386. The freedom of rules

I will give a series on economics, as announced in the previous item, but here is an intervening item on something else.  

Different forms of freedom were discussed earlier in this blog (e.g. in item 340).The one that appeared odd is the Kantian one, where moral injunctions that constrain behaviour are claimed to set you free. This is odd, at first sight, because rules constrain. At second sight it is not so odd, because rules can also enable. Moral rules set you free from slavery to impulse or emotions.

There is a great variety of rules, and here I focus only on certain kinds, not, for example, legal rules.

There are enabling rules in poetry, in the sense of regular, standard, well-known or recommended forms. Here I focus on poetry because I recently became more involved in it than I was before. I had been writing poems on and off, in batches with long intervals, all my life, about 100 in total, with no ambition to publish them, and now I was ready to pick them up and improve them. For that purpose I followed a course on writing poems, joined a poetry criticism group, and started a separate blog of poems, parallel to this philosophy blog. The title is POETRY PINFOLD (https://poetrypinfold.blogspot.nl).

Here, the ‘rules’ concern rhythm (‘metre’), such as the ‘pentameter’, with five beats to a line, or the ‘tetrameter’, with four beats. Rhyme, in different patterns and forms, as in the classic sonnet. Word choice, depending on both meaning and sound. ‘Show, don’t tell’: don’t explain ideas, but let things happen that exemplify the idea, for the reader to interpret. No sentimentality, and certainly no clichés. Few adjectives, let nouns do their work. Where to end a line: Do you let a phrase run on to its end, at the end of a line, or do you cut it off before, to run on in the next line (‘enjambment’). I was told that such ‘rules’ do not form a constraint, but help poets to set themselves free. Again, I was puzzled: how can this be?

I came to the following analysis. Rules are a form of opposition to impulse: the inclination to do what first crops up in the mind. In social psychology this is know as the ‘availability heuristic’. You pay attention to what is ‘available’, comes to mind as salient. Those are propelled by emotion. They can be threats, or opportunities, or recent experiences, or exigencies of the immediate context of action. This was adaptive, in evolution, to yield a fast response to danger and opportunity, in order to survive, but it can lead to neglect of better alternatives. And a poet should take time. 

Earlier, I had argued that to develop oneself one needs opposition from others, to have a chance of being freed from one’s preconceptions. I proposed that this yields the highest level of freedom.

The principle is wider: one needs outside corrections more in general. In ordinary experience it is things that don’t work that tell you that you are mistaken. This is what I called ‘the success of failure’ (in item 357 in this blog). In science it is facts that contradict theory.

And here, in poetry, there are regularities. They are not imperative: a poem is not necessarily bad if it breaks the rules, in fact often the rules need to be broken to make the poem interesting, to shift an emphasis, or to make a point. In fact, whatever form is taken, almost any exception or irregularity you can think of is tolerated, and is legitimized with a technical term of its own, which makes the whole exercise rather pedantic, a bit of a show-off.

Nevertheless the ‘rules’ can help. They serve to trigger a critical reflection on what impulse gives you: could you have said it differently? The rules set you to ask what form of poem you are using, whether it conforms to some of the classic forms that set the standards, whether you are adhering to those ‘rules’, and what would happen if you tried to do so. It forces you to think of alternatives and indicates directions where to look. They may yield shifts of thought that turn out to be more appealing than what you first had in mind.

Here is a quote from Auden (by Glyn Maxwell) that says it all: ‘Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of self’. Glyn Maxwell argues that poetry is rooted in the constitution of the human being. Metre and rhyme are inspired, literally, by breathing in and out, a beating heart, and movement, in step and run. That has been embodied in the full body of poetry, and it is a shame to leave it aside.  

In his book about poetry, Stephen Fry offered something deep that I like: ‘Poetry is concerned with the connections between things …. looking for ways in which one thing chimes with another’.[i] That can be done by metaphor, connections between meanings, or by alliteration and rhyme, connections by sound. The ‘rules’ can offer suggestions for that. 

I use the rules in a relaxed fashion. I will not let them force me to use a word that I don’t like, that does not fit the purpose of the poem, or does not sound right.

As in opposition from others, you listen to it carefully, see if it can improve your ideas, but in the end you follow your own conviction, and that can be something adopted from outside, from the rules.    

i] Stephen Fry, 2005, The ode less travelled, Arrow Books, p.124.