In Praise of Restraint 

by Conrad Martin

A poem or prose piece which wishes its reader to feel something has a delicate challenge. Feeling cannot be put in a box and shipped across the days and the miles, unpackaged and slipped into like a fuzzy sweater or an ice bath. Feelings can be hard to catch; they do not always come when called; they often wilt and slump in transit.  

Contrast equations and numbers, so much better behaved. Say I have in my mind the number 11. I don’t mean the written symbol, but the quantity itself. It is precisely identical to the number 11 in your mind, and anyone else’s, whether or not they speak English, use Indo-Arabic numerals, or use a base ten system. It is an abstract entity; it has no body, changing never, context-invariant, unalive. Nothing is lost in translation; there is no translation.  

Communication about feeling is always translation, because each of us has our own language, because each of us is our own body and all that we feel is grounded there. The translation works surprisingly well most of the time, but at the borders and the depths communication gets tricky, and interesting, and perhaps worth writing poetry for, and maybe even worth sharing.  

The difficulty of translation is not merely technical. Each has their own language of feeling, and all the particularities which distinguish person from person are features of that language; therefore, if a total and perfect translation were possible, it would be a merging and collapsing of individuality itself. This is not the goal, which is a relief, since it is impossible. The true aspiration then is to something less and more than self-revelation. We aspire to communion among more than reader and writer alone.   

What is “feeling” anyway, and why is it important? It seems almost too basic to define. I earlier contrasted number and feeling, and I think they are a natural pair. They can be seen as the two essential elements of the entirety of experience. All that occurs in us is composed of number and feeling—quantity and quality—quanta and qualia. All phenomena shimmer somewhere between the polar extremes of pure number and pure, undifferentiated feeling. Note that this is just a framing for all experience, not for all reality. A tree is an object ‘out there.’ It is both more and less than a quantized qualia in the mind. But there is always something that it is like to see or to think of a tree, or to jump from a tree, or to chop down a tree, or to remember having done any of these things, or to plan to do them. This “something that it is like” is just subjective experience. Everything is feeling. Feeling is happening all the time. Yes, this is bending the conventional usage of the term, but it is a principled bend. It shows an important connection and continuity. We don’t typically call an experience a feeling unless it is a relatively strong or notable experience. When it contrasts with other experiences, standing out as deserving of special attention or action, we call that sense of heightened importance “feeling.” When it stands out over other feelings, or when it lodges somewhere and stays with you, it is called an emotion.  

Sometimes a poem is about tangerines in a blue bowl. These objects are feelings; the artist is someone who reminds us of this. Things are common until they are felt—drawn out—heightened.  

But there is no height without contrast—nothing can stand out if there is nothing lying quietly underneath and in the background. Too much of any single good thing isn’t good, because the background fades, and the bottom drops out. Happiness, famously, evaporates.  

This doesn’t mean that good requires evil, or that pleasure requires pain, or beauty ugliness. It certainly doesn’t mean that the manic depressives have the most enviable lives. A person who seems to experience little variation is not therefore emotionally dead. A flatness in the equilibrium is not a value neutrality, because there is a deeper yet contrast between this baseline and a yet more absolute background. When healthy in spirit and soul, we sense that mere existence is important—that it contrasts and stands out from something else. The thing that existence contrasts with is nonexistence—the void—nothingness. The fact that things exist instead of not existing is a surprising fact; it deserves constant, perhaps very quiet, perhaps unconscious attention. Depression is best thought of not as a negative emotion, but as an erosion of this base-level feeling. It is a loss of sensitivity to the fundamental contrast between being and nonbeing, and to the importance of all the actions that sustain its brightness. That sensitivity—this fundamental reality-feeling—is called joy. All the artist’s skill should flow toward this peak. This must be the controlling reason to communicate any feeling, whether of beauty or horror, pleasure or pain.  

If the goal of personal revelation or expression of feeling is not subordinated to this higher aim, the art will suffer.  

True art is true virtue; bad form is personal lack. If we thought the stakes were lower than this, we wouldn’t still be here—the stakes are plenty high elsewhere. The original meaning of the word “virtue” combines the qualities of rightness, parity, power, balance, and finesse; it converges toward “beauty.” Moral excellence loves every kind of excellence, and love compels a living sacrifice to the highest vision—the sharpest possible contrast between being and not-being. To read a true poem well is to feel power flowing in, to be judged and found wanting, and to rejoice in the burning and the new creation. We fail often at this, of course, both in the giving and the receiving. It is worth doing poorly because it is worth doing better.  

The restraints of form in art are the restraints of virtue. The subordination of a poem’s feelings to its central, highest feeling is an embodiment of truth—a participation in the deep, universal, living Pattern. Unity is the only rule of poetry which can never be broken.  

Form is the means of unity. Forms are the more-or-less identifiable ways in which a poem achieves its singular power. This may or may not involve traditional structures and conventions. Rhyme is an example of a means of unity; a repeated element of sound tying unrelated meanings together, illuminating sameness in difference. Meanings themselves can also ‘rhyme’ with other meanings. The meaning of a word can have numerous aspects of meaning, just as the sound of a word has numerous phonemes, and some of these aspects can be shared while others are not, illuminating sameness in difference. This can be done with whole phrases, whole lines, and entire stanzas. In fact, it ought to be done with all of these. All things can rhyme. Meaning-rhyme is a more important kind of rhyme than sound-rhyme, but it’s harder to isolate and point at clearly. The different kinds of rhyme rhyme with each other, so becoming proficient with sound rhyme (including alliteration and assonance) helps develop the ear to hear other, more subtle kinds.  

To exemplify unity, through one form or another, is the defining role of poetry—every other rule of poetry is one which may be broken.  

A poem must also be about something—there must be some kind of content for the poem’s form to unify into a poem. Words have to have meanings before these meanings can be rhymed. The meanings have to be the normal meanings of the words which we use in daily life. There must first be a daily life. There must be people living the daily lives, and the people must have all the normal human aims, fears, curiosities, feelings, joys, loves, tragedies. A good writer must first love something besides writing. So a poem with very weak form can still be ‘about something’ in this basic sense, communicating something true and even important. But this does not make it a poem. It must have a rhyme; a reason is not enough.  

The initial inspiration for a poem is often a strong feeling or emotion within the poet, so the context for this challenge of artistic unity is personal, private, and more or less idiosyncratic. It can be tempting to substitute a lack of form with an over-reliance on this charged emotional content. Surely if the source feeling is of something profound, or sublime, or intense, or serious, or clever, or darling, or awfully, terribly, totally… Surely the simple transmission of this feeling would be a poem.  

But why would the transmission of feeling be a poem? The desire to achieve this contact makes more sense in the context of a private relationship; it seems less fitting in a public or semi-public forum where poetry is posted or performed. But even in the closest relationship possible, the desire bears a closer look. We cannot feel precisely what each other feels, because our experiences and our languages are never identical. Why do we wish for this then? Or what, exactly, do we wish for?  

We want to be with other people, not to be other people. So we want our experiences to be with other people’s experiences, not to be their experiences. There is an irreducible aloneness; communication is never total. Limits, boundaries, verges, contrasts—this is what is required to be a being among other beings. But just as essentially, a being must give and receive something across these boundaries. This is a fundamental truth of physics and metaphysics as much as of psychology and spirituality. A person is a thing who does this self-bounding and self-sharing knowingly, freely. There are forces that push in both directions. Self-revelation is not universally good or evil. Context matters. Restraint respects the freedom of this boundary.  

Because the proper expectation of poetry is that it induces a kind of quickened and heightened state, it might be natural to draw the conclusion that poetry takes exception to conventions of privacy and decorum which limit revelations of emotional intensity, or to social convention in general. I think this conclusion involves a natural confusion. I do suspect that our rules of decorum should loosen a button or two, and a few other conventions be unconvened; but I think that this is a separate issue, having little to do with poetry in particular. It may be that the same people who are especially drawn to art are also more likely to contest rules in general, or the rules of decorum and privacy in particular, but the overlap is far from total. I can think too easily of too many acquaintances for whom only one of these tendencies is true. Sometimes the artistically advanced are socio-emotional novices, and novices shouldn’t be revolutionaries.  

Pushing the boundaries of content can seem to serve the requirement for novelty and intensity, and this can be felt to take the place of form. It doesn’t. Novelty and intensity of this sort is entirely relative to social context, and this gives the poem’s force a horizontal thrust. But true poetry’s force is a vertical draw. It serves first of all the unity of itself, and therefore serves Unity as such. The horizontal dimension is of course present, but like all speech it is subject to contextual conventions of decorum. Poetry does involve speech to other people about things they care about, but it does not aim to make a direct, one-way contact—it does not push.  

That horizontal forcefulness is the essence of swearing. Its power consists entirely in the breaking of a convention, which keeps existing as a convention which can keep being broken only because someone somewhere keeps not swearing. It’s a parasitic use of language. The quick energy release it provides steals fire from all the more creative alternatives. Restraint doesn’t kill energy, it focuses and sublimates it, or at least stores it for later. 

A primary temptation for amateur poetry is the failure of sentimentality—the indelicate handling of a strong feeling. This can be felt as a presuming upon the willing presence of the reader—an insensitivity to the freedom of the boundary of the other. Sentimentality happens when strong feeling is exhibited in the absence of strong form. This is true in the context of poetry; other contexts are different. Everyone bleeds sooner or later, and more or less publicly. Survival, no matter how grotesque, is always beautiful. And let us remember that we can’t always distinguish the ways in which each other is surviving. The present point is not to proscribe proprieties, but to explore how poetic craft relates to the emotional life of the poet and reader, and hopefully to explain how the craft sometimes goes wrong.  

I have been speaking to the extremes, but most poem’s failures are not egregious. Many poems do not exhibit especially strong feeling, so the lack of form registers as a milder kind of sentimentality or bluntness or generality. 

The word for a feeling is a blunt instrument, because there are as many feelings as there are moments, but the word is tagging a whole class of moments—enclosing many subtle differences in one generality. If a birch tree induces a joy in you, it is a different shade of joy than a pine tree would have induced. The word “joy” is sometimes the right one in a poem, but just show us how you see the tree, and then we will see the tree more deeply than we did before, and feel our own joy. The tree-power is not in you; it is in the tree. People use words differently, because their experiences with trees and with joys are different. But it is easier to know that we are seeing the same tree than to know that we are feeling the same joy. So, show us the tree. Or, if you want to show us the tree-joy itself, then stand back even further so that you can see it, so that you don’t get in the way of us seeing what you are seeing.  

Give evidence that you know and accept that you are you and we are us, each of us our own; show that you don’t assume that when you say “joy” we will feel joy, simply because you are feeling it and told us you were. We might feel it just because of that. A little. Some of us will more than others of us—some are nicer that way. We do our feeling-boundaries in different ways, for our own reasons, more or less understood. But even the most generous concession of familiarity will not be able to receive the poem as a poem if the language is general. The blunter the emotional language, the more the reader’s attention must move toward the writer, instead of to what the writer is saying, because there is no distinct thing there for the reader to see. Even when the writer is writing explicitly about themselves, still there should be a separation between the part of them doing the writing and the part being written. If the language is pure emotion then there is no separation, no boundary—no further innerness standing at its door or window and generously sharing from its deep treasure—but only something chaoticly, ambiguously potent. When energy exceeds form, the excess is undirected and destructive. 

A poem which depends only on strongly emotive words and bypasses the mediation of form and craft is experienced as a kind of unintentional coercion. Craft introduces a kind of restraint and distance, and this earns the reader’s trust, and that trust can experience the emotion uncoerced. 

I have also noticed a temptation in amateur poetry to overuse short lines. Lines of poetry are already shorter than paragraph lines because meaning in poetry is more compact—a larger something is folded and focused into a smaller spell. This compactness is key to poetry’s power for heightened awareness and emotion, so it can be tempting to shorten the lines even further, even when the meaning has not actually been further compacted. A shorter line signals increased significance and emotion, but if the meaning-compactness does not match this, then it feels to the reader the same way that unsupported emotive language feels. It’s too easy to just shorten all the lines, so the reader isn’t likely to feel it as craft. Of course, there are all kinds of effects which can be performed with strategic contrast, and there are many good poems which consist of only short lines. Poetry can break most rules; thumbs come in all different sizes. 

Craft. Form. Pattern. Particularity. Subtlety. Novelty. Distinctness. Unity. The aspects of writing which can feel less authentic to the passionate amateur are the aspects which allow the art to exist beyond the writer’s own immediate experience, which is where the writer also should wish to exist. The hard work of bringing a single strong feeling into deep integration with the unity of one’s larger life is not at all unrelated to the hard work of integrating a single strong feeling into the unity which is called a poem. Every poem can serve the life, as every life can serve the Rhyme.  

A poem which wishes its reader to feel something should ask why it wishes this. If it is for the pure joy of the poem—if the thing burns with a brightness or at least a glimmer of its own being—then that is a worthy wish, and worth many hours of work to bring about. 

Postscript: I take the risk of stepping on tender toes in this essay because a significant percentage of them are my own. I have been speaking to no one more than to my own (hopefully) younger self.  

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Conrad Martin loves words for their ability to create deeper awareness and experience of life through connection between minds and hearts.

 

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Artwork: Adriaen Coorte 1660- Asparagus