8
Poetic Form: Open and Closed
Closed form poetry did not just dominate poetry from its origins up to the end of the 19th century; it was synonymous with poetry. For thousands of years, all poems were written in closed form. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that poets like Walt Whitman in the United States and a group of French poets (who came up with the term vers libre–or “free verse”) gave up on meter and began to write poems without any prescribed forms. Indeed, the first, easiest test of whether a poem is in open or closed form is simply to know when it was written: before 1850, closed; after 1850—better check and see.
But that won’t tell you anything about what makes a poem “open” or “closed.”
Two ways of thinking about form.
The poetics you were introduced to in the previous chapter was all about so-called “closed” or “fixed form” poetry. The word “closed” (or “fixed”) must be understood properly. In fact, language itself is never absolutely open or absolutely closed. On the one hand, language is always more or less fixed—by grammar, syntax (word order), and the meanings of the words.
- If I say “I locked my keys in the car,” everyone should know what I mean. These are the words the language asks you to use, and this is the order you are expected to put them in if you want to say the thing expressed here. There aren’t a lot of ways to say it. And if you do try to say it another way, you risk not being understood. Language is always more or less closed.
But, on the other hand, language is always also more or less open; within the restrictions of grammar, syntax, and meanings, one can always say new things. One can recombine words, use old words in new ways (“verbing” a noun for example), and reorder phrases in new ways. It would not be language if content didn’t play (move about) within form like furniture in a house. Language needs to be both open and closed to function.
- One can say, “my car was locked with the keys inside.” Or “Inside my locked car are my keys.” One can say, “my keys were locked in the car.” People will understand you if you say, “Locked in the car were my keys.” But they’d think you were weird. (You can also say, “I locked my keys in the car” and mean, as a secret code, “I left the disk drive with the secret formula in my computer.” But you’ll probably have to establish the code beforehand.) But you probably can’t say with any hope of being understood, “Keys my in car left locked I.” Not even Yoda has that much freedom.
So, to repeat: language itself is always more or less open, more or less closed.
So what do we mean when we call some poems “open” and some “closed”?
There are two ways to think about this. Both of them apply.
In fact, all poems exist on a continuum.
Imagine if we had a class of eighth graders and we had to put them into two groups: tall and short. There will be some in the middle. But we don’t have a middle circle. Everyone is marked as “tall” or “short.”
When critics and other readers u