Deductive vs. Inductive Poetry II

My nascent thought posted last night regarding inductive vs. deductive poetry needs some fleshing out. First, I did not give any examples of inductive poets. William Carlos Williams has to lead the pack, with Gary Snyder, Frank O'Hara, Charles Bukowski, Wordsworth to some extent; Robert Lowell late in his career (Life Sketches), and from what I've read of Franz Wright I might include him, and certainly the entire canon of Chinese poetry, where emotion is provoked by events or surroundings. That is, events and surroundings are not used to support an emotion; the emotion arises from them.

Keats was a deductive poet. We should not be fooled by his "Ode to a Grecian Urn," where he is not responding to an experience so much as transmogrifying an icon. "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "Lamia" are more typical--poems organized around a legend or narrative, not in response to experience.

Hopkins tried to get at nature through "inscape," but even so his work is so doused in Christianity that he cannot be considered inductive.

Basically, confining ourselves to the west, deductive poetry ruled until the twentieth century. Donne and Milton and Jonson were all deductive, so was Herbert. Sir Walter Scott epitomizes the deductive poet as he strives to communicate romances in verse. Ginsberg is an odd duck; "In a California Supermarket" is certainly an inductive poem, though a paean to Whitman; but Ginsberg is best known for his deductive work, as in "Howl," where images are used to support his emotion, that emotion not being a response to immediate experience, but to years of psychic pain.

Whitman is another odd duck; he seems to be writing inductive poetry, reacting to nature and man, until he assumes that mystic voice where he merges with all, indeed, becomes all. So he is inductive and deductive, because of the strong influence of Transcendentalism throughout his work.

Pound championed Eastern verse in his youth and wrote some inductive poetry, but his Cantos are primarily deductive, where his substance becomes almost preachy at times (not to mention disconnected).

In summary, then, like rhyme, deductive poetry ruled poetry in English until the late twentieth century, with Williams and Lowell as pioneers and Snyder and the rest following behind. What I read in current literary journals strikes me as 90% inductive. Nowadays inductive poetry is expected by teachers of creative writing; "That's not real," they may say; "That doesn't ring true;" or, "Have you ever actually seen an otter? Then you have no business writing about one."

I satirized this view in my poem, "At the Workshop."

Anyway, I'll continue to flesh out this thought until I can cobble an essay out of it. I've never written an essay this way, except for the interlocutions of my dear wife. But here in a blog format anyone can help me, provide further examples, or simply tell me I'm full of shit--which, of course, I am. But just because my opinions may stink doesn't necessarily make them untrue. ;-}

Thine,

CE