Practical Poetry

                     But in case you should think my education was wasted

                        I hasten to explain

                   That having once been to the University of Oxford

                        You can never really again

                   Believe anything that anyone says, and that of course is an asset

                         In a world like ours                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

                                                                        Louis MacNeice,  Autumn journal  XIII

He doesn't mean it literally, but you know what he means: being programmed for intellectual scrutiny can on occasions be a social drawback, but in a dangerously troubled time (in this case the late 1930s) it may be just as well.

Examining the state of society, MacNeice holds the mirror up to his own poetic persona:

                   …the tempter whispers 'But you also

                        Have the slave-owner's mind,

                   Would like to sleep on a mattress of easy profits'…

                   And I answer that that is largely so for habit makes me

                   Think…

                   The élite must remain a few. It is so hard to imagine

                   A world where the many would have their chance without

                   A fall in the standard of intellectual living

                                                                                        Autumn journal  III

The morality of slave owning, currently topical in the 2020s, is pointedly used here by MacNeice in the 1930s. Any preaching on the topic is, of course, defused by the witty adaptation of the terminology of economics in his tongue in cheek self-satire. Here is poetry that has not dated, and carries a punch even today.

And here is some poetry that may have dated, but remains a testimony to the freedom of speech that is so much a part of the American constitution:

                             A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson

                                on His Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait                                                      

                             Heir to the office of a man not dead

                             Who drew our Declaration up, who planned

                             Range and Rotunda with his drawing-hand

                             And harbored Palestrina in his head,

                             Who would have wept to see small nations dread

                             The imposition of our cattle-brand

                             With public truth at home mistold or banned,

                             And in whose term no army's blood was shed,

                             Rightly you say the picture is too large

                             Which Peter Hurd by your appointment drew,

                             And justly call that Capitol too bright

                             Which signifies our people in your charge;

                             Wait, Sir, and see how time will render you,

                             Who talk of vision but are weak of sight.

Richard Wilbur's sonnet on Lyndon Johnson's rejection of his official portrait takes the opportunity, with a concession to aesthetics, to criticize the president's policies, presumably those in pursuit of the war in Vietnam.

President Johnson is remembered legislatively for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968. Johnson is heir symbolically in the poem to Thomas Jefferson who drafted Declaration of Independence and who, himself an architect, commissioned the Capitol building.

Wilbur as a poet is noted for the polished restraint of his language, here uncharacteristically sharp but appropriate to the poem's public subject.

Milton addressed Cromwell in a sonnet.

So much for practical poetry; now for the practicalities of poetry.

As to rhyme and meter:

"good rhyme is not ornament but emphasis, ligature, and significant sound" *[i]

"English meters are more emphatic and less flowing than the French; too long a sequence of end-stopped English lines, especially if rhymed, can sound like the stacking of planks in a lumber-yard" *[ii]

"I want the rhyme to happen inevitably, as part of the flow of the argument - not as a way of completing an arbitrary pattern. That latter thing is just ornamentation: doily-making." *[iii]

That is Richard Wilbur speaking, the second US Poet Laureate. Wilbur was a champion of the discipline of formalism in poetry:

 "…form, in slowing and complicating the writing process, calls out the writer's full talents, and thereby insures a greater care and cleverness in the disposition of words. …the strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle" *[iv

but also a defender of free creativity within the constraints of form:

"It [a poem] is conflict with disorder, not a message from one person to another.

There should be no flight from irony and paradox in writing poetry, rather an insistence  on them.  

...it is unfortunately the case that these devices ...can also be the slickest for saying nothing at all.   

I think it a great vice to convey everything by imagery… There ought to be areas of statement." *[v]

"...the uninterpreted fields and streets and rooms of the present, in which the real battles of  the imagination must be fought.

Pompeii is still a busy quarter of the city of the imagination." *[vi]