I'm all for their right of personal expression, of course, and I've told my students so. And we've talked about poets who eschew the use of punctuation and who write beautiful and extraordinary poems that have no punctuation at all. For example I've shared with them poems like this one by W.S. Merwin, from his book, The Vixen (published by Knopf, 1996), on p. 69:
Vixen
Comet of stillness princess of what is over
high note held without trembling without voice without sound
aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets
of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences
never caught in words warden of where the river went
touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished
window onto the hidden place and the other time
at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting
in the moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born
you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me
you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you
even now you are unharmed even now perfect
as you have always been now when your light paws are running
on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you
when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer
when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars
from the creeds of difference and contradictions
that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications
as long as it lasted until something that we were
had ended when you are no longer anything
let me catch sight of you again going over the wall
and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures
guttering on a screen let my words find their own
places in the silence after the animals.
On might even say that the lack of punctuation in Merwin's fine, fine poem is crucial to what Frost called "the sound of sense"; that is, in this poem in part about the slipping away from the "creeds of difference and contradictions" that separate the "I" in the poem from the female fox s/he espies in the moonlight, part of that process of becoming a part of that something greater beyond the self is to slip away from the halters of punctuation, that peculiarly human invention. Punctuations, with its pauses and divisions, plays no part in the more interconnected world that the "I" in Merwin's poem desires, a place where his/her "words find their own/ places in the silences after the animals."
But such was not the case for some of my students. Too often the lack of punctuation hindered the sound and sense of their poems. For these students, as they talked about it in class, punctuation was a hassle, a bother, something that, because it needed to be attended to, prevented them from fully entering the unfettered worlds of personal utterance that they so ardently desired. These students kept to these beliefs even as I pointed out what they were giving up by avoiding punctuation: the ability to create and control their meaning, to create more nuance, to be more expressive in their tone, to have, in effect, an even more powerful personal utterance.
As an example of how punctuation, even at the level of an addition or deletion of a humble comma, can make a difference in a poem, I shared with my students Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Here's the version of the poem that you can find on the Poetry Foundation's website (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171621):
Whose woods these are I think
I know.
His house is in the village
though; He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
To the Poetry Foundation's credit, this is the version of the poem that was printed most often during Frost's lifetime. But after his death in 1963, Frost's publisher, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, brought out a collected edition of his poems, The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. This was the edition that most general readers of Frost encountered in the years after the great poet's passing, and the edition from which many anthologies took their texts of Frost's poems. However, as the poet Donald Hall wrote in a now famous article, "Robert Frost Corrupted," which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in March, 1982, "the text is corrupt: the editor has altered the rhythm of Frost's poems by repunctuating them." You can find the whole of the article reprinted online at the PN Review (http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=6740>).
Hall cites Lathem arguments that he was regularizing and tidying up the punctuation in Frost's poems for the general reader, but Hall is still critical on the grounds that Lathem messes up the music of Frost's poems. Here's an excerpt from the sixth paragraph of Hall's article:
Frost cared for the sound of verse. He went so far as to claim that words existed in order to make noises: 'Words are only valuable in writing as they serve to indicate particular sentence sounds.' Frost seemed not to have cared much for assonance, lush vowels rubbing against each other. He cared most for the cadence of talk, with the nudge and thrust of intelligence in pace and pitch. In his work he continually referred to a semantics of noise. 'Remember,' he told us, 'that the sentence sound often says more than the words . . . . 'There are tones of voice that mean more than words.' Another phrase he liked was 'the sound of sense', the way cadence makes sense and sense makes cadence.'. . . if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.'
Nicely put, but Hall is most critical of Lathem's changes to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," particularly of the comma that he added in line 13 of the poem, not so much because the sound of the line was altered, but because the meaning was. Hall writes, "Frost wrote the line 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep'. We do not find this line in The Poetry of Robert Frost. Instead we find: 'The woods are lovely, dark, and deep'. To say that the woods are 1) lovely, 2) dark, and 3) deep differs considerably from claiming that they are lovely in that they are dark and deep. In Frost's line, the general adjective 'lovely' is explained by the more particular modifiers 'dark' and 'deep'. In the editor's line, the egalitarian threesome appears to be parallel, but of course it is not -- it is as if we proclaimed that a farmer grew apples, Mclntoshes, and Northern Spies.
In other words, Frost meant "dark and deep" as an appositive, "a word or group of words that renames the noun or pronoun that comes before it," as Lynn Quitman Troyka and Douglas Hesse write on p. 341 of Quick Access, Reference for Writers. "Dark and deep" are what "lovely means, Frost tells us; they're not separate from it, as Lathem's grammatical change claims. Big difference!
I think it's precisely the lack of that comma between "dark" and "and" in line 13 that helps make "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" so great. It enables the poem to rise into the realm of deeper, more profound meaning. To be "Dark and deep" is to be "lovely." Lovely. Happily, Hall's article had an effect, and, as the Poetry Foundation's example above shows, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is now more often than not printed as it was in the poet's time. Also lovely.
And so I've been thinking of my dear students and of Donald Hall and Robert Frost, and of poor, misguided Professor Lathem, and I've been on the lookout for beautifully punctuated sentences in my reading this week. I could of course go to favorites like Jane Austen, but here's one more recent, in the first volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, which I've been having a gas reading to help me bone up on my Civil War history as I work on my novel, Miss Emily's Book of Spells. In this paragraph on pp. 166-167 that ends section 2 of the book, Foote is describing the end of the first year of the war, 1861, and of how, as the year ends, the two presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis are peering out their respective windows one hundred miles apart, keeping their vigil on the war from opposite directions. "At the far ends of the north-south road connecting the two capitals they strained to see and understand each other, peering as if across a darkling plain," Foote writes. And then he writes the following two sentences:
Soon now, that hundred miles of Virginia with its glittering rivers and dusty turnpikes, its fields of grain and rolling pastures, the peace of generations soft upon it like the softness in the voices of its people, would be obscured by the swirl and bank of cannon smoke, stitched by the fitful stabs of muzzle flashes, until at last, lurid as the floor of hell itself, it would seem to have been made for war as deliberately as a chessboard was designed for chess. Even the place-names on the map, which now were merely quaint, would take on the sound of crackling flame and distant thunder, the Biblical, Indian, Anglo-Saxon names of hamlets and creeks and crossroads, for the most part unimportant in themselves until the day when the armies came together, as often by accident as on purpose, to give the scattered names a permanence and settle what manner of life the future generations were to lead."
Two sentences, the first 84 words, the second 74, with their clauses building upon clauses, showcasing Foote's affection for the people and of the land, sentences parsed by commas that lead each of these sentences onward to their next clause and poetic utterance, and that help the sentences become a road of connections, too, like that road connecting Washington and Richmond with Lincoln and Jefferson at its ends. Foote reminds us, if we needed it, that there's a sound and sense, as well as a poetry, in prose, as well.
And so I've been thinking about punctuation in my own work as well, too, as in this little poem that I've been working on recently, as the cold has descended on much of the country these past few weeks:
Midwinter
Since noon you've sat
on a sofa's pillow,like a drowsy cat
by a sunlit window.
You stretch and purr
and walk about,inmate in stir
who can't get out.
Outside it snows;
the wind bendsits touchless touch
toward what it knows:
the endless ends,
its hush-less hush.
the endless ends,
its hush-less hush.
Just as that comma in Frost's 13th line in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" caused such consternation in Donald Hall, I've been fretting on the comma in the 13th line of my little poem. What indeed does the wind know in midwinter? And is what it knows truer with the comma, or without it? "The endless ends/ its hush-less hush," or, as the comma suggests, is "its hush-less hush" that which comprises "the endless ends"? Not quite what the definition of "lovely" is perhaps, but still beguiling I hope.
Which version do you prefer?
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