"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Paul Lytle

There is a Latin word, forma, which means form and beauty. That fact struck me (being a man in the modern world) as strange at first: a word meaning form and beauty both. After all, we live in an age when people tell us that beauty is relative, and very rarely contingent on a thing’s form. We are told that everyone is beautiful on the inside (where a person’s “form” is least important), or that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is to say that anything can be gorgeous so long as alcohol is involved.

But as I thought about it, the more it made sense that these two terms should be placed together. After all, research tells us that the attractiveness of people has more to do with simple symmetry than in particular features. Think about it — a woman may have the most beautiful eyes that have ever been created, but if one is lower on her face than the other, she will not be terribly attractive. Better to have very plain eyes, but symmetrical ones.

So is it in Art. Form frames beauty, and carries it to the audience, dresses it up and displays it as a salesman will do with his wares. Without form, Art is a wallowing thing, unable to hold its own shape, and ultimately dying. It is the rhythm and rhyme that does this for poetry, the story type that does it for fiction, and familiar images that does it in art.

These are almost revolutionary statements, for we live in the time of free verse poetry, atonal music, and painting that can only be described as the splatterings of a halfwit, or at least someone who is terribly clumsy and decides to cash in on his spills.

And since they will be viewed as such revolutionary statements, I dare not make them without support.

Form Fosters Success

The great irony with modern artists is that they are always speaking of the great meaning they are putting into their art, and yet very few people are looking at the art to learn that meaning. The truth is, unless you are simply throwing paint on a canvas to make a quick buck, you will want an audience to understand what you are saying. The only way to do that is form, and the market proves it.

There was once a time when people truly followed Art. The illiterate used to have people read aloud the latest installment of a Charles Dickens novel so that they could follow the story. People used to read and be familiar with poetry to a much greater degree than they are now, so much so that poets could actually make a living writing poetry. It was only fifty years ago or so that this country had a booming short story market, and people like Kurt Vonnegut could support a family on selling short stories alone.

Now the market has partially moved on, but only partially. People are still interested in artistic forms, but in a different way. To the artistic community, the masses may seem to have left completely, but that is only because when Art and Form divided ways, the people followed Form.

In novels, genre work, that is the most Form-based areas, thrive over the modern Post-Modern novels. Cheap romances, which are really all the same book, continue to be sold in large numbers, even though few, if any, of them have any artistic value at all. Fantasy, for which I have a great affection, is an extremely formal genre, and has been so for almost a thousand years. That has not stopped Terry Brooks from consistently making the best-seller list for almost thirty years. Mysteries also all have the same form, even if the details of the cases differ.

In painting, Impressionism remains the most popular form, even above the new art coming out everyday. Imagine if reruns of My Three Sons had better ratings than shows being aired for the first time! Multiply that by several times, because My Three Sons is not a terribly old show, but Monet painted a century and a half ago now.

If you look at the most popular movies of all time, you will find them to be very formal films. There is nothing in Titanic that we have not seen in a hundred tragedies. Star Wars is purely archetypal, and very little of it is not predictable. The Lord of the Rings is a culmination of the great Fantasy story and character types.

In music, the most popular forms are the most formal. Rock almost always uses one of three or four structures, and sometimes the exact same chord progression (which will be discussed further below). Country is more formal, limited to fewer subjects and more strict in its structure. Rap music is almost only form, musically varying only in background riffs and tempo.

The most formal genre of all is watched by millions every night. Television is so formal that all the shows last exactly the same amount of time! Almost every show has a minor climax which changes the problem just before its central commercial break, and then the greater one at the end.

All of this has been said to say this: When given the choice between Form and Meaning, people err on the side of Form. If an artist wants people to see and understand his meaning, he must present it within a form, otherwise he will be ignored.

Form and the Stifling of Imagination

Most people now (and even I once made this claim) would say that form inhibits imagination. That you must take these great ideas and change them to fit the form. But these statements are only made by those people who do not use form, because formal artists know better. Form tempers imagination into something not only imaginative, but also substantial.

I have already mentioned that many Rock songs use the same chord progression. That progression is known as “twelve bar blues,” and it has been used for over a century. It is an arrangement of three chords in a twelve-measure theme that repeats several times. To hear it, you can go back to “Jail House Rock” or B. B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone.” Led Zeppelin used it several times, but most popularly in “Rock and Roll.” More recently, U2’s great song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” is twelve bar blues. The hymn “Amazing Grace” is only a measure or two off from the form.

Can anyone honestly say that all of these songs (and thousands more) are the same song? That is utter nonsense, and yet they are so formal that they use the exact same chord progression. In these songs, the form has not inhibited the Art.

Let us take it further, for the form of Blues and Rock music is even more limited than I have suggested so far. Anyone who has taken basic piano knows that the Major and Minor Scales have seven notes in each octave. What this means to those who have not had basic piano is that, when a song is in a major key, the melody and harmony will usually use only those eight notes (do-ray-me-fa-so-la-te, and repeated in a higher or lower octave). The Blues, or Pentatonic, Scale uses only five primary notes (do-ray-me-so-la) and one secondary note (between ray and me) per octave. Almost all Blues, Jazz, and Rock songs are in a Blues mode, meaning that their melodies are generally made up of those five tones, occasionally hitting the sixth.

Therefore, we have a genre of music that has thrived for over a century based on only five notes and three chords. Yet these aspects have been used in completely different ways. Buddy Holly, the Beatles, U2, and Stevie Ray Vaughan all recorded using the same form, but the substance of each style is completely different.

Another example is that there are several books based upon the Medieval epic Beowulf. John Gardner wrote Grendel, which retells the first section of the story from the monster’s point of view. Matthew T. Dickerson takes a short section of the epic and expands it into a complete novel called The Finnsburg Encounter. Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead gives us a version of the story in a completely realistic manner from the point of view of a historical Arabian traveler.

These authors have taken on a most extreme form, using the exact same story as the primary source for their own fiction, and yet it is almost impossible to connect the three without that source tale. Their substance is utterly different, and each fascinatingly original.

The form has not hindered these authors or musicians, but rather facilitated a stronger substance.

Form Fosters Meaning

Artists who complain that form stifles them have not been using form correctly. What form does instead is forces the artistic mind to dig more deeply into the subject.

In Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam, the author mourns the death of a dear friend. That mourning causes him to doubt the existence of God, and he is desperately searching for some sort of sign that his friend still exists in some form. In the climax of the poem, he finds himself alone at night, and he at last finds the proof he needs:

These lines are in no way hurt by form, but rather helped by it. Consider the urgency of the middle two lines, not only in the words (“all at once it seem’d at last”), but also in form. The rhyme scheme is not common, but rather has a couplet in the middle, flanked by two rhyming lines on the outside. The couplet speeds up the action, making it very clear how quickly this feeling came and went from Tennyson. But then we slow down, and the last line reaches all the way back to the first to take its rhyme. This is a more calm pacing, an afterthought almost, as though the poet is wondering just what has happened to him.

Consider the exact same lines translated into free verse:

Of course, I am not a poet on Tennyon’s level, but this is decent poetry, if I may praise my own rewriting of the lines. Yet the form is gone, and it is obviously weaker. Tennyson’s form has forced it own will and own emotion into the poem, making the meaning even deeper than the words inherently have without support.

It also forces the artist to consider more deeply what he wants to say. He cannot simply write down the words as they come to him, but he must form the words and develop them. Sometimes a thought simply will not fit into form, no matter how much you try, but those times are the exception. More often will form add more. In seeking a rhyme, a poet will be forced into another line of thought that will complement the first one. In trying to make a novel of an acceptable length, an author will add an episode that develops the characters to a greater degree. A defined scale allows several musician to improvise together without clashing, and musical ideas are developed by their interaction.

Form is More Eternal

Consider, if you would, two statements. The first is, “It is the form that sparks the memory.” The second is, “It’s the form that will spark the memory.”

Of the two, which is the more memorable? It is obviously the first, even though the two statements are almost identical. Formal poets will recognize the reason immediately, but perhaps others will not. The first is more memorable because it is written in formal rhythm.

Read it again, taking note of the stresses. “it IS the FORM that SPARKS the MEM-o-RY.” The line is written in the most famous English poetical form — iambic pentameter, which simply means that every second syllable is stressed, and that there are five stressed syllables.

One of the reason that all of those Shakespeare quotes are so memorable (besides his genius), is his form. “To be or not to be.” “But soft, what light in yonder window breaks?” Consider the great and heroic speech of Henry V:

This section is nearly perfect form, and you can almost hear the “blast of war” behind them. But more than that, they are lines that are not easily forgotten. Even if they are not memorized, someone who has read these lines once will recognize them easily in the future.

What is easier to remember, a piece of music with a defined melody, or one without form? A painting (even an Impressionistic one) of a forest, or a group of paint splatterings that claims to be a forest? A novel with a traditional plot, or one where time and events get jumbled?

An artist that wishes to be remembered would do well to use form, because something without form does not lend itself to memory.

Form Focuses the Audience

Lastly, I have heard from artists that they wish to be original, so that they do not use form. Personally, I think it a poor measure of originality whether or not a poet used rhyme. An artist who wants to be recognized simply because of a strange form or complete lack of one is not recognized for much at all.

A music teacher once asked the class who was more influential: Mozart or Haydn? She claimed that the answer was Haydn because Haydn invented the string quartet while Mozart did not invent any musical genre at all.

Such a conclusion astounded me. Here is one composer who is the Shakespeare of the music world. If he was not the greatest musician of all time, he was easily in the top three. A dozen of his pieces remain instantly recognizable by people who do not even listen to Classical music. Studies have proven that his work actually increases the IQ of infants and children.

The other man was certainly successful, but a much more minor character in the history of music. His work is not recognizable to most people, and today’s musicians were not as influenced by this person. And yet I was supposed to believe that he was more important because he invented a form.

Personally, I would have rather composed beautiful and memorable music than to have simply put four string performers in a room together. I appreciate that he did that, but the inventers of form are not as great as the masters of form. Stevie Ray Vaughan was no less a great guitarist because he did not invent the guitar. Shakespeare was not less important because he did not create the play. Monet was no less a painter because he was taught to paint by another person. No, we must judge Art by its influence and meaning, not by its form. The form is a vessel that develops that influence and meaning, but it should not be mistaken as Art itself.

The meaning must be deeper than something so superficial as form, but form will, in fact, help the audience reach that meaning.

In a play, if a naked man simply runs across the stage without purpose in the play, we may say that the playwright is original. But when the audience gathers after the play, they will not speak of the themes and symbols of the play, but simply about the naked man. “Was that supposed to happen?” they will wonder. “That was strange.”

But a play that acts like a play will point the audience in the right direction. It is because we already know the rules and traditions of the play that we can understand what the playwright is really trying to say.

Imagine that we had never before heard of a play, and know nothing about one. At our first play, we could not even understand what the people were doing on stage, or what a stage was. Is this a show or some kind, or are we eavesdropping on a real family? During a murder mystery, we might try to call the police when someone on stage is shot.

But we know the form of theatre. We know what to expect, and so we may enjoy the story and the meaning.

In a musical piece that shuns the rules of meter and scales, we will only wonder at the strange form rather than the music itself. We must use the familiar musical forms to allow the audience to dig deeper into the work.

A lover of sonnets does not need to read deeply into the form of a new sonnet. He is so familiar with it that he can bypass it completely and dig into the words themselves.

We do not lose the benefits of the form simply because it is bypassed by the audience. We will still find more success because the audience isn’t worried about something so superficial as rhymes or meter, and yet rhyme and meter has made it more accessible to them. We have still gained that deeper imagination that comes with forming the words rather than just writing them. And the work will continue to be more memorable, even if the audience does not realize right away that it is memorable.

Form has all of these benefits, and the additional advantage of getting out of the way to allow the audience in. Art without form is destroyed simply because a lack of form is more noticeable than the form itself, and therefore does the Art not become deeper, but more superficial.

Conclusions

We live in an age that rejects these ideas, but we also live in an age when Art itself is largely rejected, and we cannot help but see this as a cause/effect relationship. If an artist wishes an audience, then he would do well to look again at form. If he does not wish an audience, then he is unimportant by all standards, and his work will not survive past his death, for he will be the only one to love it, or even see it.

Every painter, poet, novelist, and musician that is remembered beyond his own field has used form. Even Walt Whitman, who made free verse famous, used form: it was simply a form of a different kind.

There are art teachers that will say that certain painters are important even though they do not use form, or a music teacher that will say that there are some great atonal composers, but these people are not recognized by the public. A painter may be important to Modern Feminist Surrealistic Expressionist Art, but if no one looks at Modern Feminist Surrealistic Expressionist Art, can that person really be considered important?

It is the form that brings an audience. It is the form that develops the work. It is the form that deepens Art. And once it has done all of that, form retreats. The beauty it has brought remains, but form itself is almost gone, hardly noticeable in the beauty that remained.

The Romans had it right with when the recognized the deep meaning in forma. Form and beauty go hand in hand. They cannot be separated.

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