The Trivium is part of a Medieval educational system that was designed to provide the student with a complete education. The Trivium is made up of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The other part of that educational system was called the Quadrivium--arithmetic (number), geometry, astronomy, and music.
You may be wondering what the Quadrivium could possibly do with poetry. Well, one can view geometry as number in space (patterns), music as number in time (rhythms), and astronomy as number in space and time. Using this formula, one could easily argue that well-written poetry is akin to astronomy, especially those poems that use things like iambic pentameter (note the use of number--"penta" means "five," which is the number of iambic syllable patterns in a line). As John Steinbeck once wrote, "Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music."
We have already spent a great deal of time discussing several aspects of the Quadrivium within poetry, even if we haven't exactly been calling it that, and we will spend even more on the issue of number in the future. However, for this lesson, I want us to focus on the Trivium.
Poets, perhaps more than anyone else (excepting lawyers), must master the Trivium.
Mastery of grammar should be obvious: how can you be said to be a language artist if you have not mastered the language itself? Only if you fully know and understand why your language works the way it does can you properly use it, beautifully use it, twist and bend it. Thus, it is important that one understand how the different parts of speech work, what kinds of sentences there are, and how to diagram sentences. To be a poet, one must love language enough to want to know how the words and the sentences work.
I'm not going to be spending time on grammar lessons. That's not the point of this blog. I'm assuming you have mastered grammar and that you are here to learn about the tools you need to write poetry, and to give you some ideas about poetry writing, challenge the way you think about poetry, and provide you with my own ideas about poetry. However, there is much that can be said about the other elements--logic and rhetoric--and their importance to poetry.
First, logic. You may think that logic has nothing to do with poetry. You may even have some romantic idea that poetry transcends logic and reason. And you are, perhaps, right about the latter statement. But, in order to transcend something, you have to include it. But there is, as I have argued, a rationality in poetic verse.
Poetry both infers and, in complex ways, demonstrates. Logic shows when inference and demonstrations are valid. We have to keep in mind that the word "logic" comes from the Greek "logos," which can be translated as word, account, thought, reason, idea, or principle. A dialogue thus occurs "through logos"--meaning there is necessarily a logic to dialogue, and thus to plays, which combine action with dialogue. Insofar as poetry is made up of words and ideas, and are products of our thoughts, it should be clear that we cannot avoid logic. Logic just clarifies our thinking.
You have perhaps heard complaints about "logocentrism" and about logic itself. However, those who oppose "logocentrism" have to use logic to make their arguments. Those arguments can only be better or worse, and use good or bad logic, but logic is inescapable. Given this fact, I would argue that you should master logic--certainly before you can criticize it. And at least a familiarity with formal logic should benefit your thinking and, thus, your poetry. (Symbolic logic is another thing altogether--we'll leave that to the logicians over in the philosophy department.)
Rhetoric is the art of making an argument, the art of persuasion. Each work of art is trying to make some sort of argument, and the language arts perhaps more clearly and obviously. After all, we make most arguments using language. Thus, rhetoric is central to all forms of poetry.
Aristotle argued that good rhetoric requires the use of logos, ethos, and pathos.
Logos we have just covered.
Ethos, from which we derive the word "ethics," has to do with the reader trusting the writer or speaker. Part of persuasion comes from your reader trusting you, and you can only create true trust by being a trustworthy person. How that can be demonstrated in a poem will certainly vary form poem to poem, from topic to topic, and is perhaps less tangible in poetry than in a scholarly paper or a speech.
Pathos is emotion, how we create emotion in our writing or in a speech. We do not create true pathos by being melodramatic or sentimental. It has been said that sentimentality occurs when there's a lack of sentiment. Sentimentality if felt by the reader when the writer fails to communicate emotion well. One could perhaps say that sentimentality is pathos without ethos.
It should be obvious that pathos is central to poetry. It's perhaps the one thing most early poets focus on--sometimes to the exclusion of all else. Which is why there is so much sentimental poetry out there. The way to create true pathos is through the use of appropriate imagery and through the use of story. But in the end, like most aspect of poetry, it takes practice to communicate emotions well, and you are bound to miss the mark on either side, by being either too sentimental or too cold. More, what works for one reader won't work for another. You just have to play the numbers--if you find a large-enough number of your readers get the emotion in the poem, you can consider it a success in its pathos.
To be persuasive, you have to have good style. Of course, good style means different things for different kinds of writing. "A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate" (Aristotle). The style of an article intended for a mass audience is necessarily going to be different from that intended for scientists with advanced degrees, and both should be different for different kinds of novels, whether romance or literary, and everything in-between. And of course, poetry should itself have its own, and each poem should have its own, style.
Style is more than just decoration. "Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it" (Nietzsche). The reader ought to be able to feel your conviction. Style, then, is part of the ethos of rhetoric.
It is important for poets to master the Trivium. The Trivium must be mastered before you can challenge any part of it--if you decide to challenge any part of it. To paraphrase Don Barthelme, you have to be able to write masterfully well-written sentences before you can write bad sentences in your poetry or prose. Thus, it is important to know the rules of the language before one can challenge them. And challenge them we must for, as Octavio Paz once wrote, "Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings." The greatest poets have always challenged the rules of grammar, logic, and rhetoric--and of ethos and pathos. But they have also always been their masters as well.
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