English poetics of the Augustan period, that is, from the 17th<\/sup> through the 18th<\/sup> century, was ambivalent about the deployment of wit- \u2018false wit\u2019- in its poetry particularly and prose generally. In Roger D. Lund\u2019s “The Ghosts of Epigram, False Wit, and the Augustan Mode\u201d[1]<\/a> he refers to \u00a0George Williamson (1961), who quotes Robert South thus: “[b]revity and succinctness of speech is that, which in philosophy or speculation, we call maxim<\/em>, and first principle; in the counsels and resolves of practical wisdom, and the deep mysteries of religion, oracle<\/em>; and lastly, in matters of wit, and the finenesses of imagination, epigram<\/em>.”<\/p>\n Generally an epigram is a short witty saying; but in the Augustan sense it could be an epigrammatic couplet standing as a stanza or a longer short poem in couplets, as a legitimate form within a hierarchy including the epic, the dramatic, the lyric, the elegaic, the epoenetic and the bucolic. Lund notes that the epigram was the most problematic in rhetorical legitimacy for the critics of the day, like John Dryden, Joseph Addison or even Alexander Pope, who nevertheless wrote several epigrams himself or who, according to J. Paul Hunter \u201cbrought the couplet \u2013 already the dominant form of English poetry for more than a century \u2013\u00a0 [and one of the chief characteristics of the epigram] to its most finished state of formal perfection and at the same time popularized its accessible conversational ease.\u201d[2]<\/a> Before we proceed, here is an example from Pope\u2019s \u201cEssay on Criticism:<\/p>\n A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; Although those lines are excerpted from a much longer poem, and were not composed in the usual short forms epigrams come in \u2013 especially in the epigrammatic epitaph \u2013 it can nevertheless stand alone as an epigram. It is complete as an epigram, with rhyming couplet (or the heroic couplet), equivocation in the first line, pun in \u2018draughts as juxtaposed against \u2018drinking\u2019 and closure and surprise in the last line where the drunken becomes magically sober from more drinking. The ring of the first line sounds like a maxim, or a truth although it is built on the fiction and sloganeering and the myth of the Pierian spring; its truth is closer to fiction than to that of logic, philosophy or science. \u00a0Now let us take another example from the same \u2018Wit\u2019 \u2013 for these poets with such quick turns of sharp utterances where also referred to as wits:<\/p>\n See how the World its Veterans rewards! The above is quoted by Lund, who notes the emphasis on antithesis \u2013 common in Pope, for example in the long poem, \u201cEssay on Man\u201d, and in the Augustan epigram generally \u2013 which we can equate with the equivocation in the first example due to the similarity in rhetorical move.<\/p>\n Such was the hold of the epigram on the 18th<\/sup> century that in spite of its \u201cequat[ion] with the exploitation of puns and conceits that everyone conceded to be forms of false wit\u201d[3]<\/a>, it was nevertheless difficult to exorcise the poetic imagination of the day of what, in the first place, made it \u2018witty\u2019. One reason for the paradox can be deduced from Hunter\u2019s assertion that there was a grey area between writing and talking in the 18th<\/sup> century and that active conversation was an art that was cultivated and diligently pursued in coffee houses \u2013 especially in the city. \u00a0As such the close approximation of the Augustan epigram to everyday speech, embellished with couplets and equivocations, antithesis, \u2018the point\u2019 or closure and surprise and humour, had popular appeal; besides these epigrams where the main content of \u2018miscellanies\u2019, which were \u2018textbooks\u2019 on cultivated speech and \u2018universal truths\u2019 and a part of the education of young men of class. This popularity made it easy to simply anchor formal metric features unto popular speech, insinuating a sophistication of wit \u2013 for all it is worth, with the results passing for elevated literary speech while managing to maintain the distinction between prose proper and poetry. Augustan \u2018false\u2019 wit, with its \u201canagrams, acrostics, jests, riddles, rebuses, conundrums, epigrams, and cheap witticisms\u201d[4]<\/a>, is not the kind of wit one intends to dwell upon in this essay.\u00a0 \u00a0But 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: \u2018Your husband is coming to dinner tonight\/may it be the last that he shall eat!\u2019 This is from one of Eliot\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n To grasp the kind of wit in contemplation we should begin with the \u2018true wit\u2019 of the Greeks as distinct from that Latinate impostor introduced by Martial Ausonius[5]<\/a> \u2013 dealing in antithesis, equivocation, closure or \u2018point\u2019 and surprise \u2013 which is the direct progenitor of Augustan false wit.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018plunderverse\u2019, 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\u2019s \u201cCatching Frogs\u201d: \u201cjar din\u201d. That is the whole poem; yes, \u201cJar din\u201d! Gregory Betts[6]<\/a> then proceeds to justify it thus:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ellipsis or omission is a normal trope in poetry \u2013 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 \u2018frogs as Frenchmen\u2019 – obvious as it might seem to North American readers \u2013 and \u2018the game of finding French words in English\u2019, are too culturally specific to be transparent to speakers of English elsewhere. It would have served the poet\u2019s 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. \u201cJar \u00a0din\u201d could be read as an anagram of \u2018garden\u2019 merely, without the reader making any conclusive semantic deductions \u2013\u00a0 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 \u2018din\u2019 (noise) in the \u2018jar\u2019 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. \u00a0But of course Bretts is discussing avant-garde experimental or language poetry, which probes the limits of a language that we are \u2018forced into\u2019.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s arbitrariness is then delimited by rules of communication.\u00a0 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. \u00a0Contractions, 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 \u2018witticisms\u2019, perhaps not quite the \u2018false wit\u2019 of the Augustan epigram since the tropes involved and effects intended or achieved might be different.<\/p>\n For our purposes witticisms are forms, which \u2013 through the instrument of figures and syntactical constructions other than that of Augustan poetics; or a mixture of the latter\u2019s features and different or similar contemporary tropes \u2013 begin to bend towards the false wit of Augustan poetics. \u00a0In 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:<\/p>\n 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]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Temple\u2019s observation would apply to most areas of the contemporary avant-garde. For example Augustan Poetry- as insinuated by Hunter- emphasized \u201cspecial representations on the page like symmetrical rectangles [\u2026] or other repeated shapes\u201d[8]<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n The avant-garde over-reaches itself in the phenomenon of the plunderverse, which purports to save the \u2018waste\u2019 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.\u00a0 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, \u2018fowl\u2019! We can now begin to closely look at the specific ways in which the contemporary avant-garde (with its perverse witticisms) or the poetaster and the lazy poet, may, like Martial in previous centuries, initiate cultural decay, shape and mis-shape subjectivities. The linguistic gestures of the poet in any language, once they flow into the mainstream, are likely to find unconscious replication in the users of that language. This is an age of war, religious belligerence and bigotism; these two areas of cultural life are then very sensitive to such influences from poets or writers generally. The war in Iraq was initiated through the agency of language, first, that is the language of propaganda or perverse rhetoric. \u00a0When a powerful leader of the world uses the expression, \u201cthe axis of evil\u201d \u2013 whether borrowed from a speech writer or not \u2013 he is following one of the rhetorical strategies (metonymy in this case) of the poet.<\/p>\n The expression is witty in a negative 18th<\/sup> century epigrammatic fashion. It takes hold of the na\u00efve subject with the force of the slogan, though based on untruth; it is short, witty and therefore memorable. The metonymy, \u2018axis of evil\u2019, neatly cuts the world into two different opposed parts with the certitude of a samurai sword. There are several binaries at work there, good and evil being just one of them. The listener can then go on, depending on their political sway, and imaginatively multiply such binaries: Muslim=bad and Christian =good and so on.\u00a0 Binaries are dangerous because they leave the mind in a stupor and close all doors to mediating discourses. In this way the war was first fought (and won for propaganda) on the level of language before its physical manifestation. And when a bellicose leader taunts the other and promised him \u2018the mother of all battles\u2019, again the rhetorical gesture consolidated by countless poets in ages past is put into a negative use.<\/p>\n Of course it is easy to argue that the metonymy and the prepositional construction exemplified are a standard in any language, are parts of our linguistic unconscious already and available to anyone who would abuse it. Very true, and this is precisely why the poet should not further deploy expressions \u2013 heavy on false wit or witticisms, illogic and untruth \u2013 which may become mainstream in the future of any language; rather have\u00a0 \u00a0truth and reason at the writing elbow, such that there would be no rhetorical precedence \u00a0\u00a0for misappropriation; or that if false wit should occur in utterance, the very structure and character of a language would make it obvious at once.<\/p>\n Contemporary avant-garde\u2019s witticisms \u2013 and here one should include not only the verbal but also \u2018representational witticisms\u2019 such as drawings, irrational textual form or mixed media \u2013 as they are deployed lead to cultural decay by impoverishing what could otherwise be examples of great poetry for tradition and by pushing language inexorably into a dead-end; even if the avant-garde thinks it is doing the exact opposite. Due to false wit there is plenty room for a political misappropriation of rhetoric. Let us take the example of plunderverse\u2019 rhetorical manifesto according to Bretts:<\/p>\n Plunderverse limits its own expression to the source text, but attempts a genuine, divergent expression through the selection, deletion or contortion of it. Plunderverse makes poetry through other people\u2019s words. The constraint is not random, but merely an accelerated variation of the basic fact of language: we already speak in each other\u2019s words. Plunderverse exaggerates the constraints through which we realize and discover our own voice, re-enacting the struggle against influences and cultural histories. It does not try to obscure, bury or overcome influence, but, in fact, celebrates the process by which influences vary into and inform our own voices. It foregrounds the process of language acquisition, reveals the debt of influence and exploits the waste of language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Underlying the above manifesto is another kind of witticism, non-verbal but equally dangerous, namely that of legitimising theft and destruction\u2013 this time literary destruction and theft as distinct from borrowing, allusion or intertextuality \u2013 and by extension, any kind of theft and destruction. There is a moral hole at the centre of this \u2018plundering\u2019 that is appalling. It seeks to deface an already finished work under the fallacy that we speak in each other words, anyway. Bretts occludes the fact that even if we utter each other\u2019s words, they come out with differing tonal ranges and combinations that do not make any two sentence the exact same thing. It is indeed wastage if someone were to take my poetry and, through cancellation and selection, pretend to have \u2018written\u2019 a new \u2018original\u2019 poem. Plunderverse exemplifies the laziness that powers the avant-garde, as it is now constituted, by promoting or seeking to atrophy personal imagination and true creative impulse. It celebrates war and despoliation, literally, war on words and, metaphorically, war as a \u2018phenomenon\u2019 in itself; and as a means of balance in wasteful and over-producing economies. Listen to him:<\/p>\n As Bataille wrote, economies that depend upon wastefulness must obscure the waste or risk the insurgence of destabilization. The Vikings, in their indelicate raids, pillaged the excesses of communities without destroying the waste-producing structures (allowing them to return and plunder again in the future).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Should one walk into a gallery and begin to take bits and pieces of a painting to create a collage of another painting. The new work would amount to a destruction and theft of the old. Surely one would be flogged out of the gallery as Jesus Christ flogged religious whores out of the synagogues of his youth.<\/p>\n True wit should deploy syntactical brevity, measured cadence, memorable expression, even the pun, but all within an ambience of truthful utterance developed through demonstrable logic and not empty binarisms, antithesis or the maxim; it should not provide wayward moral injunctions in its subtext.<\/p>\n window.newShareCountsAuto=”smart”;<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Further reading<\/strong><\/p>\n Alderson Simon, J.: \u201cThe Augustan Attack on the Pun\u201d in Eighteenth-Century Life<\/em> 20.3 (1996) 1-19 [1]<\/a> Eighteenth-Century Life<\/em> – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, pp. 67-95.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Hunter Paul, J. \u201cCouplets and Conversation\u201d in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry<\/em> ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 13.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Roger D. Lund\u00a0 Eighteenth-Century Life<\/em> – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, 79.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Ibid. 1<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Ibid. 80<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> See \u201cPlunderverse: A cartographic Manifesto\u201d at\u00a0 http:\/\/www.poetics.ca\/poetics05\/05betts.html<\/p>\n
\nDrink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
\nThere shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
\nAnd drinking largely sobers us again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nA Youth of frolicks, an old Age of Cards,
\nFair to no purpose, artful to no end,
\nYoung without Lovers, old without a Friend,
\nA Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot,
\nAlive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\nThere 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 \u2018truths\u2019 were, nevertheless based on false logic.\u00a0 If we juxtapose the scientific deduction, \u2018twelve inches make one foot\u2019 to Pope\u2019s \u201cA little learning is a dangerous thing\u201d, the first term would be much more accurate mathematically (and can be proven logically) than the second.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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\nExperiments in language are necessary and useful but not in the form of witticisms, which introduces a cultural decadence similar to what \u2018the age of Martial\u2019 initiated into 18th<\/sup> century thought. One way in which witticisms in poetry introduce cultural decadence is that it impacts the language in which it is written in a negative way; more on that shortly. According to Bretts, and as it is common knowledge, Shakespeare influenced the English language by introducing new words into it through his poetic utterances \u2013 one thousand and seven hundred new words exactly, one of which is \u2018excellence\u2019 or\u00a0 \u2018majestic\u2019. In the same way contemporary poets, depending on their originality \u2013 and \u2018wit\u2019 in the proper sense or witticisms, as the case might be \u2013 may influence any language by introducing not only new words but turns of expressions, which then flow into the general current of a living language. Since language is the medium for expressing cultural thought, subjective reality can be influenced by writers in general and poets particularly. Politics is one area of culture where the accretions from writers and poets, especially poets, may be used or abused by power to shape subjective reality for ill or even for good; but most times for ill.<\/p>\n
\nBretts, Gregory: \u201cPlunderverse: A Cartographic Manifesto\u201d available http:\/\/www.poetics.ca\/poetics05\/05betts.html
\nHunter, Paul, J.: \u201cCouplets and Conversation\u201d in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry<\/em> ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 13.
\nLund,\u00a0 Roger D.: \u00a0\u201cThe Ghosts of Epigram, False Wit, and the Augustan Mode\u201d in\u00a0 Eighteenth-Century Life<\/em> – Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2003, 79.
\nWilliamson, George: The Proper Wit of Poetry<\/em> (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962) 5.<\/p>\n