more than speech

When reading your poetry consider: enunciation, pace, pauses (silence), tone and modulation. Some poets aren’t blessed with pleasing voices, but they can thoughtfully manage their speech patterns to better present their poetry.

viewed through crystal

The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

[…]

My reading of “Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in different areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organizing them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

—Italo Calvino, “Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’,” Why Read the Classics? (Vintage Books, Random House, 2000).

Montale’s short poem translated by Jonathan Galassi appears in this essay by Huck Gutman.

note struck by an adjective

Every adjective creates a tone when applied to a noun.

should end well

The main thing about a story is that it should end well, and perhaps it is not too much to say that a story’s ending casts its voice, color, tone and shade over the whole work.

—Muriel Spark, The Informed Air (New Directions, reprint 2018)

ring wrong

His rhymes were unexpected, but in that bad way of being right by sound but off in tone or out of sorts with the diction.

slighter verse

Auden with his frequent lapses into vers de société.

party crashers

The poem was a wild party of words, where you imagined some words were eyeing one another, thinking how did he/she get in here.

wild in ordered manner

Stevie [Smith] probably did read too much for her own happiness, but for her poetry the result was a well of association sunk through centuries. She also read a great deal outside of English, particularly in French, and especially Racine, whose decorous example helped inspire the finely calibrated play of tone which permitted her to run wild in an ordered manner.

—Clive James, “Stevie Smith: Not Drowning but Waving,” As Of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002 (Norton, 2003)

masked man

Frost uses masks not to deflect the personal voice but to find one, or several. He speaks truthfully when speaking as someone else, when he can assume the otherness of a mask, looking through those eyeholes at the world. Tone, he notes, is how you take yourself, your stance toward the world; literally, it is your attitude. Paradoxically, it seems harder to speak as one’s self without the sustained practice of speaking as somebody else.

—Jay Parini, “The Personal Voice,” Why Poetry Matters (Yale Univ. Press, 2008)

crafted carelessness

One felt a crafted carelessness that made it difficult to surrender to those odd collocations of imagery and outright tonal collisions.

being alive to poetry

Just as our body needs to breathe, our soul requires the fulfillment and expansion of its existence in the reverberations of emotional life. Our feeling of life desires to resound in tone, word, and image.

—Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet,” translated by Louis Agosta and Rudolf A. Makkreel, Poetry and Experience (Princeton U. Press, 1985)