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The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

George T. Wright
George T. Wright*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
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Abstract

Poets writing in English frequently use the simple present form of action verbs where the progressive form would be more natural in speech. Probably they do so in order to take advantage of overtones resident in the simple form, overtones that permit a physical action to seem timeless yet permanent, pastlike yet edging toward the future, repeatable yet provisional, urgent yet distant, ceremonious and archaic. Never quite a stage direction, and different in feeling even from temporally unlocated past tense verbs, the action verb cast in the lyric present tense serves every epoch of English literary history differently but is always expressive of the poets' deepest perceptions and fears. An appendix reports and comments on an extensive survey of the frequency with which British and American poets have used progressive forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , May 1974 , pp. 563 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 574 Scholars wrestling explicitly with the uses of progressive and simple forms include Jacobus van der Laan, An Enquiry on a Psychological Basis into the Use of the Progressive Form in Late Modern English (Gorinchem: Duym, 1922); Fernand Mossé, Histoire de la forme périphrastique, être+participe présent en germanique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1938); Thomas Satchell, “Expanded Tenses,” English Studies, 21 (1939), 214–17; Leah Dennis, “The Progressive Tense: Frequency of Its Use in English,” PMLA, 55 (1940), 855–65; Edward Calver, “The Uses of the Present Tense Forms in English,” Language, 22 (1945), 317–25; Dwight L. Bolinger, “More on the Present Tense in English,” Language, 23 (1947), 434–36; A. S. Hornby, “Non-Conclusive Verbs: Some Notes on the Progressive Tenses,” English Language Teaching, 3 (May 1949), 172–77; Anna Granville Hatcher, “The Use of the Progressive Form in English,” Language, 27 (1951), 254–80; Eric Buyssens, Les Deux Aspectifs de la conjugaison anglaise au xx“ siècle (Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1968); F. G. A. M. Aarts, ”On the Use of the Progressive and Non-Progressive Present with Future Reference in Present-Day English,“ English Studies, 50 (1969), 565–79; and J. A. Van Ek, ”The ‘Progressive’ Reconsidered,“ English Studies, 50 (1969), 579–85. Among more general studies of the English verb that try to throw light on the simple progressive problem are: Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924); H. Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English, Pt. II, Sec. ii: The Verb and the Particles (Groningen: P. Noordhoff, 1926); B. Trnka, On the Syntax of the English Verb from Caxton to Dryden, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, No. 3 (Prague: Jednota feskoslovenstj'ch matematikû a fysikü, 1930); George O. Curme, Syntax, Vol. m of A Grammar of the English Language (Boston: Heath, 1931); A. S. Hornby, A Guide to Patterns and Usage in English (London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1954); Archibald A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structures (New York: Harcourt, 1958); Tauno F.

Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 1960); Yngve Olsson, On the Syntax of the English Verb, Gothenburg Studies in English, No. 12 (Goteborg: Elander, 1961); Ralph B. Long, The Sentence and Its Parts: A Grammar of Contemporary English (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961); F. R. Palmer, A Linguistic Study of the English Verb (London: Longmans, 1965); David Crystal, “Specification and English Tenses,” Journal of Linguistics, 2 (April 1966), 1–34; W. H. Hirtle, The Simple and Progressive Forms: An Analytical Approach (Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1967); and what seem to me the most impressive works on the subject: William Diver, “The Chronological System of the English Verb,” Word, 19 (1963), 141–81; and Martin Joos, The English Verb: Form and Meanings (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964).

Study of the progressive, and of English verbs generally, has been complicated and probably obfuscated by the understandable efforts of linguists to explain what goes on in English by referring to only partly pertinent foreign models. In particular, they have been misled by the Latin participial adjective (sum amans), which for a long time gave uneasy justification to the English progressive, and more recently by the “aspect” of Slavonic verbs, a term which many of the above-mentioned writers use in trying to fix the respective functions of simple and progressive forms in English. English practice, however, so eludes formulation that virtually all scholars who distinguish aspects in English verbs do so differently from their colleagues. The result is Babel. Among the aspects proposed by various scholars are: point-action, momentaneous, ingressive, inchoate, inchoative, effective, imperfective, perfective, perfect, non-perfect, durative (including durative-progressive and durative-terminate, or indefinitely durative, ingres-sively durative, terminately durative and continuatively durative), continuative, continuous, terminate, terminative, egressive, iterative (including momentaneously iterative and duratively iterative), Iterativum, Frequentativum, Inchoati-vum, Intensivum, Kausativum, static, dynamic, common, progressive, temporary, and generic. For a fascinating history of the origins of the aspect hunt and an attack on the usefulness of the term, see R. W. Zandvoort, “Is ‘Aspect’ an English Verbal Category?” Contributions to English Syntax and Philology, Gothenburg Studies in English, No. 14(Goteborg: Almkvist and Wiksell, 1962), pp. 1–20.

Note 2 in page 575 E.g., J. Kerkhof, Studies in the Language of Geoffrey Chaucer (Leyden : Universitaire pers Leyden, 1966); Georg Fridén, Studies on the Tenses of the English Verb from Chaucer to Shakespeare with Special Reference to the Late Sixteenth Century (Uppsala: Almkvist and Wiksell, 1948); and the already cited works by Laan, Mossé, Dennis, and Buyssens.

Note 3 in page 575 This does not contradict the statement above that the lyric tense verb describes an action that takes place once and endures. For me at least it makes sense to say that the poem is repeatable; on each repetition the action of the poem resumes.

Note 4 in page 575 English is, of course, not one of those languages that uses a special aorist form on such occasions; the simple present or simple past verb must do the job.

Note 5 in page 575 E.g. : “Here let him tell her a great long tale in her ear” (Roister Doistef); Exeat, Exeant (many plays); “Here must Crapine be coming in with a basket and a stick in his hand” (The Supposes); “Pointing behind to his torn breeches” (Gamer Gurton's Needle); “And gave him a good blow on the buttock” (Gorboduc); “Fall down and quake” (Muce-dorus); “Sit down and knock your head” (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay); “Stab him” (The Spanish Tragedy); “Kiss, kiss, kiss” (Cambises, King of Persia).

Note 6 in page 575 Other examples of introductory but unlocated pasts in familiar poems:

I struck the board and cried. . . (Herbert)

I made my song a coat. . . (Yeats)

I met a traveler from an antique land . . . (Shelley)

He stood, and heard the steeple . . . (Housman)

Burbank crossed a little bridge . . . (Eliot)

She sang beyond the genius of the sea. (Stevens)

Note 7 in page 575 Louis Simpson, Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1965), p. 138. The other lines, of course, are by Nashe, Gray, Keats, and Tennyson.

Note 8 in page 575 See Langer, “A Note on the Film,” Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art, pp. 411–15.

Note 9 in page 575 Poems quoted in this paragraph are, in order: Shapiro, “Nostalgia”; Hughes, “Hawk Roosting”; Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”; Simpson, “American Preludes.”

Note 10 in page 575 Molloy in Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1959), p. 26.

Note 11 in page 575 That / stand or / walk should become paradigms for the assertion of reality in our time has abundant ironies : on the one hand, “I” is real, the source of thought, perception, and sensation, while “stand” or “walk” is unlocated and hence unreal; on the other hand, every “I” is mortal and tentative whereas the lyric tense action is eternal. The conjunction of the two serves almost as a figure for the contradictions and anxieties we feel in all our experience.

Note 1 in page 578 The lines surveyed were not, of course, all of the same length. Hence, for poets who use many short lines (Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Yeats, Pound, Roethke, and most recent poets), the ratios given should probably be lower than they are; for poets who use abnormally long lines (Whitman), they should be higher. On the whole, if such adjustments were made, the tendencies noted here would be even more pronounced than they are.

Note 2 in page 579 Excluding poems by Shakespeare, Sidney, Drayton, and Spenser.

Note 3 in page 579 Naked Poetry: Recent American Poetry in Open Forms, ed. Stephen Berg and Robert Mezey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969). Counted, in order of increasing use of progressives, were poems by Kinnell ( 1:250), Creeley (1:228), Snyder (1:125), Patchen and Levine (1:100), Levertov (1:82), Kees, (1:72), Ginsberg (1:71), Berryman (1:55), Rexroth (1:45), James Wright, Merwin, Mezey, and Plath (1:36–38), Berg (1:25), and Bly (1:19). The poems of Lowell, Roethke, and Stafford were counted from other volumes.

Note 4 in page 579 Or 164 years if we disregard Gray, 2 of whose 3 progressives are mere fooling around (e.g., “The Master of Maudlin / In the same dirt is dawdling”).

Note 5 in page 579 Such highlighting frequently occurs in speech and prose. See Laan, pp. 7, 13, 19.