Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End

by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

In Poetic Closure , distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith’s book remains essential reading in poetic theory.

“Ranging from Elizabethan lyric through free and syllabic verse and concrete poetry, Poetic Closure is a learned, witty, and richly illustrated study of the behavior of poems. . . . It can be read, enjoyed, studied by people who like reading poetry, including—I would suspect—poets.”—Richard M. Elman, New York Times Book Review

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Criticism, Teaching, Nonfiction, Theory

289 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University and Director of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, and Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read this way back in an Introduction to Poetry class. Not sure what is used in classes today, but this was groundbreaking in its time and still a useful study of the topic.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just started reading this book and am about 50 pages into it. I took it up in preparation for a poetry discussion group later this month on the endings of poems. So far, the book points out the difference between formal and thematic structure and how they prepare for closure. There seems to be no way to have formal closure without thematic closure. For instance the progression ABABABA suggests that B is next in the sequence, but no closure is implied. It would be the same if circles alternated with triangles. That's formal structure. The sequence ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXY suggests that Z is the next and perhaps final character in the sequence. But to know that, one must know the alphabet. If you saw the sequence *%)#^%*@$& you wouldn't know what to expect next without knowing what those characters meant in a certain context. That's thematic structure.

150 pages into the book and I've gone through the sections on formal and thematic closure. She emphasizes what forces for continuation can be in a poem, and how those forces of continuation are stopped by forces of stability and finality. She focuses on repetition as a formal device for continuation, and logical and temporal progression for thematic continuation. She also covers paratactic poems, which consist of a list or a series of variations. None of the forces of continuation contain within themselves the force for finality. For instance, in heroic couplets the pre-rhyme line contains the expectation for the rhyming line, but there is nothing in the couplet to determine how many couplets there should be. Same for quatrains, and even sonnets and sestinas (as poets write double sonnets and double sestinas, etc.) Usually, closure is signaled by a deviation from the repetition, or a deviation and then a return to exact repetition. Also, it can be signaled by reference thematically to something final (sleep, death, stillness, etc.) I'm just getting to the part now where she explains how prosodic elements like assonance, alliteration and rhyme can be used for closure. The book gets better the further I get into it.

Finished! Not since reading "Blank Verse" has a book on poetics held my attention throughout like this one. The book ends with a look at anti-closural effects, which are essentially the absences or diminutions of closural effects. When discussing the aesthetics for non-closure, that it's a realistic/naturalistic representation of the way life really is, I thought to myself, no it's not. I hear so many poems that meander and whimper away, meander and whimper away, over and over and over, when, at least in my life experience, there have been great shocks and upheavals that don't seem accurately represented by the bland monotony of so many poems that clog The New Yorker. I'm sick of the premise that passion isn't authentic unless it's captured in a montonous amber of carefully dessicated words. I mean, sure, that's viable once in a while, but, for so many poets, that seems to be their ONLY output. I wish, when I read or heard poetry, I more often got the sense that the poet actually enjoyed -- was thrilled by -- their own work. Instead, I get the sense they want me to feel how oh-so-sensitive they are. Again, that's okay sometimes, but not over and over and over and over and over and over again!

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about closure, less about ending. As Smith points out, the success of each poem's ending, that is, whether it is perceived as "successful" or not (and thus, in her words, achieves closure (or what she calls anti-closure)), comes necessarily from the poem's structure up to that point.

Which is to say that this is a book about structure, really, about considering what a full and adequate theory of structure must include. And Smith, despite her overriding concern with closure, comes pretty close. When she isn't spending her time and ours talking about endings, that is.


The Introduction is brilliant, as is the last chapter, particularly its penultimate section, "Failures of Closure," which is less about failure than it is about "anti-closure," which is just another way of saying closure that is not "closed." The chapters between are also very smart, very clever, and very useful as examples of how a structure is actually hammered into place, but they are also too much. Smith tries to reassure us throughout that she is not trying to write an encyclopedia on the subject, but she failed to convince me. There is just too much here that is merely supporting argument, that gets in the way of completing this book. It is all interesting, given an abiding interest in Renaissance poetry, and ALL of the various structural clues that help the poet to decide where and how to end his/her poem that Smith could possibly come up with. But the main force of the argument becomes lost not even a third of the way through, and it is a shame, because it is an interesting argument, one that I think has a lot of validity.

What is central to Smith's whole endeavor is the experience of poetry, the way that it is experienced when read, and how we read and understand what we read. From this comes the understanding of a thing as a poem, of a poem as complete versus incomplete, and how we understand why we understand something as complete. And here it gets interesting, because Smith (in that final chapter) says that art is that feeling of completeness, as separated from the purely incidental, the purely interpretive, which we do not understand as art, but as life. Within the boundaries of her definition, which is too long to give here (really, the better part of her book), this is entirely valid, but especially valid for poetry (and narrative).

This entails the sequencing, one after another, of elements of structural significance in a poem, and the feeling, on the part of the reader, that in that sequence there is a way to make structural sense out of it all. That the sequence, the structure, feels intentional, rather than haphazard. And if it is intentional, that presupposes some resolution-- "HERE is what the writer intended"-- apart from any narrative resolution, apart even from the categories of closure presented in Smith's book.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently came across this book unexpectedly while browsing library shelves and, drawn by the title, started reading. Quickly I realized I'd need my own copy in order to be able to highlight just about every sentence. Certainly Herrnstein Smith has a dense writing style, and this is a book that requires a person's full attention, but I can honestly say that this is the most useful and thought-provoking book on writing that I've read in years. It demonstrates convincingly what all writers need to know: that the effect of a piece on a good reader is not random but a result of the many particular choices -- word choice, structural choices, choice of sounds and rhythms -- that we make. This book offers the writer (and the teacher of writing) a finely-tuned understanding of what those decisions will mean when the work encounters the reader.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is definitely good. I can see why it's a classic. I gave it three stars rather than more simply because of two things: it is much more academic than I anticipated; and much of the advice Smith offers is based up upon fixed form poems or those which a set meter plays a major role. She DOES, in fact, devote a large section to closure with regard to the world of free verse. But as expected (given free verse's variety), her advice and examples are not nearly as strong as those regarding tradition forms.

Still, I hope to find myself using many of Smith's conceptual approaches to Closure in my own work.

[H]

What is important for our present concern, then, is the fact that effective closure will always involve the reader's expectations regarding the termination of a sequence--even though it will never be simply a matter of fulfilling them. (110)

As I pointed out earlier, this perception forms a kind of running hypothesis which the reader constantly tests against the actual development of the work, and which is ultimately confirmed (or not) by its conclusion. (119)

In literature, as in life, we do not respond directly to time as such; and what determines the integrity of a unit of time in either is the integrity of some attendant circumstance. Our personal histories are marked off by a multitude of such circumstances, and upon even the most random or chaotic lives night must fall and day must dawn. (121)

And, furthermore, a certain degree of closure will be secured merely if the novel concludes with night falling, or the arrival of autumn, or if the play concludes with the protagonist slamming the door behind her. Our experience of coherence and closure in a work of literature is inevitably affected by these nonliterary experiences. (121)

A lyric poem, however, is not so directly comparable to drama or fiction; for although a lyric may be dramatic or narrative in certain respects, what distinguishes it from a versified play or novel is the fact that it is the representation, not of an action or the chronicle of an action, but of an utterance. Lyrics cannot, for example, end in deaths, although they may (and often do) end in references to death. (122)

Although the poet presumably does not know exactly what will occur from one moment to the next, the structure and conclusion of the poem are limited by the nature of that occasion and the integrity of that experience. (An analogy may clarify this: when a radio sportscaster reports the events of a football game, neither he nor his audience knows exactly what will happen from one play to the next, but the substance, structure, and termination of his "discourse" are limited by those of the game itself.) (127)

Other syntactic forms, less obviously related to what we usually think of as logical sequence, affect our perceptions and expectations in the same way: "not only" implies "but also," "when implies "then," "although" implies "yet," "once" implies "but now," and so forth. To the extent that such syntactic conventions imply a more or less definite sequence of linguistic structures, they may function as thematic principles, providing coherence throughout the poem and giving closural force to its conclusion. (137)

For an excellent analysis of the relation between the forms and functions of overt and internalized speech, see Thought and Language by the Russian linguist and psychologist, L. S. Vygotsky, ed. and trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). (note 33, p141)

Thus, through the diplomatic introduction of the notion of two kinds of truth, the poet makes his peace with those who dispute his claim to any truth at all. The truce is threatened, however, by the current crisis in epistemology. The growing ascendancy of various forms of philosophical realism (e.g., positivism and pragmatism) and the associated activity of linguistic analysis in both philosophy and science have undercut whatever traditional notions of truth remained to us; and as we see even the rock of verifiable scientific truth pulverized into "statements of probability" and "operational definitions," any simple division of the territory appears increasingly irrelevant or inadequate. Although this situation obviously complicates the relation of poetry to truth, it is also something of a boon to the literary partisan or theorist. It is evident, for example, that poetry need no longer be so much on the defensive with respect to its claims to truth, for no one else is claiming to have cornered the real thing. (153)

The concept of the poem as "a possible utterance" suggests one of the ways in which poetic language can be true while being fictional. Poems are obviously impossible utterances in several respects (no one really talks in couplets), but the contexts and motives they imply are recognizable human situations, emotions, and desires. (153)

An utterance tends to seem valid, however, not only when it conforms to our expectations, but also when it confirms our experience. If someone says, "It is raining outside," we need not have expected him to say it in order to feel that it is true--not if we have just observed that it is, indeed, raining outside. (155)

An epigram, as I suggested earlier, tends to define its subject for eternity, to view it sub specie aeternitatis. The understatement with which this epigram concludes puts grief into that perspective; it yields emotion, which is not stable, over to wisdom, which is. (204)

But the intention of the haiku is to capture an experience, of the epigram to clinch it. Nor is the epigrammatist "objective" in the same sense as is the haiku poet. Whereas the objectivity of the latter is metaphysical and consists in the obliteration or surrender of personality to the object evoked, the objectivity of the former is moral and consists in the obliteration of illusion and the conquest of sentimentality toward the object defined. (209)

When it is not confirmed, the conclusion may create an instantaneous readjustment of the hypothesis--what I have referred to as "retrospective patterning." (212)

It is impossible to say, for example, what there is in common between the topmost step of a staircase and the highest pitched tone in an ascending scale, without using these very terms to state it. There is nothing spatially higher about one tonal frequency compared to another, and although we represent higher notes on the upper part of the musical staff, they could just as well be on the lower. The upperness of high frequencies is a convention that seems to follow the curious transference of spatial order to nonspatial series. Pitch, of course, is a function of higher, that is, more numerous, frequencies. But even the notion that numbers are higher or lower reflects the same transference. One may observe, by the way, that not all languages exhibit this metaphor. In Latin, e.g., altus "means" either high or deep, depending on what it refers to, while our word high is variously translated as acutus, amplus, carus, maximus, magnus, etc., depending, again, on the reference. (note 32, pp222-3)

In Melville's Billy Budd, for example, the murder of Claggart is a climax, but the story and the reader are concerned with more than the expected consummation of the events leading up to it. This also suggests why it is not always true that everything that follows a climax is necessarily anticlimactic. (223)

Thus (although it was not my intention), the preponderance of examples drawn from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry might have suggested that Renaissance closure was (or was being considered) normative, while the discussions of associative structure and free verse were obviously tending toward generalizations about closure in Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. If we add that epigrammatic closure, in both its techniques and its expressive effects, would naturally be associated with neoclassical verse, we can see what those broad outlines might come to: closure in Renaissance poetry tended to be strong and secure, in Augustan poetry to be maximal, in Romantic poetry to be weak, and in modern poetry it has become minimal. (234)

The term "modern poetry" is a literary historian's nightmare, not only because dates always imply definitions (and vice versa), but because the most striking characteristic of the poetry of our time is its stylistic multiplicity. Not only are the forms widely various, but also the modes and mannerisms, the implied aesthetics, and the allegiances--or what we should ordinarily call the "traditions." The latter term is almost meaningless, however, in an era such as the present one, when almost every poetic tradition that has ever existed--native or foreign, Western or Oriental, classical or medieval--is to some extent viable, and the most characteristic feature of our poetic activity, broadly considered, is the apparent absence of any principle of rejection. (235)

The point to be emphasized is that a large and entirely respectable part of contemporary poetry is simply indistinguishable from traditional poetry in the ways that would affect closure; . . . (236)

While he may share the general impulse to "radical empiricism," he is confined by the fact that if his empiricism is too radical, his art loses both its identity and, more important, the sources of its characteristic effects. For the (243) material of poetry is not words, but language--a system of conventions previously determined and continuously mediated by usage in a community--and if the poem divorces itself utterly from the structure of discourse, it ceases to be poetry and ceases to affect us as such. (244)

The implicit "conclusion" here [Blake's "The Clod and the Pebble"] that, in the absence of any other, forces itself upon the reader is, in Gloucester's words, "And that's true, too." We might also recognize that there is a stability of deadlock as well as a stability of repose. (251)

If, as I suggested earlier, we recognize that the suspicion of language itself is a significant aspect of the contemporary malaise, one may see the development of a poetry of nonstatement as a possible consequence of this. If the traitor, language, is not to be exiled, one may disarm him and make him a prisoner of war. But first, one must force him to renounce his major claim to glory and the mainspring of his treachery: the power to assert. For only a statement, not a word, can lie or delude. Poetry must be language and it must have some relation to discourse, but it need not be "discourse of reason." (254)

Although, for example, the techniques of serial music and John Cage's composition by "random generation" are in many ways directly opposed to each other, both involve conceptions of the relation of art to determinacy and indeterminacy which, in turn, play some havoc with our assumptions regarding the place of expectation, determination, and predictability in the perception of structure and closure. (261)

It might be observed, however, that the unexpected, the surprise, had always been built into the work of art. What is different here is that the artist is not less surprised than his audience; and, given certain traditional conceptions of art, this may be supposed to make all the difference. (262)

[Marylisa DeDomenicis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Substantial preview:
http://books.google.com/books?id=uFn1...

I can't believe how much I liked this book. Smith balances the information she provides regarding technical devices used in poetic closure and anti-closure with the exact right amount of art theory. This is definitely not a "how to," book, not for the novice, but for those who've been writing/reading poetry for some time. Still, I was so thoroughly entertained and interested I was compelled to take notes while simultaneously nodding yes in recognition to Smith's precise descriptions as well as to her self-professed, contradictions. Considering the subject she took on in writing this book -- closure and anti-closure in poetry (and art) -- it comes as no surprise that there would be contradictions and exceptions regarding perfection, anti-perfection.

[Scott Wiggerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather dense study of poetic endings, a bit more academic in nature than I had expected. Still, I'm glad I made it through the book!

[Lauren]

Recommended by Wayne Booth, whose opinion I trust.

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Art inhabits the country between chaos and cliché."