An essay by Roy Schwartzman, Assistant Editor
In a world stalked
by the specter of terrorism, what can poetry offer? Poets must navigate
between the Scylla of fulsome, flag-waving doggerel and the Charybdis of
lovely, lyrical irrelevance. Must writers choose between political
pertinence and aesthetic appeal? What form of poetry might do justice
to current political challenges while maintaining stylistic elegance?
An answer emerged almost 2,400 years ago in ancient Greece.
It was the Periodos.
By all accounts,
the master of the Periodos was the orator, teacher, and philosopher Isocrates
(436-338 BC). He established a famous school of political oratory.
Today we might think of political oratory as mere bluster, but Isocrates
had in mind something quite different. He sought to marry graceful
oratorical style with substantive content. Fed up with grandiloquence
wasted on petty subjects (he used the example of an encomium to a flea),
Isocrates taught his students to discuss serious issues eloquently.
The technical grammatical
aspects of the Periodos have less relevance today than the lessons it can
teach poets. Transferred from linguistics to poetics, the Periodos
can help poets combine style with substance. Thematically, a Periodos
must address a significant issue of public concern. If he were instructing
poets in our age, Isocrates would steer them away from purely personal
themes and toward topics that affect the well-being of the entire state
and its citizens.
Poetic Themes:
Isocrates
|
Poetic Themes:
Romantic and Modern
|
Affairs of the
state
|
Affairs of the
heart
|
Agonies endured
for the sake of others
|
Personal angst
(à la Kurt Cobain)
|
Sense of kinship
with others
|
Sense of individuality,
alienation
|
Civic duty
|
Personal withdrawal
|
Isocrates taught poets to involve themselves
in issues of the day as well as ongoing themes of personal responsibility
to state and society.
Some stylistic aspects
of the Periodos apply across languages and provide fertile ground for poets.
Since the Periodos deals with large themes, its style is expansive as well.
If written in prose, a Periodos would qualify as a run-on sentence.
A Periodos relentlessly pursues a single main idea, which would have formed
the grammatical subject in Greek. A series of clauses and phrases
follows the introduction of the subject. These clauses and phrases
develop the subject, then the Periodos culminates with the predicate.
Structurally, a Periodos has no set length, but it does have a customary order: (1) subject, (2) modifying phrases, (3) predicate. The modifying components have a symmetrical arrangement, such as: correlation: a and b;
opposition: a not
b; disjunction: a or b; comparison: more/less a than b. These symmetry
requirements discipline a poet to consider specific types of relationships
between modifier and subject instead of choosing random descriptions.
The composer’s skill
lies in creating as long a Periodos as possible while maintaining logical
and thematic unity. A Periodos may employ any literary devices for
effect. Isocrates was especially fond of working with sounds through
alliteration, meter, rhyme, etc., to heighten the aesthetic impact when
read.
Example of a Periodos:
Periodos on the Departure of an Only Son for War
You, my son,
my one chance for immortality,
my name’s one chance not to perish,
march one step closer to mortal conflict,[1]
impatient for duty’s blood-stained hands
to cradle your wailing conscience,
more eager to bathe in sanguine rapture of the kill
than to entwine your fingers[2]
that had caresses yet left in them
with those that gave you life,
fed you courage,
nurtured your pride[3]
(not that you should ignore
your country’s first seductive call,
nor follow slavishly
my
last desperate whispers);[4]
the thirst for brotherhood amidst fratricide,[6]
rip my farewell into warring pieces:[7]
one begging for peace and preservation of blood,
one
buying honor for the price of innocence.[8]
Writing the preceding
poem as a Periodos forced me to construct it differently from a “modern”
piece. I had to expand the pain of personal loss by relating it to
the civic obligation that caused it, and make my private emotions relevant
to the situation at hand. Thus the poet becomes a public servant
without becoming a slave to the state.
© 2003 Sol Magazine