There was also the allure that the epigram was easy to remember, especially where knowledge of aphoristic universals was concerned. Again it should be noted that such ‘truths’ were, nevertheless based on false logic. If we juxtapose the scientific deduction, ‘twelve inches make one foot’ to Pope’s “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, the first term would be much more accurate mathematically (and can be proven logically) than the second. Perhaps it is one reason why Plato wanted to kick the poet out of his republic, although poetry does, of course, have as its function the cultivation of the mind and humanizing of the man or woman.
Augustan ‘false’ wit, with its “anagrams, acrostics, jests, riddles, rebuses, conundrums, epigrams, and cheap witticisms”[4], is not the kind of wit one intends to dwell upon in this essay. But before we depart this course of investigation we ought to have one more example from a modernist, namely T.S. Eliot; a paraphrase will do: ‘Your husband is coming to dinner tonight/may it be the last that he shall eat!’ This is from one of Eliot’s minor poems and he was wise in not pursuing such epigrammatic fancies in his major poems or in the larger body of his oeuvre. Finally the simplest way for the contemporary mind to grasp the worst of Augustan wit is to compare it to what we would call the limerick today. In short the epigram was too unserious a form to be totally integrated into the major forms, except perhaps, the burlesque, the ribald or the comic.
To grasp the kind of wit in contemplation we should begin with the ‘true wit’ of the Greeks as distinct from that Latinate impostor introduced by Martial Ausonius[5] – dealing in antithesis, equivocation, closure or ‘point’ and surprise – which is the direct progenitor of Augustan false wit. Greek wit was, mostly, a set of fine thoughts; it neither dealt in mirth nor surprise but was capable of giving aesthetic pleasure to fragile sensibilities. What was required of the Greek epigram was a simple brevity and unity of thought. Such brevity and unity of thought, which can be achieved with a lean syntax, imagistic and precise diction and poignancy, is the kind of wit under consideration.
Those qualities will then be instrumental toward the function of organic unity within the poem. The contemporary poet should then always question himself or herself about the purpose of a word or an expression within the poem. A superfluity of wording or expression should be shunned since it could lead to prosaicness at best, mixed metaphors at worst or a complete breakdown of intended verbal and thematic effects. Here there is a need to comment on the over-elaborately brief. There is such a thing as false economy in traditional grammar just as in the syntax of poetry. While writing about the new-fangled ‘plunderverse’, a commentator made the example of a two-word poem and proceeded to confidently refract its import through his own cultural prism. The poem in question is bpNichol’s “Catching Frogs”: “jar din”. That is the whole poem; yes, “Jar din”! Gregory Betts[6] then proceeds to justify it thus:
His brilliant “Catching Frogs,” for instance, unravels an entire narrative with just two words: “jar din.” From the bilingual play of the two words, the activity (catching frogs) gains a locus (the garden) and a conclusion (the frog is now in the jar). Best of all, the title plays on the pun of frogs as Frenchmen, and the game of finding French words in English.
Ellipsis or omission is a normal trope in poetry – and a useful one too, that helps in stream-lining syntax and scintillating the cerebrum of the reader, nevertheless there is usually some hint or a clue for the reader, some sort of scaffolding, narrow as it might be, for him to walk upon towards comprehension. None is apparent here, except perhaps in the title. Even then there are cultural and linguistic barriers set up here for a speaker who knows only English. The intended pun on ‘frogs as Frenchmen’ – obvious as it might seem to North American readers – and ‘the game of finding French words in English’, are too culturally specific to be transparent to speakers of English elsewhere. It would have served the poet’s purpose better to construct the line such that the brevity is retained but not at the expense of the mono-lingual reader. There is also the possibility of miscomprehension- even for the North American reader of English. “Jar din” could be read as an anagram of ‘garden’ merely, without the reader making any conclusive semantic deductions – except, perhaps, with the weak prop of the titling, which might suggest to him that someone is catching physical frogs in the garden and that there is a ‘din’ (noise) in the ‘jar’ where the frogs are dropped. The punning insinuated in the bilingualism would be lost due to a cultural opacity. It is indeed a brilliant ploy but one that leaves too much room for ambiguity, unless the poet intended to append footnotes! This is brevity at its most unnecessarily extreme. But of course Bretts is discussing avant-garde experimental or language poetry, which probes the limits of a language that we are ‘forced into’.
That language is arbitrary and difficult to master does not mean that there are no agreed units, rules and modes of signification. Once we learn the signs in a particular language, such a language’s arbitrariness is then delimited by rules of communication. This structuralist fallacy of eternal arbitrariness would then be unmasked. We do use words to mean, irrespective of whether they are arbitrary or not; words, that is, in syntactical relationships within the sentence or a line of verse. Contractions, in the form of syntactical brevity or ellipses, should expand the field of signification through its omissions not raise cultural semantic blocks, semantic ambiguity or doubts. Otherwise such constructions would fall under what one might call ‘witticisms’, perhaps not quite the ‘false wit’ of the Augustan epigram since the tropes involved and effects intended or achieved might be different.
For our purposes witticisms are forms, which – through the instrument of figures and syntactical constructions other than that of Augustan poetics; or a mixture of the latter’s features and different or similar contemporary tropes – begin to bend towards the false wit of Augustan poetics. In this model the above example of an over-contraction of a poem would be a witticism; so would be the lippogram, because it relies on a preponderance of phonic punning and, like the Augustan epigram and its conceits, resemble what Sir William Temple, according to Lund, in complaining about the influence of Martial on the Augustan period, describes as:
an Ingredient that gave Taste to Compositions which had little of themselves; ’twas a Sauce that gave Point to Meat that was Flat, and some Life to Colours that were Fading. . . . However it were, this Vein first over-flowed our modern [read contemporary] Poetry, and with so little Distinction or Judgment that we would have Conceit as well as Rhyme in every Two Lines, and run through all our long Scribbles as well as the short, and the whole Body of the Poem, whatever it is.[7]
Temple’s observation would apply to most areas of the contemporary avant-garde. For example Augustan Poetry- as insinuated by Hunter- emphasized “special representations on the page like symmetrical rectangles […] or other repeated shapes”[8]. He contends that modern poetry, meaning poetry as it is today, shuns the overt rhyme and does not call attention to its shape and patterns of repetition. We must assume that Hunter has not read much of the contemporary avant-garde! Certainly he has not read a lippogram.
The avant-garde over-reaches itself in the phenomenon of the plunderverse, which purports to save the ‘waste’ of language by creating poems from other already finished text by other poets. It is not a parody, no; nor is plunderverse satisfied with intertextuality or the literary allusion but it must tear down other texts completely to make its perverse points; it simply plunders! These language games do not represent true innovation or experiments nor do they show much originality. There are also issues of ethics and copyright to be considered. This kind of literary narcissism is not much different from what the Augustan period practiced to an extreme, and which made several critics of the day cry out, ‘fowl’!