This page makes use of an innovation of mine called 'dual-purpose text.' Click anywhere in the text below (not in the white space around the text) to get to the top of the page very quickly and easily - there's no need to find a separate top button or to scroll. The page on Web design describes this innovation and others, including 'the rail,' which can also be used to reach top of page.

So many human activities reveal a powerful drive to explore the fullest range of possibilities. This drive can only be appreciated to the full by taking a systematic approach. Michel Guerard, in his 'Cuisine Minceur,' gives a systematic treatment of 'The Methods of Cooking.' Colin Tudge, the writer on science, agriculture and cookery, gives a systematic treatment of techniques in cookery in 'Future Cook.' In the great cuisines of the world, for example, potatoes have not simply been boiled, baked or roasted:
Potatoes may be served as whole, discrete things...They can be broken down a little, so their surface starches take up the surrounding juices, and leak out to thicken them. They may be pounded a little more to produce a puree, usually called mash, or broken up completely to thicken soups, like flour; or indeed turned into flour, which is sometimes used in bread. At all grades of comminution the potato will pick up and hold surrounding flavours: of mint, thyme, young carrot, or (although the potato came late to India) the whole astonishing pharmacopoeia of Indian spices.
The potato, once mashed, is as pliant as modelling-clay; it can be mixed with anything and everything and moulded to whatever shape you choose.

Disappointingly, cooks seem to have used more ingenuity - and more imagination, in this very limited context - than contemporary poets. It cannot possibly be claimed, I think, that contemporary poets have explored a wide range of possibilities. Some have written very great poetry, poetry of permanent worth, but a wide range of possibilities has not been explored. A systematic treatment of form in poetry makes clear this deficiency, and may help to rectify it.

Of course, not all possibilities can be used. It may be that a technique or a form has been used to a great extent in the past and is now exhausted. The two questions which must be asked are:
(1) What are the possibilities and the possible combinations, revealed by a systematic approach?
(2) Which of these can be used and justified in artistic terms?

By considering the possible combinations of length, form and subject, it can easily be shown that an epic poem in rhymed couplets concerned with the martial exploits of a great king is one possibility, but it is not one that would be contemplated today.

My own systematic approach to the question of form will be obvious. I see the need for system on the one hand and passion and instinct on the other - again, that is, I see the need for polarities. I also see the need for humane values - these, too, are not contradicted by the urge to be systematic. By using systematic methods, we can more easily detect omissions and arbitrary choices, and perhaps develop new techniques.

Art may follow Occam's Razor, the principle that 'entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity,' when it is a matter of avoiding the superfluous word and phrase. It is not applicable to forms and techniques. Art does not so much explain reality or reflect reality as extend it, so that reality becomes more mysterious than ever. It is in the nature of art to be rich, to be multifarious. Inventiveness is an aspect of imagination. Art should be intricate and varied, like nature. This does not mean that there should be only intricate and multifarious works of art, but that there should be plain and austere works coexisting with intricate works, and that a vast range of possibilities should be realized. Artists should try to realize new possibilities and be restless in their search, just as living things have colonized and flourished in new habitats.

The human drive to explore the fullest range of possibilities also entails the drive to transcend a medium, to transcend apparent limitations. There are many examples from music. The piano is an instrument which is well suited to polyphony but, unlike the human voice, cannot sustain a note. Many composers have refused to be discouraged by the limitations of the piano and have made the piano sing, like the human voice. The violin, of course, can sustain a note but can play only a limited number of chords and is unsuited to polyphony. Even so, Bach, in his partitas and sonatas for unaccompanied violin, was able to suggest rich harmonies and actually wrote fugues for the violin.

The Polish composer Panufnik was not deterred by the fact that music takes place in time, not in space, but explained that his purpose, in his work 'Sinfonie di Sfere,' was 'to write a work that work that would reflect in musical terms a sense of geometrical pattern and order...' He saw the symphony as a kind of journey through three spheres.

It is true that there are things which, apparently, poetry can do best - for example, better than prose - and there are things to which poetry is apparently unsuited, but even so, writers of poetry should transcend limits whenever they can, should try to make poetry do things which are unprecedented, and which might have been thought to be impossible. Like Panufnik, they can certainly explore relationships in space as well as time. Like Bach, they can make the single poetic line suggest harmonies and polyphony.

I distinguish two phases in many human activities, the exploratory and the systematic. These phases are not to be regarded as separate and sequential - exploration can continue after systematization has begun. To give an example from scientific activity, in the exploratory phase, chemical elements were discovered one by one. The Russian chemist Mendeleev drew up a systematic plan for the ordering of the elements, the Periodic Table. Elements continued to be discovered, and one by one, the gaps in the Periodic Table were filled.

In the arts, the pattern is less clear-cut, but the resemblances remain. Innovations are made one by one, one possibility after another is realized, the repertoire of techniques becomes ever wider, more intricate. There follows a phase of conscious realization - there are gaps in the scheme which need filling, the possibilities are not exhausted, new possibilities can be realized. Thinking in systematic terms can lead to new innovations and new discoveries. Alternatively, there may be no obvious ways forward, no innovations which renew the exploratory phase.

In the exploratory phase, creation of new works is less problematic for a time because the artist, architect, writer or composer is working from within a style, which in the end is superseded: so, in architecture, the architect has worked within a succession of styles: Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and so on. Later, there was a systematic phase in which innovations were lacking and the architect chose a style, such as neo-Gothic or neo-Classic. The exploratory phase was renewed with the modern movement in architecture, which is now exhausted. An architect today chooses from past styles.