September Poetry Works

“Isocrates Improves Our Poetry.  Period.”

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 hunger for heroism in the face of cowardly conflict,[5]

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]


Roy Schwartzman, MaryvilleMOUSA

 

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



[1] The subject appears early; subsequent description and explanation develop that theme.
[2] These phrases use comparison to elaborate on the subject.
[3] The preceding three lines are linked thematically by correlation, but also structurally by similar three-word phrases: (past tense verb) you/r (name of a value or virtue).
[4] Two phrases modify the subject by opposition: not x nor y.
[5] Alliteration unifies the poem’s sounds as the theme gets more expansive.
[6] This contrast points to the contradictory nature of war, but also the conflicting obligations to family and to country.
[7] The personal conflict is not merely personal, but an inward reflection of the military struggle.  This line is the ultimate predicate of line 1 and is the grammatical as well as thematic culmination.
[8] The matching meter of the final two lines helps rein in this potentially rambling Periodos and show that the conflicting sides are evenly balanced.