may afford.

I'll handle dainties on the docks
And thou shalt read of summer frocks:
At evening by the sour canals
We'll hope to hear some madrigals.

Care on thy maiden brow shall put
A wreath of wrinkles, and thy foot
Be shod with pain: not silken dress
But toil shall tire thy loveliness.

Hunger shall make thy modest zone
And cheat fond death of all but bone —
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

— C. Day Lewis, 1935

Appendix E

"Ubi Sunt...?"