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Poetry
is a vast subject, as old as history and older, present wherever religion
is present, possibly--under some definitions--the primal and primary form of
languages themselves. The present section means only to describe in as general a
way as possible certain properties of poetry and of poetic thought regarded as
in some sense independent modes of the mind. Naturally, not every tradition nor
every local or individual variation can be--or need be--included, but the
article illustrates by examples of poetry ranging between nursery rhyme and
epic. (For particular information about various types of poetry, see below Prosody
, Ballad
, and Epic
.) (see also aesthetics)
Poetry is the other way of using language.
Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using
language or simply was language tout
court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and
language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual
in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed,
arose at first in the form of magical
spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis,
it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class
of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much
regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may
be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and
not directly upon the natural world outside.
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its
greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance
on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed
appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual
voice, possibly because, as Ben
Jonson said, poetry "speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth."
If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it
most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it
looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading
by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the
syntax. (see also prosody)
That is a minimal definition but perhaps
not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the
way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it
looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.
People's reason for wanting a definition
is to take care of the borderline case, and this is what a definition, as if by
definition, will not do. That is, if a man asks for a definition of poetry, it
will most certainly not be the case that he has never seen one of the objects
called poems that are said to embody poetry; on the contrary, he is already
tolerably certain what poetry in the main is, and his reason for wanting a
definition is either that his certainty has been challenged by someone else or
that he wants to take care of a possible or seeming exception to it: hence the
perennial squabble about distinguishing poetry from prose, which is rather like
distinguishing rain from snow--everyone is reasonably capable of doing so, and
yet there are some weathers that are either-neither. (see also prose poem)
Sensible things have been said on the
question. The poet T.S. Eliot
suggested that part of the difficulty lies in the fact that there is the
technical term "verse"
to go with the term "poetry," while there is no equivalent technical
term to distinguish the mechanical part of prose and make the relation
symmetrical. The French poet Paul Valéry
said that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Indeed, the original two terms, prosus
and versus, meant, respectively,
"going straight forth" and "returning"; and that distinction
does point up the tendency of poetry to incremental repetition, variation, and
the treatment of many matters and different themes in a single recurrent form
such as couplet or stanza.
Robert
Frost said shrewdly that poetry was what got left
behind in translation, which
suggests a criterion of almost scientific refinement: when in doubt, translate;
whatever comes through is prose, the remainder is poetry. And yet to even so
acute a definition the obvious exception is a startling and a formidable one:
some of the greatest poetry in the world is in the Authorized
Version of the Bible, which is not only a translation but also, as to its
appearance in print, identifiable neither with verse nor with prose in English
but rather with a cadence owing something to both.
There may be a better way of putting the
question by the simple test alluded to above. When people are presented with a
series of passages drawn indifferently from poems and stories but all printed as
prose, they will show a dominant inclination to identify everything they
possibly can as prose. This will be true, surprisingly enough, even if the poem
rhymes and will often be true even if the poem in its original typographical
arrangement would have been familiar to them. The reason seems to be absurdly
plain: the reader recognizes poems by their appearance on the page, and he
responds to the convention whereby he recognizes them by reading them aloud in a
quite different tone of voice from that which he applies to prose (which,
indeed, he scarcely reads aloud at all). It should be added that he makes this
distinction also without reading aloud; even in silence he confers upon a piece
of poetry an attention that differs from what he gives to prose in two ways
especially: in tone and in pace.
In place of further worrying over
definitions, it may be both a relief and an illumination to exhibit certain
plain and mighty differences between prose and poetry by a comparison. In the
following passages a prose writer and a poet are talking about the same subject,
growing older.
Between the ages of 30 and 90, the
weight of our muscles falls by 30 percent and the power we can exert likewise .
. . . The number of nerve fibres in a nerve trunk falls by a quarter. The weight
of our brains falls from an average of 3.03 lb. to 2.27 lb. as cells die and are
not replaced . . . . (Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Biological Time Bomb, 1968.)
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for
age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's
effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring
sense
Without enchantment, offering no
promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow
fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of
re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been . .
. .
(T.S. Eliot, Four
Quartets)
Before objecting that a simple
comparison cannot possibly cover all the possible ranges of poetry and prose
compared, the reader should consider for a moment what differences are
exhibited. The passages are oddly parallel, hence comparable, even in a formal
sense; for both consist of the several items of a catalog under the general
title of growing old. The significant differences are of tone, pace, and object
of attention. If the prose passage interests itself in the neutral, material,
measurable properties of the process, while the poetry interests itself in what
the process will signify to someone going through it, that is not accidental but
of the essence; if one reads the prose passage with an interest in being
informed, noting the parallel constructions without being affected by them
either in tone or in pace, while reading the poetry with a sense of considerable
gravity and solemnity, that too is of the essence. One might say as tersely as
possible that the difference between prose and poetry is most strikingly shown
in the two uses of the verb "to fall":
The number of nerve fibres in a nerve
trunk falls by a
quarter
As body and soul begin to fall asunder
It should be specified here that the
important differences exhibited by the comparison belong to the present age. In
each period, speaking for poetry in English at any rate, the dividing line will
be seen to come at a different place. In Elizabethan times the diction of prose
was much closer to that of poetry than it later became, and in the 18th century
authors saw nothing strange about writing in couplets about subjects that later
would automatically and compulsorily belong to prose--for example, horticulture,
botany, even dentistry. Here is not the place for entering into a discussion of
so rich a chapter in the history of ideas; but it should be remarked that the
changes involved in the relation between poetry and prose are powerfully
influenced by the immense growth of science, commerce, and number in man's ways
of describing, even of viewing, the world.
Returning to the comparison, it is
observable that though the diction of the poem is well within what could be
commanded by a moderately well-educated speaker, it is at the same time well
outside the range of terms in fact employed by such a speaker in his daily
occasions; it is a diction very conscious, as it were, of its power of choosing
terms with an effect of peculiar precision and of combining the terms into
phrases with the same effect of peculiar precision and also of combining sounds
with the same effect of peculiar precision. Doubtless the precision of the prose
passage is greater in the more obvious property of dealing in the measurable;
but the poet attempts a precision with respect to what is not in the same sense
measurable nor even in the same sense accessible to observation; the distinction
is perhaps just that made by the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal
in discriminating the spirits of geometry and finesse; and if one speaks of
"effects of precision" rather than of precision itself, that serves to
distinguish one's sense that the art work is always somewhat removed from what
people are pleased to call the real world, operating instead, in Immanuel
Kant's shrewd formula, by exhibiting "purposefulness without
purpose." To much the same point is what Samuel
Taylor Coleridge remembers having learned from his schoolmaster:
I learnt from him, that Poetry, even
that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of
its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle,
more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly
great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every
word, but for the position of every word. (Biographia
Literariach. I.)
Perhaps this is a somewhat exaggerated,
as it is almost always an unprovable, claim, illustrating also a propensity for
competing with the prestige of science on something like its own terms--but the
last remark in particular illuminates the same author's terser formulation:
"prose = words in the best order, poetry = the best words in the best
order." This attempt at definition, impeccable because uninformative, was
derived from Jonathan Swift,
who had said, also impeccably and uninformatively, that style in writing was
"the best words in the best order." Which may be much to the same
effect as Louis Armstrong's
saying, on being asked to define jazz, "Baby, if you got to ask the
question, you're never going to know the answer." Or the painter Marcel
Duchamp's elegant remark on what psychologists call "the problem of
perception": "If no solution, then maybe no problem?" This
species of gnomic, riddling remark may be determinate for the artistic attitude
toward definition of every sort; and its skepticism is not confined to
definitions of poetry but extends to definitions of anything whatever, directing
one not to dictionaries but to experience and, above all, to use: "Anyone
with a watch can tell you what time it is," said Valéry, "but
who can tell you what is time?" (see also gnomic poetry)
Happily, if poetry is almost impossible
to define, it is extremely easy to recognize in experience; even untutored
children are rarely in doubt about it when it appears:
Little Jack Jingle,
He used to live single,
But when he got tired of this kind of
life,
He left off being single, and liv'd
with his wife.
It might be objected that this little
verse is not of sufficient import and weight to serve as an exemplar for poetry.
It ought to be remembered, though, that it has given people pleasure so that
they continued to say it until and after it was written down, nearly two
centuries ago. The verse has survived, and its survival has something to do with
pleasure, with delight; and while it still lives, how many more imposing works
of language--epic poems, books of science, philosophy, theology--have gone down,
deservedly or not, into dust and silence. It has, obviously, a form, an
arrangement of sounds in relation to thoughts that somehow makes its agreeable
nonsense closed, complete, and decisive. But this somewhat muddled matter of
form deserves a heading and an instance all to itself. (see also doggerel)
People nowadays who speak of form in
poetry almost always mean such externals as regular measure and rhyme, and most
often they mean to get rid of these in favour of the freedom they suppose must
follow upon the absence of form in this limited sense. But in fact a poem having
only one form would be of doubtful interest even if it could exist. In this
connection, the poet J.V. Cunningham speaks of "a convergence of forms, and
forms of disparate orders," adding: "It is the coincidence of forms
that locks in the poem." For a poem is composed of internal and
intellectual forms as well as forms externally imposed and preexisting any
particular instance, and these may be sufficient without regular measure and
rhyme; if the intellectual forms are absent, as in greeting-card verse and
advertising jingles, no amount of thumping and banging will supply the want.
Form, in effect, is like the doughnut
that may be said to be nothing in a circle of something or something around
nothing; it is either the outside of an inside, as when people speak of
"good form" or "bourgeois formalism," or the inside of an
outside, as in the scholastic saying that "the soul is the form of the
body." Taking this principle, together with what Cunningham says of the
matter, one may now look at a very short and very powerful poem with a view to
distinguishing the forms, or schemes, of which it is made. It was written by Rudyard
Kipling--a great poet at present somewhat sunken in reputation, probably
on account of misinterpretations having to do more with his imputed politics
than with his poetry--and its subject, one of a series of epitaphs for the dead
of World War I, is a soldier shot by his comrades for cowardice in battle.
I could not look on Death, which being
known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.
The aim of the following observations
and reflections is to distinguish as clearly as possible--distinguish without
dividing--the feelings evoked by the subject, so grim, horrifying, tending to
helpless sorrow and despair, from the feelings, which might better be thought of
as meanings, evoked by careful contemplation of the poem in its manifold and
somewhat subtle ways of handling the subject, leading the reader on to a view of
the strange delight intrinsic to art, whose mirroring and shielding power allows
him to contemplate the world's horrible realities without being turned to stone.
There is, first, the obvious external
form of a rhymed, closed couplet in iambic pentameter (that is, five poetic
"feet," each consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed
syllable, per line). There is, second, the obvious external form of a single
sentence balanced in four grammatical units with and in counterpoint with the
metrical form. There is, third, the conventional form belonging to the epitaph
and reflecting back to antiquity; it is terse enough to be cut in stone and
tight-lipped also, perhaps for other reasons, such as the speaker's shame. There
is, fourth, the fictional form belonging to the epitaph, according to which the
dead man is supposed to be saying the words himself. There is, fifth, especially
poignant in this instance, the real form behind or within the fictional one, for
the reader is aware that in reality it is not the dead man speaking, nor are his
feelings the only ones the reader is receiving, but that the comrades who were
forced to execute him may themselves have made up these two lines with their
incalculably complex and exquisite balance of scorn, awe, guilt, and
consideration even to tenderness for the dead soldier. There is, sixth, the metaphorical
form, with its many resonances ranging from the tragic through the pathetic to
irony and apology: dying in battle is spoken of in language relating it to a
social occasion in drawing room or court; the coward's fear is implicitly
represented as merely the timorousness and embarrassment one might feel about
being introduced to a somewhat superior and majestic person, so that the
soldiers responsible for killing him are seen as sympathetically helping him
through a difficult moment in the realm of manners. In addition, there is,
seventh, a linguistic or syntactical form, with at least a couple of tricks to
it: the second clause, with its reminiscence of Latin construction, participates
in the meaning by conferring a Roman stoicism and archaic gravity on the saying;
remembering that the soldiers in the poem had been British schoolboys not long
before, the reader might hear the remote resonance of a whole lost world built
upon Greek and Roman models; and the last epithets, "blindfold and
alone," while in the literal acceptation they clearly refer to the coward,
show a distinct tendency to waver over and apply mysteriously to Death as well,
sitting there waiting "blindfold and alone." One might add another
form, the eighth, composed of the balance of sounds, from the obvious likeness
in the rhyme down to subtleties and refinements beneath the ability of coarse
analysis to discriminate. And even there one would not be quite at an end; an
overall principle remains, the compression of what might have been epic or
five-act tragedy into two lines, or the poet's precise election of a single
instant to carry what the novelist, if he did his business properly, would have
been hundreds of pages arriving at. (see also syntax)
It is not at all to be inferred that the
poet composed his poem in the manner of the above laborious analysis of its
strands; the whole insistence, rather, is that he did not catalog eight or 10
forms and assemble them into a poem; more likely it "just came to
him." But the example may serve to indicate how many modes of the mind go
together in this articulation of an implied drama and the tension among many
possible sentiments that might arise in response to it.
In this way, by the coincidence of forms
that locks in the poem, one may see how to answer a question that often arises
about poems: though their thoughts are commonplace, they themselves mysteriously
are not. One may answer on the basis of the example and the inferences produced
from it that a poem is not so much a thought as it is a mind: talk with it, and
it will talk back, telling you many things that you might have thought for
yourself but somehow didn't until it brought them together. Doubtless a poem is
a much simplified model for the mind. But it might still be one of the best man
has available. On this great theme, however, it will be best to proceed not by
definition but by parable and interpretation.
In the fourth book of the OdysseyHomer tells the following strange tale. After the war at Troy, Menelaus
wanted very much to get home but was held up in Egypt for want of a wind
because, as he later told Telemachus, he had not sacrificed enough to the gods.
"Ever jealous the Gods are," he said, "that we men mind their
dues." But because the gods work both ways, it was on the advice of a
goddess, Eidothea, that Menelaus went to consult Proteus, the old one of the
sea, as one might consult a travel agency.
Proteus
was not easy to consult. He was herding seals, and the seals stank even through
the ambrosia Eidothea had provided. And when Menelaus crept up close, disguised
as a seal, and grabbed him, Proteus turned into a lion, a dragon, a leopard, a
boar, a film of water, and a high-branched tree. But Menelaus managed to hang on
until Proteus gave up and was himself again; whereupon Menelaus asked him the
one great question: How do I get home? And Proteus told him: You had better go
back to Egypt and sacrifice to the gods some more.
This story may be taken as a parable
about poetry. A man has an urgent question about his way in the world. He
already knows the answer, but it fails to satisfy him. So at great
inconvenience, hardship, and even peril, he consults a powerful and refractory
spirit who tries to evade his question by turning into anything in the world.
Then, when the spirit sees he cannot get free of the man, and only then, he
answers the man's question, not simply with a commonplace but with the same
commonplace the man had been dissatisfied with before. Satisfied or not,
however, the man now obeys the advice given him.
A foolish story? All the same, it is to
be observed that Menelaus did get home. And it was a heroic thing to have hung
onto Proteus through those terrifying changes and compelled him to be himself
and answer up. Nor does it matter in the least to the story that Menelaus
personally may have been a disagreeable old fool as well as a cuckold.
A poet also has one great and simple
question, simple though it may take many forms indeed. Geoffrey
Chaucer put it as well as anyone could, and in three lines at that:
What is this world? what asketh men to
have?
Now with his love, now in his colde
grave,
Allone, with-outen any companye.
("The Knight's Tale")
And a poet gets the simple answer he
might expect, the one the world grudgingly gives to anyone who asks such a
question: The world is this way, not that way, and you ask for more than you
will be given, which the poet, being scarcely more fool than his fellowmen, knew
already. But on the path from question to answer, hanging onto the slippery
disguiser and shape-shifter Proteus, he will see many marvels; he will follow
the metamorphoses of things in the metamorphoses of their phrases, and he will
be so elated and ecstatic in this realm of wonders that the voice in which he
speaks these things, down even to the stupid, obvious, and commonplace answer,
will be to his hearers a solace and a happiness in the midst of sorrows:
When I do count the clock that tells
the time, (see also sonnet)
And see the brave day sunk in hideous
night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with
white;
When lofty trees I see barren of
leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the
herd,
And summer's green all girded up in
sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and
bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must
go,
Since sweets and beauties must
themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others
grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can
make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes
thee hence.
(Shakespeare,
Sonnet 12.)
Like Menelaus, the poet asks a simple
question, to which, moreover, he already knows the unsatisfying answer. Question
and answer, one might say, have to be present, although of themselves they seem
to do nothing much; but they assert the limits of a journey to be taken. They
are the necessary but not sufficient conditions of what really seems to matter
here, the Protean encounter itself, the grasping and hanging on to the powerful
and refractory spirit in its slippery transformations of a single force flowing
through clock, day, violet, graying hair, trees dropping their leaves, the
harvest in which, by a peculiarly ceremonial transmutation, the grain man lives
by is seen without contradiction as the corpse he comes to. As for the answer to
the question, it is not surprising nor meant to be surprising; it is only just.
On this point--that the answer comes as
no surprise--poets show an agreement that quite transcends the differences of
periods and schools. Alexander Pope's
formula, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expresst," sometimes
considered as the epitome of a shallow and parochial decorum, is not in essence
other than this offered by John Keats:
I think Poetry should surprise by a
fine excess, and not by Singularity--it should strike the Reader as a wording of
his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance. (Letter to John
Taylor, 1818.)
In the present century, Robert
Frost is strikingly in agreement:
A word about recognition: In literature
it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, "Oh
yes I know what you mean." It is never to tell them something they dont
know, but something they know and hadnt thought of saying. It must be something
they recognize. (Letter to John Bartlett, in Modern
Poetics, ed. James Scully, 1965.)
And the poet and critic John
Crowe Ransom gives the thought a cryptically and characteristically
elegant variation: "Poetry is the kind of knowledge by which we must know
that we have arranged that we shall not know otherwise." Perhaps this point
about recognition might be carried further, to the extreme at which it would be
seen to pose the problem of how poetry, which at its highest has always carried,
at least implicitly, a kind of Platonism and claimed to give, if not knowledge
itself, what was more important, a "form" to knowledge, can survive
the triumph of scientific materialism and a positivism minded to skepticism
about everything in the world except its own self (where it turns credulous,
extremely). The poet's adjustment, over two or three centuries, to a Newtonian
cosmos, Kantian criticism, the spectral universe portrayed by physics has
conspicuously not been a happy one and has led alternately or simultaneously to
the extremes of rejection of reason and speaking in tongues on the one hand and
the hysterical claim that poetry will save the world on the other. But of this
let the Protean parable speak as it will.
There is another part to the story of
Menelaus and Proteus, for Menelaus asked another question: What happened to my
friends who were with me at Troy? Proteus replies, "Son of Atreus, why
enquire too closely of me on this? To know or learn what I know about it is not
your need: I warn you that when you hear all the truth your tears will not be
far behind . . . ." But he tells him all the same: "Of those others
many went under; many came through . . . ." And Menelaus does indeed
respond with tears of despair, until Proteus advises him to stop crying and get
started on the journey home. So it sometimes happens in poetry, too: the
sorrowful contemplation of what is, consoles, in the end, and heals, but only
after the contemplative process has been gone through and articulated in the
detail of its change:
When to the sessions of sweet silent
thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I
sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear
time's waste;
Then can I drown an eye, unused to
flow,
For precious friends hid in death's
dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since
cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd
sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances
foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear
friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows
end.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 30)
This poem, acknowledged to be a
masterpiece by so many generations of readers, may stand as an epitome and
emblem for the art altogether, about which it raises a question that must be
put, although it cannot be satisfactorily and unequivocally answered: the
question of whether poetry is a sacrament or a confidence game or both or
neither. To reply firmly that poetry is not religion and must not promise what
religion does is to preserve a useful distinction; nevertheless, the religions
of the world, if they have nothing else in common, seem to be based on
collections of sacred poems. Nor, at the other extreme, can any guarantee that
poetry is not a confidence game be found in the often-heard appeal to the poet's
"sincerity." One will never know whether Shakespeare wept all over the
page while writing the 30th sonnet, though one inclines to doubt it, nor would
it be to his credit if he did, nor to the reader's that he should know it or
care to know it.
For one thing, the sonnet is obviously
artful--that is, full of artifice--and even the artifice degenerates here and
there into being artsy. "Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow."
Surely that is poesy itself, at or near its worst, where the literal and the
conventional, whatever their relations may have been for Shakespeare and the
first reader of these sugar'd sonnets among his friends, now live very
uncomfortably together (Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine
eyes" is a like example of this bathetic crossing of levels), though
perhaps it has merely become unattractive as a result of changing fashions in
diction.
Moreover, while the whole poem is
uniquely Shakespearean, the bits and pieces are many of them common property of
the age, what one writer called "joint stock company poetry." And the
tricks are terribly visible, too; art is not being used to conceal art in such
goings-on as "grieve at grievances" and "fore-bemoaned
moan." "He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy," as Samuel
Johnson sternly wrote of John Milton's style in the elegy
"Lycidas," "he who thus praises will confer no honour."
Nor is that the worst of it. This man
who so powerfully works on the reader's sympathies by lamenting what is past
contrives to do so by thinking obsessively about litigation and, of all things,
money; his hand is ever at his wallet, bidding adieu. He cannot merely
"think" sweet silent thoughts about the past; no, he has to turn them
into a court in "session," whereto he "summons" the probable
culprit "remembrance"; when he "grieves," it is at a
"grievance"--in the hands of the law again; finally, as with the
sinners in Dante's Divine Comedy, his
avarice and prodigality occupy two halves of the one circle: he bemoans his
expenses while paying double the asking price.
And still, for all that, the poem
remains beautiful; it continues to move both the young who come to it still
innocent of their dear time's waste and the old who have sorrows to match its
sorrows. As between confidence game and sacrament there may be no need to
decide, as well as no possibility of deciding: elements of play and artifice,
elements of true feeling, elements of convention both in the writing and in
one's response to it, all combine to veil the answer. But the poem remains.
If it could be plainly demonstrated by
the partisans either of unaided reason or revealed religion that poetry was
metaphorical, mythological, and a delusion, while science, say, or religion or
politics were real and true, then one might throw poetry away and live honestly
though poorly on what was left. But, for better or worse, that is not the
condition of man's life in the world; and perhaps men care for poetry so
much--if they care at all--because, at last, it is the only one of man's many
mythologies to be aware, and to make him aware, that it, and the others, are
indeed mythological. The literary critic I.A.
Richards, in a deep and searching consideration of this matter,
concludes: "It is the privilege of poetry to preserve us from mistaking our
notions either for things or for ourselves. Poetry is the completest mode of
utterance."
The last thing Proteus says to Menelaus
is strange indeed:
You are not to die in Argos of the fair
horse-pastures, not there to encounter death: rather will the Deathless Ones
carry you to the Elysian plain, the place beyond the world . . . . There you
will have Helen to yourself and will be deemed of the household of Zeus.
So the greatest of our poets have said,
or not so much said, perhaps, as indicated by their fables, though nowadays
people mostly sing a different tune. To be as the gods, to be rejoined with the
beloved, the world forgotten . . . . Sacrament or con game? Homer, of course, is
only telling an old story and promises mankind nothing; that is left to the
priests to do; and in that respect poetry, as one critic puts it, must always be
"a ship that is wrecked on entering the harbor." And yet the greatest
poetry sings always, at the end, of transcendence; while seeing clearly and
saying plainly the wickedness and terror and beauty of the world, it is at the
same time humming to itself, so that one overhears rather than hears: All will
be well. ( H.Ne.)
As it has come to be defined in modern
criticism, the term prosody encompasses the study of all of the elements of
language that contribute toward acoustic and rhythmic effects, chiefly in poetry
but also in prose. The term derived from an ancient
Greek word that originally meant a song accompanied by music or the
particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Greek and Latin literary
critics generally regarded prosody as part of grammar;
it concerned itself with the rules determining the length or shortness of a
syllable, with syllabic quantity, and with how the various combinations of short
and long syllables formed the metres
(i.e., the rhythmic patterns) of Greek
and Latin poetry. Prosody was the study of metre and its uses in lyric,
epic, and dramatic verse. In sophisticated modern criticism, however, the scope
of prosodic study has been expanded until it now concerns itself with what the
20th-century poet Ezra Pound
called "the articulation of the total sound of a poem." (see also
Latin literature)
Prose as well as verse reveals the use
of rhythm and sound effects; however, critics do not speak of "the prosody
of prose" but of prose rhythm. The English critic George
Saintsbury wrote A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present (3
vol., 1906-10), which treats English poetry from its origins to the end of the
19th century; but he dealt with prose rhythm in an entirely separate work, A
History of English Prose Rhythm (1912). Many prosodic elements such as the
rhythmic repetition of consonants (alliteration) or of vowel sounds (assonance)
occur in prose; the repetition of syntactical and grammatical patterns also
generates rhythmic effect. Traditional rhetoric,
the study of how words work, dealt with acoustic and rhythmic techniques in
Classical oratory and literary prose. But although prosody and rhetoric
intersected, rhetoric dealt more exactly with verbal meaning than with verbal
surface. Rhetoric dealt with grammatical and syntactical manipulations and with
figures of speech; it categorized the kinds of metaphor. Modern critics,
especially those who practice the New Criticism, might be considered
rhetoricians in their detailed concern with such devices as irony, paradox, and
ambiguity. These subjects are discussed at greater length below in the section Literary
criticism and in the article RHETORIC
. (see also English
literature)
This section considers prosody chiefly
in terms of the English language--the only language that all of the readers of
this article may be assumed to know. Some examples are given in other languages
to illustrate particular points about the development of prosody in those
languages; because these examples are pertinent only for their rhythm and sound,
and not at all for their meaning, no translations are given. A further general
discussion of the development of prosodic elements will be found in the section
above, Poetry
.
As a part of modern literary criticism, prosody is concerned with the study of rhythm
and sound effects as they occur in verse and with the various descriptive, historical, and
theoretical approaches to the study of these structures.
The various elements of prosody may be
examined in the aesthetic structure of prose. The celebrated opening passage of Charles
Dickens' novel Bleak
House(1853) affords a compelling example of prose made vivid through the
devices of rhythm and sound:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down
the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside
pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish
heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and
hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small
boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the
firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful
skipper . . . .
Two phrases of five syllables each ("Fog everywhere"; "Fog up the
river") establish a powerful rhythmic expectation that is clinched in repetition:
. . . fog down the river . . . . Fog on the Essex . . . , fog on the Kentish . . . .
Fog creeping into . . . ; . . . fog drooping on the . . . .
This phrase pattern can be scanned; that
is, its structure of stressed and unstressed syllables might be translated into
visual symbols: (see also stress)
(This scansion notation uses the following symbols: the acute accent [] to
mark metrically stressed syllables; the breve [
] to mark metrically weak syllables; a single line [ | ] to mark the divisions
between feet
[i.e., basic combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables]; a
double line [  ] to
mark the caesura, or pause in
the line; a rest [ ] to mark
a syllable metrically expected but not actually occurring.) Such a grouping
constitutes a rhythmic constant, or cadence, a pattern binding together the
separate sentences and sentence fragments into a long surge of feeling. At one
point in the passage, the rhythm sharpens into metre; a pattern of stressed and
unstressed syllables falls into a regular sequence:
The line is a hexameter (i.e., it comprises six feet), and each foot is either a
dactyl ( )
or a trochee ( ).
The passage from Dickens is strongly characterized by alliteration, the repetition of
stressed consonantal sounds:
Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs;
and by assonance, the patterned repetition of vowel sounds:
. . . fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among . .
. .
Here the vowel sounds are symmetrically distributed: short, long and long, short. Thus,
it is clear that Dickens uses loosely structured rhythms, or cadences, an occasional lapse
into metre, and both alliteration and assonance.
The rhythm and sound of all prose are
subject to analysis; but compared with even the simplest verse, the
"prosodic" structure of prose seems haphazard, unconsidered. The poet
organizes his structures of sound and rhythm into rhyme, stanzaic form, and,
most importantly, metre. Indeed, the largest part of prosodical study is
concerned with the varieties of metre, the nature and function of rhyme,
and the ways in which lines of verse fall into regular patterns or stanzas. An
analysis of "Vertue" by the 17th-century English poet George
Herbert reveals how the elements of prosody combine into a complex
organism, a life sustained by the technical means available to the poet. When
the metre is scanned with the symbols, it can be seen (and heard) how metre in
this poem consists of the regular recurrence of feet, how each foot is a pattern
of phonetically stressed and unstressed syllables.
The basic prosodic units are the foot, the line, and the stanza.
The recurrence of similar feet in a line determines the metre; here there are
three lines consisting of four iambic feet (i.e.,
of four units in which the common pattern is the iamb--an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), which are followed by a
line consisting of two iambic feet. Thus the stanza or recurring set of lines
consists of three
iambic tetrameters followed by one iambic dimeter. The stanzaic form is clinched by the
use of rhyme; in "Vertue" the first and third and second and fourth lines end
with the same sequence of vowels and consonants: bright/night, skie/pie, brave/grave,
eye/pie, etc. It should be observed that the iambic pattern () is not invariable; the third foot of line 5, the first foot of
line 6, the second foot of line 9, and the first foot of line 13 are reversals of the
iambic foot or trochees
(). These reversals are called substitutions;
they provide tension between metrical pattern and meaning, as they do in these celebrated
examples from Shakespeare:
Macbeth
Scansion reveals the basic metrical
pattern of the poem; it does not, however, tell everything about its prosody.
The metre combines with other elements, notably propositional sense or meaning,
pace or tempo, and such sound effects as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. In
the fifth line of "Vertue," the reversed third foot occurring at
"angry" brings that word into particular prominence; the disturbance
of the metre combines with semantic
reinforcement to generate a powerful surge of feeling. Thus, the metre here is
expressive. The pace of the lines is controlled by the length of number of
syllables and feet, line 5 obviously takes longer to read or recite. The line
contains more long vowel sounds:
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave . . .
Vowel length is called quantity. In
English verse, quantity cannot by itself form metre although a number of English
poets have experimented with quantitative
verse. Generally speaking, quantity is a rhythmical but not a metrical
feature of English poetry; it can be felt but it cannot be precisely determined.
The vowel sounds in "Sweet rose" may be lengthened or shortened at
will. No such options are available, however, with the stress patterns of words;
the word  cannot be read  .
Assonance
takes into account the length and distribution of vowel sounds. A variety of
vowel sounds can be noted in this line:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright . . .
To borrow a term from music, the line modulates from ee, through a, oo,
a, to i. Alliteration
takes into account the recurrence and distribution of consonants:
so cool, so calm . . .
Sweet spring . . .
Rhyme normally occurs at the ends of lines; "Vertue" reveals, however, a
notable example of interior rhyme, or rhyme within the line:
My musick shows ye have your closes . .
.
It has been shown that the metre of "Vertue" is determined by a pattern of
stressed and unstressed syllables arranged into feet and that a precise number of feet
determines the measure of the line. Such verse is called syllable-stress
verse (in some
terminologies accentual-syllabic) and was the norm for English poetry from the beginning
of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. A line of syllable-stress verse is
made up of either two-syllable (disyllabic) or three-syllable (trisyllabic) feet. The
disyllabic feet are the iamb and the trochee (noted in the scansion of
"Vertue"); the trisyllabic feet are the dactyl
( ) and
anapest ( ).
Following are illustrations of the four principal feet found in English verse:
Some theorists also admit the spondaic foot ('') and pyrrhic foot ( ) into their
scansions; however, spondees
and pyrrhics occur only as substitutions for other feet, never as determinants of a
metrical pattern:
It has been noted that four feet make up
a line of tetrameter verse; a
line consisting of one foot is called monometer, of two dimeter, of three
trimeter, of five pentameter,
of six hexameter, and of seven
heptameter. Lines containing more than seven feet rarely occur in English
poetry.
The following examples illustrate the principal varieties of syllable-stress metres and
their scansions:
Lord
Byron, "The Destruction of
Sennacherib"(1815)
Syllable stress became more or less
established in the poetry of Geoffrey
Chaucer (c. 1340-1400). In the
century that intervened between Chaucer and the early Tudor poets,
syllable-stress metres were either ignored or misconstrued. By the end of the
16th century, however, the now-familiar iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and
anapestic metres became the traditional prosody for English verse.
In the middle of the 19th century, with Walt
Whitman's free verse and Gerard
Manley Hopkins' extensive metrical innovations, the traditional prosody
was challenged. Antecedent to the syllable-stress metres was the strong-stress
metre of Old English and Middle English poetry. Strong-stress verse is measured
by count of stresses alone; the strong stresses are usually constant, but the
number of unstressed syllables may vary considerably.
Strong-stress verse survives in nursery
rhymes and children's counting songs:
The systematic employment of
strong-stress metre can be observed in the Old English epic poem Beowulf(c. 1000) and in William
Langland's vision-poem, Piers
Plowman('A' Text, c. 1362):
These lines illustrate the structural pattern of strong-stress metre. Each line divides
sharply at the caesura ( ), or medial
pause; on each side of the caesura are two stressed syllables strongly marked by
alliteration.
Strong-stress verse is indigenous to the
Germanic languages with their
wide-ranging levels of stressed syllables and opportunities for alliteration.
Strong-stress metre was normative to Old English and Old Germanic heroic poetry,
as well as to Old English lyric poetry. With the rising influence of French
literature in the 12th and 13th centuries, rhyme replaced alliteration
and stanzaic forms replaced the four-stress lines. But the strong-stress rhythm
persisted; it can be felt in the anonymous love lyrics of the 14th century and
in the popular ballads of the
15th century. (see also German
literature, Old English
literature, Old High German
literature, Old English
language)
"Lord
Randal" can be comfortably scanned to show a line
of mixed iambic and anapestic feet; it clearly reveals, however, a four-stress
structure:
A number of 20th-century poets,
including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
and W.H. Auden, have revived
strong-stress metre. The versification of Pound's Cantos
and Eliot's Four
Quartets(1943)
shows the vitality of the strong-stress, or, as they are often called,
"native," metres. (see also "Cantos,
The")
Most of English poetry is carried by the
strong-stress and syllable-stress metres. Two other kinds of metres must be
mentioned: the purely syllabic metres and the quantitative metres. The count of
syllables determines the metres of French, Italian, and Spanish verse. In French
poetry the alexandrine, or
12-syllabled line, is a dominant metrical form: (see also Italian literature, Spanish
literature)
O toi, qui vois la honte o?je suis descendue,
Implacable V?us, suis-je assez confondue?
Tu ne saurais plus loin pousser ta cruaut?
Ton triomphe est parfait; tous tes traits ont port?
Racine,
Phèdre (1677)
Stress and pause in these lines are
variable; only the count of syllables is fixed. English poets have experimented
with syllabic metres; the Tudor poet Thomas
Wyat's translations from Petrarch's
Italian poems of the 14th century attempted to establish a metrical form based
on a decasyllabic or 10-syllabled line:
The long love that in my thought doth harbor,
And in my heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretense
And there encampeth, spreading his banner.
"The Lover for Shamefastness Hideth . . ." (1557)
Most ears can detect that these lines waver between syllabic and syllable-stress metre;
the second line falls into a pattern of iambic feet. Most ears also discover that the
count of syllables alone does not produce any pronounced rhythmic interest; syllabic
metres in English generate a prosody more interesting to the eye than to the ear.
Quantitative metres determine the prosody of Greek and Latin verse. Renaissance
theorists and critics initiated a confused and complicated argument that tried to explain
European poetry by the rules of Classical prosody and to draft laws of quantity by which
European verse might move in the hexameters of the ancient Roman poets Virgil or Horace.
Confusion was compounded because both poets and theorists used the traditional terminology
of Greek and Latin prosody to describe the elements of the already existing
syllable-stress metres; iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic originally named the
strictly quantitative feet of Greek and Latin poetry. Poets themselves adapted the metres
and stanzas of Classical poetry to their own languages; whereas it is not possible here to
trace the history of Classical metres in European poetry, it is instructive to analyze
some attempts to make English and German syllables move to Greek and Latin music. Because
neither English nor German has fixed rules of quantity, the poets were forced to revise
the formal schemes of the Classical paradigms in accordance with the phonetic structure of
their own language.
A metrical paradigm much used by both Greek and Latin poets was the so-called
Sapphic stanza. It consisted of three quantitative lines that scanned
- - - - - - ,
followed by a shorter line, called an Adonic,- - - .
"Sapphics" by the 19th-century
English poet Algernon Charles
Swinburne shows the Sapphic metre and stanza in English:
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me . . .
Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctant . . . .
The same metre and stanza in German are found in "Sapphische Ode,"
by the 19th-century poet Hans Schmidt, which was beautifully set to
music by Johannes Brahms (Opus 94, No. 4):
Rosen brach ich nachts mir am dunklen Hage;
s?ser hauchten Duft sie, als je am Tage;
doch verstreuten reich die bewegten 훥te
Tau den mich n?ste.
Auch der K?se Duft mich wie nie ber?kte,
die ich nachts vom Strauch deiner Lippen pfl?kte:
doch auch dir, bewegt im Gem? gleich jenem,
tauten die Tr?en.
Quantitative metres originated in Greek,
a language in which the parts of speech appear in a variety of inflected forms (i.e.,
changes of form to indicate distinctions in case, tense, mood, number,
voice, and others). Complicated metrical patterns and long, slow-paced lines
developed because the language was hospitable to polysyllabic metrical feet and
to the alternation of the longer vowels characterizing the root syllables and
the shorter vowels characterizing the inflected case-endings. The Classical
metres can be more successfully adapted to German than to English because
English lost most of its inflected forms in the 15th century, while German is
still a highly inflected language. Thus Swinburne's "Sapphics" does
not move as gracefully, as "naturally" as Schmidt's. A number of
German poets, notably Goethe
and Friedrich Hölderlin,
both of the early 19th century, made highly successful use of the Classical
metres. English poets, however, have never been able to make English syllables
move in the ancient metres with any degree of comfort or with any sense of vital
rhythmic force. (see also inflection)
The American poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow adapted the Classical hexameter for his Evangeline(1847):
In Virgil's AeneidLongfellow's Classical model, the opening line scans:
The rules determining length of syllable
in Classical Greek and Latin poetry are numerous and complicated; they were
established by precise grammatical and phonetic conventions. No such rules and
conventions obtain in English; Robert
Bridges, the British poet laureate and an authority on prosody, remarked
in his Poetical Works (1912) that the
difficulty of adapting English syllables to the Greek rules is "very great,
and even deterrent." Longfellow's hexameter is in reality a syllable-stress
line of five dactyls and a final trochee; syllabic quantity plays no part in
determining the metre. (see also quantitative
metre)
The analysis of prosodic style begins
with recognizing the metrical form the poet uses. Is he writing syllable-stress,
strong-stress, syllabic, or quantitative metre? Or is he using a nonmetrical
prosody? Again, some theorists would not allow that poetry can be written
without metre; the examples of Whitman and many 20th-century innovators,
however, have convinced most modern critics that a nonmetrical prosody is not a
contradiction in terms but an obvious feature of modern poetry. Metre has not
disappeared as an important element of prosody; indeed, some of the greatest
poets of the modern period--William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
Wallace Stevens--revealed themselves as masters of the traditional metres. They
also experimented with newer prosodies based on prose cadences, on expansions of
the blank-verse line, and revivals of old forms--such as strong-stress and
ballad metres. Also noteworthy are the "visual" prosodies fostered by
the poets of the Imagist
movement and by such experimenters as E.E.
Cummings. Cummings revived the practice of certain 17th-century poets
(notably George Herbert) of "shaping" the poem by typographic
arrangements. (see also pattern poetry)
The prosodic practice of poets has
varied enormously with the historical period, the poetic genre, and the poet's
individual style. In English poetry, for example, during the Old English period
(to 1100), the strong-stress metres carried both lyric and narrative verse. In
the Middle English period
(from c. 1100 to c.
1500), stanzaic forms developed for both lyric and narrative verse. The
influence of French syllable counting pushed the older stress lines into newer
rhythms; Chaucer developed for The
Canterbury Talesa
line of 10 syllables with alternating accent and regular end rhyme--an ancestor
of the heroic couplet. The
period of the English Renaissance (from c.
1500 to 1660) marks the fixing of syllable-stress metre as normative for
English poetry. Iambic metre carried three major prosodic forms: the sonnet,
the rhyming couplet, and blank verse.
The sonnet was the most important of the fixed stanzaic forms. The iambic
pentameter rhyming couplet (later known as the heroic couplet) was used by Christopher
Marlowe for his narrative poem Hero
and Leander(1598); by John Donne
in the early 17th century for his satires, his elegies, and his longer
meditative poems. Blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), first introduced
into English in a translation by Henry
Howard, earl of Surrey, published in 1557, became the metrical norm for
Elizabethan drama. The period of the Renaissance also saw the refinement of a
host of lyric and song forms; the rapid development of English music during the
second half of the 16th century had a salutary effect on the expressive
capabilities of poetic rhythms.
A poet's choice of a prosody obviously
depends on what his language and tradition afford; these are primary
considerations. The anonymous author of the Old English poem Deorused the conventional four-stress metric available to him; but he punctuated
groups of lines with a refrain:
þaes ofereode: þisses swa maeg!
(that passed away: this also may!)
The refrain adds something to the
prosodic conventions of regulated stress, alliteration, and medial pause: a
sense of a smaller and sharper rhythmic unit within the larger rhythms of the
given metre. While the poet accepts from history his language and from poetic
convention the structure of his metre, he shapes his own style through
individual modifications of the carrying rhythms. When critics speak of a poet's
"voice," his personal tone, they are also speaking of his prosodic
style.
Prosodic style must be achieved through
a sense of tension; it is no accident that the great masters of poetic rhythm
work against the discipline of a given metrical form. In his sonnets, Shakespeare
may proceed in solemn iambic regularity, creating an effect of measured
progression through time and its legacy of suffering and despair:
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled . . . .
"Sonnet 71"
Or he may wrench the metre and allow the reader to feel the sudden violence of his
feelings, the power of a conviction raised to a command:
The first two feet of the first line are
trochaic reversals; the last two feet comprise a characteristic pyrrhic-spondaic
formation. A trochaic substitution is quite normal in the first foot of an
iambic pentameter line; a trochaic substitution in the second foot, however,
creates a marked disturbance in the rhythm. There is only one "normal"
iambic foot in the first line; this line runs over (or is enjambed) to the
second line with its three consecutive iambic feet followed by a strong caesura
and reversed fourth foot. These lines are, in Gerard Manley Hopkins' terms,
metrically "counter-pointed"; trochees, spondees, and pyrrhics are
heard against a ground rhythm of regular iambics. Without the ground rhythm,
Shakespeare's expressive departures would not be possible. (see also enjambment, counterpoint)
A poet's prosodic style may show all of
the earmarks of revolt against prevailing metrical practice. Whitman's
celebrated "free verse"
marks a dramatic break with the syllable-stress tradition; he normally does not
count syllables, stresses, or feet in his long sweeping lines. Much of his
prosody is rhetorical; that is, Whitman urges his language into rhythm by such
means as anaphora (i.e.,
repetition at the beginning of successive verses) and the repetition of
syntactical units. He derives many of his techniques from the example of
biblical verses, with their line of various types of parallelism. But he often
moves toward traditional rhythms; lines fall into conventional parameters:
O past! O happy life! O songs of joy!
"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" (1859)
Or they fall more often into disyllabic hexameters:
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd
with missiles I saw them . . . .
"When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865-66)
Despite the frequent appearance of regular metrical sequences, Whitman's lines cannot
be scanned by the usual graphic method of marking syllables and feet; his prosody,
however, is fully available to analysis. The shape on the page of the lines below (they
comprise a single strophe or verse unit) should be noted, specifically the gradual
elongation and sudden diminution of line length. Equally noteworthy are the repetition of
the key word carols, the alliteration of the s sounds, and the use of words
in falling (trochaic) rhythm, "lagging," "yellow," "waning":
Shake out carols!
Solitary here, the night's carols!
Carols of lonesome love! death's carols!
Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon!
O under that moon where she droops almost down into
the sea!
O reckless despairing carols.
"Out of the Cradle"
No regular metre moves these lines; but a clearly articulated rhythm--produced by
shape, thematic repetitions, sound effects, and patterns of stress and pause--defines a
prosody.
Whitman's prosody marks a clear break with previous metrical practices. Often a new
prosody modifies an existing metrical form or revives an obsolete one. In "Gerontion"
(1920), T.S. Eliot adjusted the blank-verse line to the emotionally charged, prophetic
utterance of his persona, a spiritually arid old man:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now . . .
(From T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)
The first three lines expand the pentameter line beyond its normal complement of
stressed and unstressed syllables; the fourth line contracts, intensifying the arc of
feeling. Both Pound and Eliot used stress prosodies. Pound counted out four strong beats
and used alliteration in his brilliant adaptation of the old English poem "The
Seafarer" (1912):
Chill its chains are; chafing sighs
Hew my heart round and hunger begot
Mere-weary mood. Lest man known not
That he on dry land loveliest liveth . . .
(From Ezra Pound, Personae, Copyright 1926 by
Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Di-
rections Publishing Corporation.)
He uses a similar metric for the energetic opening of his "Canto I." Eliot
mutes the obvious elements of the form in the celebrated opening of The Waste Land(1922):
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(From T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)
Here is the "native metre" with its falling rhythm, elegiac tone, strong
pauses, and variably placed stresses. If this is free verse, its freedoms are most
carefully controlled. "No verse is free," said Eliot, "for the man who
wants to do a good job."
The prosodic styles of Whitman, Pound,
and Eliot--though clearly linked to various historical antecedents--are
innovative expressions of their individual talents. In a sense, the prosody of
every poet of genius is unique; rhythm is perhaps the most personal element of
the poet's expressive equipment. Alfred Lord Tennyson
and Robert Browning, English
poets who shared the intellectual and spiritual concerns of the Victorian age,
are miles apart in their prosodies. Both used blank verse for their dramatic
lyrics, poems that purport to render the accents of real men speaking. The blank
verse of Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842) offers smoothly modulated vowel
music, carefully spaced spondaic substitutions, and unambiguous pentameter
regularity: (see also Victorian
literature)
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Browning's blank verse aims at colloquial vigour; its "irregularity" is a
function not of any gross metrical violation--it always obeys the letter of the metrical
law--but of the adjustment of abstract metrical pattern to the rhythms of dramatic speech.
If Tennyson's ultimate model is Milton's Baroque prosody with its oratorical rhythms,
Browning's model was the quick and nervous blank verse of the later Elizabethan
dramatists. Characteristic of Browning's blank verse are the strong accents, involuted
syntax, pregnant caesuras, and headlong energy in "The Bishop
Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church" (1845):
Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews--sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well--
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
In the lyric genres, the rhythms of the
individual poet--or, in the words of the 20th-century American poet Robert
Lowell, "the person himself"--can be heard in the prosody. In the long
poem, the dramatic, narrative, and didactic genres, a period style is more
likely to be heard in prosody. The blank-verse tragedy of the Elizabethan and
Jacobean dramatists, the blank verse of Milton's
Paradise
Lost(1667) and its
imitators in the 18th century (James Thomson and William Cowper), and the heroic
couplet of Neoclassical satiric and didactic verse, each, in different ways,
defines the age in which these prosodies flourished. The flexibility and energy
of the dramatic verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and John
Webster reflect the later Renaissance with its nervous open-mindedness,
its obsessions with power and domination, and its lapses into despair. Miltonic
blank verse, based on Latin syntax and adaptations of the rules of Latin
prosody, moved away from the looseness of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans toward
a more ceremonial style. It is a Baroque style in that it exploits the musical
qualities of sounds for their ornamental values. The heroic couplet, dominating
the poetry of the entire 18th century, was unequivocally a prosodic period
style; its elegance and epigrammatic precision entirely suited an age that
valued critical judgment, satiric wit, and the powers of rationality. (see also
literary genre, Elizabethan
literature)
It is in dramatic verse, perhaps, that a
prosody shows its greatest vitality and clarity. Dramatic verse must make a
direct impression not on an individual reader able to reconsider and meditate on
what he has read but on an audience that must immediately respond to a
declaiming actor or a singing chorus. The ancient Greek dramatists developed two
distinct kinds of metres: "stichic" forms (i.e., consisting of "stichs," or lines, as metrical units)
such as the iambic trimeter for the spoken dialogues; and lyric, or strophic,
forms (i.e., consisting of stanzas),
of great metrical intricacy, for the singing and chanting of choruses. Certain
of the Greek metres developed a particular ethos; characters of low social
standing never were assigned metres of the lyric variety. Similar distinctions
obtained in Elizabethan drama. Shakespeare's kings and noblemen speak blank
verse; comic characters, servants, and country bumpkins discourse in prose;
clowns, romantic heroines, and supernatural creatures sing songs. In the early
tragedy Romeo
and Julietthe
chorus speaks in "excellent conceited" sonnets: in what was one of the
most popular and easily recognized lyric forms of the period.
The metrical forms used by ancient and
Renaissance dramatists were determined by principles of decorum.
The use or non-use of a metrical form (or the use of prose) was a matter of
propriety; it was important that the metre be suitable to the social status and
ethos of the individual character as well as be suitable to the emotional
intensity of the particular situation. Decorum, in turn, was a function of the
dominant Classical and Neoclassical theories of imitation.
Ancient critics like Aristotle
and Horace insisted that certain metres were natural to the specific poetic
genres; thus, Aristotle (in the Poetics)
noted that "Nature herself, as we have said, teaches the choice of the
proper measure." In epic verse the poet should use the heroic measure
(dactylic hexameter) because this metre most effectively represents or imitates
such qualities as grandeur, dignity, and high passion. Horace
narrowed the theory of metrical decorum, making the choice of metre
prescriptive; only an ill-bred and ignorant poet would treat comic material in
metres appropriate to tragedy. Horace prepared the way for the legalisms of the
Renaissance theorists who were quite willing to inform practicing poets that
they used "feete without joyntes," in the words of Roger Ascham, Queen
Elizabeth's tutor, and should use the quantitative metres of Classical prosody.
During the Middle Ages little of
importance was added to actual prosodic theory; in poetic practice, however,
crucial developments were to have important ramifications for later theorists.
From about the second half of the 6th century to the end of the 8th century,
Latin verse was written that no longer observed the rules of quantity but was
clearly structured on accentual and syllabic bases. This change was aided by the
invention of the musical sequence;
it became necessary to fit a musical phrase to a fixed number of syllables, and
the older, highly complex system of quantitative prosody could not be adapted to
simple melodies that must be sung in sequential patterns. In the musical
sequence lies the origin of the modern lyric form. (see also Middle English literature)
The 9th-century hymn "Ave maris
stella" is a striking instance of the change from quantitative to accentual
syllabic prosody; each line contains three trochaic feet determined not by
length of syllable but by syllabic intensity or stress:
Ave maris stella
Dei mater alma
atque semper virgo,
felix caeli porta.
Sumens illud Ave
Gabrielis ore,
funda nos in pace,
mutans nomen Evae.
The rules of quantity have been
disregarded or forgotten; rhyme and stanza and a strongly felt stress rhythm
have taken their place. In the subsequent emergence of the European vernacular
literatures, poetic forms follow the example of the later Latin hymns. The
earliest art lyrics, those of the Provençal troubadours
of the 12th and 13th centuries, show the most intricate and ingenious stanzaic
forms. Similarly, the Goliardic
songs of the Carmina
Burana(13th
century) reveal a rich variety of prosodic techniques; this
"Spring-song" embodies varying lines of trochees and iambs and an
ababcdccd rhyme scheme: (see also Provençal
literature)
Ver redit optatum
Cum gaudio,
Flore decoratum
Purpureo;
Aves edunt cantus
Quam dulciter!
Revirescit nemus,
Cantus est amoenus
Totaliter.
Renaissance prosodic theory had to face
the fact of an accomplished poetry in the vernacular that was not written in
metres determined by "rules" handed down from the practice of Homer
and Virgil. Nevertheless, the classicizing theorists of the 16th century made a
determined attempt to explain existing poetry by the rules of short and long and
to draft "laws" by which modern verse might move in Classical metres. Roger
Ascham, in The
Scholemaster(1570), attacked "the Gothic . . . barbarous and rude
Ryming" of the early Tudor poets. He admitted that Henry Howard, earl of
Surrey, did passably well as a poet but complained that Surrey did not
understand "perfite and trewe versifying"; that is, Surrey did not
compose his English verses according to the principles of Latin and Greek
quantitative prosody. (see also Renaissance
art)
Ascham instigated a lengthy argument,
continued by succeeding theorists and poets, on the nature of English prosody.
Sir Philip Sidney, Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and Thomas Campion all (to
use Saintsbury's phrase) committed whoredom with the enchantress of quantitative
metric. While this hanky-panky had no adverse effect on poetry itself (English
poets went on writing verses in syllable-stress, the prosody most suitable to
the language), it produced misbegotten twins of confusion and discord, whose
heirs, however named, are still apparent today. Thus, those who still talk about
"long and short" (instead of stressed and unstressed), those who
perpetuate a punitive prosodic legalism, and those who regard prosody as an
account of what poets should have done and did not, trace their ancestry back to
Elizabethan dalliance and illicit classicizing.
Although Renaissance prosodic theory
produced scarcely anything of value to either literary criticism or poetic
technique--indeed, it did not even develop a rational scheme for scanning
existing poetry--it raised a number of important questions. What were the
structural principles animating the metres of English verse? What were the
aesthetic nature of prosody and the functions of metre? What were the
connections between poetry and music? Was poetry an art of imitation (as
Aristotle and all of the Neoclassical theorists had maintained), and was its
sister art painting; or was poetry (as Romantic theory maintained) an art of
expression, and prosody the element that produced (in Coleridge's words) the
sense of musical delight originating (in T.S.
Eliot's words) in the auditory imagination?
Early in the 18th century, Pope
affirmed, in his Essay
on Criticism(1711),
the classic doctrine of imitation. Prosody was to be more nearly onomatopoetic;
the movement of sound and metre should represent the actions they carry: (see
also Augustan
Age)
'Tis not enough no harshness gives
offence,
The sound must seem an Echo to the
sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently
blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother
numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding
shoar,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the
torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast
weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words
move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the
plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and
skims along the main.
In 18th-century theory the doctrine of
imitation was joined to numerous strictures on "smoothness," or
metrical regularity. Theorists advocated a rigid regularity; minor poets
composed in a strictly regular syllable-stress verse devoid of expressive
variations. This regularity itself expressed the rationalism of the period. The
prevailing dogmas on regularity made it impossible for Samuel
Johnson to hear the beauties of Milton's versification; he characterized
the metrically subtle lines of "Lycidas" as "harsh" and
without concern for "numbers." Certain crosscurrents of metrical
opinion in the 18th century, however, moved toward new theoretical stances.
Joshua Steele's Prosodia Rationalis (1779)
is an early attempt to scan English verse by means of musical notation. (A later
attempt was made by the American poet Sidney
Lanier in his Science of English
Verse, 1880.) Steele's method is highly personal, depending on an
idiosyncratic assigning of such musical qualities as pitch and duration to
syllabic values; but he recognized that a prosodic theory must take into account
not merely metre but "all properties or accidents belonging to
language." His work foreshadows the current concerns of the structural
linguists who attempt an analysis of the entire range of acoustic elements
contributing to prosodic effect. Steele is also the first "timer"
among metrists; that is, he bases his scansions on musical pulse and claims that
English verse moves in either common or triple time. Modern critics of musical
scanners have pointed out that musical scansion constitutes a performance, not
an analysis of the metre, that it allows arbitrary readings, and that it levels
out distinctions between poets and schools of poetry.
With the Romantic
movement and its revolutionary shift in literary sensibility, prosodic
theory became deeply influenced by early 19th-century speculation on the nature
of imagination, on poetry as
expression--"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," in Wordsworth's
famous phrase--and on the concept of the poem as organic form. The discussion
between Wordsworth and Coleridge on the nature and function of metre illuminates
the crucial transition from Neoclassical to modern theories. Wordsworth (in his
"Preface" to the Lyrical
Ballads1800)
followed 18th-century theory and saw metre as "superadded" to poetry;
its function is more nearly ornamental, a grace of style and not an essential
quality. Coleridge saw metre as being organic; it functions together with all of
the other parts of a poem and is not merely an echo to the sense or an artifice
of style. Coleridge also examined the psychologic effects of metre, the way it
sets up patterns of expectation that are either fulfilled or disappointed:
As far as metre acts in and for itself,
it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general
feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued
excitement of surprize, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still
gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one
moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their
aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated
conversation; they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where,
therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the
attention and feelings thus roused, there must needs be a disappointment felt;
like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a staircase, when we had
prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.
Biographia
LiterariaXVIII (1817)
Romantic literary theory, although
vastly influential in poetic practice, had little to say about actual metrical
structure. Coleridge described the subtle relationships between metre and
meaning and the effects of metre on the reader's unconscious mind; he devoted
little attention to metrical analysis. Two developments in 19th-century poetic
techniques, however, had greater impact than any prosodic theory formulated
during the period. Walt Whitman's
nonmetrical prosody and Gerard Manley
Hopkins' far-ranging metrical experiments mounted an assault on the
traditional syllable-stress metric. Both Whitman and Hopkins were at first
bitterly denounced, but, as is often the case, the heresies of a previous age
become the orthodoxies of the next. Hopkins' "sprung
rhythm"--a rhythm imitating natural speech, using mixed types of
feet and counterpointed verse--emerged as viable techniques in the poetry of Dylan
Thomas and W.H. Auden. It is virtually impossible to assess Whitman's
influence on the various prosodies of modern poetry. Such American poets as Hart
Crane, William Carlos Williams,
and Theodore Roethke all have
used Whitman's long line, extended rhythms, and "shaped" strophes.
Since 1900 the study of prosody has
emerged as an important and respectable part of literary study. George
Saintsbury published his great History
of English Prosody during the years 1906-10. Sometime later, a number of
linguists and aestheticians turned their attention to prosodic structure and the
nature of poetic rhythm. Graphic prosody (the traditional syllable and foot
scansion of syllable-stress metre) was placed on a securer theoretical footing.
A number of prosodists, taking their lead from the work of Joshua Steele and
Sidney Lanier, have recently attempted to use musical notation to scan English
verse. For the convenience of synoptic discussion, modern prosodic theorists may
be divided into four groups: the linguists
who examine verse rhythm as a function of phonetic structures; the aestheticians
who examine the psychologic effects, the formal properties, and the
phenomenology of rhythm; the musical scanners, or "timers," who try to
adapt the procedures of musical notation to metrical analysis; and the
traditionalists who rely on the graphic description of syllable and stress to
uncover metrical paradigms. It is necessary to point out that only the
traditionalists concern themselves specifically with metrical form;
aestheticians, linguists, and timers all examine prosody in its larger
dimensions.
Modern structural linguistics has placed
the study of language on a solid scientific basis. Linguists have measured the
varied intensities of syllabic stress and pitch and the durations of junctures
or the pauses between syllables. These techniques of objective measurement have
been applied to prosodic study. The Danish philologist Otto
Jespersen's early essay "Notes on Metre" (1900) made a number
of significant discoveries. He established the principles of English metre on a
demonstrably accurate structural basis; he recognized metre as a gestalt
phenomenon (i.e., with emphasis on the
configurational whole); he saw metrics as descriptive science rather than
proscriptive regulation. Jespersen's essay was written before the burgeoning
interest in linguistics, but since World War II numerous attempts have been made
to formulate a descriptive science of metrics.
It has been noted that Coleridge defined
metrical form as a pattern of expectation, fulfillment, and surprise. Taking his
cue from Coleridge, the British aesthetician I.A.
Richards in Principles
of Literary Criticism(1924)
developed a closely reasoned theory of the mind's response to rhythm and metre.
His theory is organic and contextual; the sound effects of prosody have little
psychologic effect by themselves. It is prosody in conjunction with "its
contemporaneous other effects"--chiefly meaning or propositional
sense--that produces its characteristic impact on our neural structures.
Richards insists that everything that happens in a poem depends on the organic
environment; in his Practical Criticism (1929)
he constructed a celebrated "metrical dummy" to "support [an]
argument against anyone who affirms that the mere sound of verse has independently
any considerable aesthetic virtue." For Richards the most important
function of metre is to provide aesthetic framing and control; metre makes
possible, by its stimulation and release of tensions, "the most difficult
and delicate utterances." (see also New
Criticism)
Other critics, following the Neo-Kantian
theories of the philosophers Ernst
Cassirer and Susanne Langer,
have suggested that rhythmic structure is a species of symbolic form. Harvey
Gross in Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (1964)
saw rhythmic structure as a symbolic form, signifying ways of experiencing
organic processes and the phenomena of nature. The function of prosody, in his
view, is to image life in a rich and complex way. Gross's theory is also
expressive; prosody articulates the movement of feeling in a poem. The unproved
assumption behind Gross's expressive and symbolic theory is that rhythm is in
some way iconic to human feeling: that a particular rhythm or metre symbolizes,
as a map locates the features of an actual terrain, a particular kind of
feeling.
The most sophisticated argument for
musical scansion is given by Northrop
Frye in his influential Anatomy
of Criticism(1957).
He differentiates between verse that shows unmistakable musical quality and
verse written according to the imitative doctrines current in the Renaissance
and Neoclassic periods. All of the poetry written in the older strong-stress
metric, or poetry showing its basic structure, is musical poetry, and its
structure resembles the music contemporary with it.
The most convincing case for traditional
"graphic prosody" has been made by the American critics W.K.
Wimsatt and Monroe C.
Beardsley. Their essay "The Concept of Meter" (1965) argues
that both the linguists and musical scanners do not analyze the abstract
metrical pattern of poems but only interpret an individual performance of the
poem. Poetic metre is not generated by any combination of stresses and pauses
capable of precise scientific measurement; rather, metre is generated by an
abstract pattern of syllables standing in positions of relative stress to each
other. In a line of iambic pentameter
Preserved in Milton's or in
Shakespeare's name . . .
the "or" of the third foot
is only slightly stronger than the preceding syllable "-ton's," but
this very slight difference makes the line recognizable as iambic
metre. Wimsatt and Beardsley underline the paradigmatic nature of metre; as an
element in poetic structure, it is capable of exact abstraction.
The metres of the verse of ancient India
were constructed on a quantitative basis. A system of long and short syllables,
as in Greek, determined the variety of complicated metrical forms that are found
in poetry of post-Vedic times--that is, after the 5th century BC. (see also
Indian literature)
Chinese prosody is based on the
intricate tonal system of the language. In the T'ang
dynasty (AD 618-907) the metrical system for classical verse was fixed.
The various tones of the language were subsumed under two large groups, even
tones and oblique tones. Patterned arrangements of tones and the use of pauses,
or caesuras, along with rhyme determine the Chinese prosodic forms. (see also
Chinese literature)
Japanese poetry is without rhyme or
marked metrical structure; it is purely syllabic. The two main forms of syllabic
verses are the tanka and the haiku.
Tanka is written in a stanza of 31 syllables that are divided into alternating
lines of five and seven syllables. Haiku is an extremely concentrated form of
only 17 syllables. Longer poems of 40 to 50 lines are also written; however,
alternate lines must contain either five or seven syllables. The haiku form has
been adapted to English verse and has become in recent years a popular form.
Other experimenters in English syllabic verse show the influence of Japanese
prosody. Syllabic metre in English, however, is limited in its rhythmic effects;
it is incapable of expressing the range of feeling that is available in the
traditional stress and syllable-stress metres. (see also Japanese
literature)
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