Poetry has been described as a “concentrated language” whose words are freighted with meaning which the reader must take on and carry back to the idea they arose from. That phrase “concentrated language” belongs to the distinguished literary critic R. P. Blackmur, and he goes on to say that “poems remain obscure until the reader takes out what the poet puts in.”
Prose writers, unlike the poets, cannot expect their readers to meditate so deeply on the construction of their language. The contract they hold with their readers captions an entirely different set of mutual obligations. Clear prose must be clear first on the surface, and what may be found more deeply within the grammar should still not be necessary to understand the immediate significance of the sentences, what Blackmur calls “the bare indicative statement of experience.”
Take, for example, this profoundly prosaic sentence: That’s the best cake I ever ate. The surface meaning is clear enough quickly enough. The notions of a cake, of someone called I, of the action of having eaten are all so obvious that we cannot call this poetry in any real sense, because all of those ideas are straightforward, suggesting little beyond themselves. They are the facts they are, not loaded down by hints of deeper meaning. Still, the grammar of prose may be fraught with suggestions of a richer understanding if we take the time to ask questions of style and construction.
One such question might be this: what is the difference between the best cake I ever ate and the best cake I have ever eaten? The material difference lies with the verbs. Ate is the simple past tense of the infinitive to eat, and have eaten is its present perfect tense. The subjects of the two sentences (I) remain the same, as do the direct objects (the best cake) and the adverb ever. But it’s that last grammatical role, the adverb, which changes the cast of the two sentences. Understanding how is the contractual obligation of both the writer and reader.
Adverbs partially change the meaning of a verb or adjective or other adverb. The traditional terminology for this change is modify, and in the Latin etymology of that term we can see the function of an adverb more exactly: making or changing (-fy) the way (modus) in which a verb (or adjective or other adverb) means what it means. The adverb ever represents the idea of at any time, and in each of these two sentences, it is modifying the verb. The phrase at any time is a temporal idea, and a temporal adverb is just one of a number of different kinds: there are also adverbs of manner (well), adverbs of degree (very), adverbs of cause (why), and adverbs of result (therefore). So how does adding the idea of time to the verbs in these two sentences change the implications of each?
The simple past tense (ate) is meant to take a snapshot of a moment, to represent a slice of time in a time now gone. The present perfect tense (have eaten) refers not only to a single past moment, but to a stretch of the past whose effects are felt to continue almost to the present. The simple past makes no more exact a claim about a past moment than that something happened in the past somewhere; the present perfect suggests the possibility of an immediate past, one so recent, in fact, that its effects might still be felt. I can say I ate a piece of cake a month ago, but I can’t say I have eaten one a month ago. That past is now long gone.
So, to add the adverb ever to the simple past ate in the first example is to contort the purpose of that tense by making it try to extend its meaning at any time, even to the very recent past. But that is done better by the present perfect tense in the second sentence, which already has in its design the very purpose of including what might have happened only a moment ago. The character of a sentence depends in good measure on the perceptual character of the writer, but for that to mean something to us, we readers must bring our own awareness of how the language works if we want to gain the most we can from a writer’s words.
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