Sonnets are born free, and everywhere are in chains

Friday, cigarette #1

I can freely leave an unfinished free-verse poem to prepare a meal, sleep, have a drink with friends, but a formal poem seems to follow me everywhere and makes me hard to live with. Mona Van Duyn, A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women

I have a feeling that Peter Augustine Lawler would have enjoyed Tuesday's YPU debate (Resolved: Conform to traditional gender roles). All of the modernists said exactly what he would have predicted: Gender roles are constraints, constraints obscure individuality, and individuality is the basis of my identity.

Some conservatives answer this charge by saying that the sense of direction that tradition gives people outweighs the fact that traditions are constraining, but is the fact that a tradition constrains people really a disadvantage that needs to be outweighed? Even if individual authenticity is the thing you care most about, constraints usually give you more individuality, not less. Ask a hundred high school students to write a free-verse poem, then ask them all to write a sonnet. The hundred sonnets are going to reflect greater individuality. The shackles of tradition give people purpose, and that's cool. But sometimes, like rhyme and meter, they're cool just because they're shackles.*

Oscar Wilde takes the virtue of working within constraints one step further:

Personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation. When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely — Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His own individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation. People sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare's. In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare's Hamlet.

In other words, if you want to understand Kenneth Branagh you shouldn't chat with him about his favorite books or watch him drink his afternoon tea. You should watch him play Henry the Fifth.

The logical conclusion of the idea that men are most themselves when most free of constraints is that the groggy self that exists when I've just woken up, before I've had enough caffeine to remember my manners, is more authentic than the more polished self that leaves the house for work in the morning and meets with my thesis advisor. Maybe this is true, but I hope not.

*Not all constraints lead to greater authenticity. Burqas do not, in fact, dignify women.