Argument in verse

In his comment to my reflections on plot and thought, Brandon Watson suggests, without developing the idea further, that one of lyric poetry’s “intellectual strengths” is its use of “poetic syllogisms.”

The father of the thought, of course, is J. V. Cunningham, whose “Logic and Lyric,” originally published in Modern Philology in 1953, argues that the structure of the syllogism is one means to organize a poem, “a way of disposing of, of making a place for, elements of a different order.” His example, which changed the course of its interpretation, is Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress with its clear argument:

Major premise
Had we world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime. . . .

Minor premise
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. . . .

Conclusion
Now, therefore,
. . . . . . . .
Now let us sport us while we may. . . .

At the risk of being heretical, though, I would venture to say that there may be no poet in the English language better than Cunningham at constructing arguments, philosophical arguments, in verse. Here is one of my favorites:Passion

Passion is never fact
And never in a kiss,
For it is pure unact,
All other than the this.

It is love’s negative,
Love’s furious potency,
Distinct from which we live
In the affirmed to be.

And as love’s passive form
Is not this form I see
But all the loves that swarm
In the unwilled to be,

So in this actual kiss,
Unfaithful, I am true:
I realize in this
All passion, act, and you.Aside from the riddling content and the further evidence of what he means by certain terms that are central to his verse (“the this,” the error or perhaps the evil of actual choice), the poem shamelessly lays bare its syllogistic structure:

Major premise
Passion is never act. . . .

Minor premise
       love’s passive form
Is not this form I see. . . .

Conclusion
So in this actual kiss,
Unfaithful, I am true. . . .

The argument is that passion—the ardor that is suffered in passivity—can only realized in a human contact (“kiss”) that dispels the passion, because human contact demands action, the opposite of passionate passivity. The lover has a choice: to remain faithful to the experience of passion, and never love; or to his lover, and reject passion forever.

It is an argument for marriage.

Update: There are also those who observe that Ulysses is structured as a syllogism. They note the printing convention used in the old Modern Library Giant edition of the novel, with its 360-point initials at the beginning of each division in the novel:

Part I. STATELY, PLUMP

Part II. MR

Part III. PREPATORY TO ANYTHING

S–M–P, the terms of a syllogism.

Of course, I learned this from a teaching assistant at Santa Cruz who also believed that Freud and Joyce were connected by the meanings of their surnames. So make of the observation what you will.