Mastery of Form / Deformation of Mastery

The scholar Houston Baker developed these key terms for talking specifically about African-American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. The two terms offer a way of thinking about about the strategies a writer develops in relation to a dominant tradition–a tradition less likely to recognize differences of gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc–that might allow them to either be heard by those in the mainstream, or that might allow them to resist the pull of the tradition itself.   Mastery of Form describes a strategy by which a writer works to meld more fully with the tradition in order that their voice be heard.  A female poet writing traditional and safe sonnets could be said to attempt a certain mastery of form.  She is writing in traditionally poetic forms so that her voice might join the tradition.  Deformation of Mastery, on the other hand, refuses this accommodation to the “accepted” tradition.  A poet who deploys a deformation of master breaks down and attacks tradition through her or his poem’s form or content.  Langston Hughes advocates for this position his essay on “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”  Most poets that we discussed in class find a fruitful middle ground: McKay’s and Cullen’s sonnets are traditional in form, but much more insinuating and critical in terms of their content.  The sonnet allows them to be “heard” (they are playing the “sonnet” game) but the content of the poem itself resists the tradition explicitly. We might think of Zukofsky’s response to Eliot along these lines as well.  Even Hughes’s “Theme for English B” seems to strike this more nuanced middle-ground despite his earlier argument.  The key here is to view these two concepts not as either/or options, but as a continuum.  Most poems like not at either extreme, but somewhere in the middle.