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LIGHT VERSE: DEAD BUT REMARKABLY ROBUST

Brad Leithauser is the author of a novel, "Equal Distance," and two volumes of poetry. His collection, "Between Leaps: Poems 1972-1985," will be published in England in September, Leithauser, Brad

1987

Overview

As Auden's examination of Burns and Byron suggests, ''light verse'' might profitably be viewed as a term embracing two strains of diction. In the first, epitomized by Burns, poetic language tends to be direct and earthy and linked to common - traditionally, indigent and pastoral - people. This is ''lightness'' that does not necessarily aspire to humor but only to lucidity and bright musicality. Burns's ''I Once Was a Maid'' or ''My Luve Is Like a Red Red Rose'' could serve as examples. Byron's verse, on the other hand, seeks an audience of greater sophistication and social standing, and addresses them in a humorous, dexterous and often patrician manner. (These audiences are of course prototypes only; to the ideal reader of light verse, who would feel at home with both strains, this disjunction would correspond merely to different sectors of his or her mind.) Although both sorts of light verse have languished in our time, it is verse of this latter, patrician sort - usually written with what Mr. [John Updike] calls ''metric neatness'' - that has suffered the graver decline. Where did light verse go? Has it only migrated temporarily, or is it gone for good? And if it is extinct, are we at least left with someone to blame, or will this prove another of those dismaying disappearances - so prevalent in modern life - for which no blame can ever be assigned, since the causes always turn out to be hopelessly complex and indeterminate? IN the late 1930's, W. H. Auden offered some theories about the decline of light verse, which he saw as the result of complex but not absolutely indeterminate causes. In his introduction to ''The Oxford Book of Light Verse,'' he contrasted the successes of Robert Burns and Lord Byron as a means of setting out the social conditions under which light verse might naturally prosper. According to Auden, Burns's success derived in part from his origins in a ''genuine community where the popular tradition in poetry had never been lost. In consequence Burns was able to write directly and easily about all aspects of life, the most serious as well as the most trivial.'' Byron, on the other hand, was ''the first writer of Light Verse in the modern sense. His success lasts as long as he takes nothing very seriously; the moment he tries to be profound and 'poetic' he fails.'' And yet, Auden argued, Byron no less than Burns drew strength from his social ties: ''However much they [ he and society ] tried to reject each other, he was a member of 'Society', and his poetry is the result of his membership. If he cannot be poetic, it is because smart society is not poetic.'' After hypothesizing that societies in the future ''will not grow of themselves,'' and ''will either be made consciously or decay,'' Auden concluded on one of those tolling, apocalyptic notes that shudder so often within the prose he wrote in the 30's: ''Poetry which is at the same time light and adult can only be written in a society which is both integrated and free.''

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: BOOKS AND LITERATURE / LEITHAUSER, BRAD