Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse 9780804765169

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Mysterious Music RHYTHM AND FREE VERSE

~ysterious Music RHYTHM AND FREE VERSE

G. Burns Cooper

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©1998 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University CIP

data appear at the end of the book

For Sandra, and for my parents, whose love, patience, and good sense have gotten me this far.

Acknowledgments

people have had a hand in the development of this book than I could possibly list, or thank: teachers, colleagues, authors, friends, family members, and others. I will mention only those most directly involved. In the early stages, Thomas Cable and Mary Blackley gave me invaluable commentary and encouragement. Later, a Faculty Small Grant from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, made it possible for me to have a few months of concentrated working time. The editors at Stanford University Press have been extremely helpful, as have the expert readers who reviewed the manuscript: Gilbert Youmans and E. L. Epstein. Finally, Sandra Boatwright has lent her superb editing skills along with moral and even financial support throughout most of the project. I am most grateful to all these people. MORE

Contents

Abbreviations and Symbols xi Introduction

I

1 What Is Rhythm? (Who's Asking?) 2

r6

Eliot's Four Quartets: A Transitional Case 43

3 Particles and Atoms of Free Verse: Lower-Level Figures of Sound 67 4

Molecules and Crystals of Free Verse: Lines and Phrases 92

5 The Literal Music of Poetry: Intonational Tunes Conclusions and Speculation

Notes

I95

Glossary 209 Bibliography 225 Index 239

r88

n6

Abbreviations and Symbols

WORKS OF LITERATURE BN

= "Burnt Norton"

EC

= "East Coker"

DS

= "Dry Salvages"

LG

= "Little Gidding"

Pear Tree = To a Blossoming Pear Tree Branch = The Branch Will Not Break GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES AND LINGUISTIC SYMBOLS

N =noun Prep = preposition Adj = adjective or word used as an adjective P = phrase (PrepP = prepositional phrase; NP = noun phrase; etc.) V =verb

+ =conjunction Adv =adverb Det = determiner (article, demonstrative, etc.) S = sentence or subject, depending on context S' = S-bar (essentially a clause) 0 =object ( ) = optional item

xu

Abbreviations and Symbols

[ ] = phrase or clause boundaries /1/

=

phonemic or phonetic notation

f (above a word) =

stressed syllable

\(above a word)

=

secondary stress

x (above a word)

= unstressed syllable

H, L (above a line of text)

=

high or low pitch accents

H'', L*

=

pitch accent on a stressed syllable

F, R, L

=

fall, rise, or level tone

Mysterious Music RHYTHM AND FREE VERSE

Introduction

magazine editor once told me my poetry was "just prose chopped up into lines." My initial reaction, like that of most authors whose work has just been rejected, was to deny the charge, but on reflection I wasn't quite sure what I was denying. Though readers commonly complain of prosiness in free verse they don't like/ they seldom specifyare seldom able to specify, I would argue-exactly what the difference is. What was that cheeky editor accusing me of? Many of us have been trained to think of imagery, metaphor, and perhaps semantic ambiguity as the sine qua non of poetry. Yet as many linguists have pointed out, these are the basic stuff not only of poetry, but of all language. My maligned poem was full of images, metaphors, and double meanings. Was the editor simply telling me my metaphors weren't interesting enough? Maybe, but that's not what I usually mean when I say something isn't poetic. I mean it doesn't sound poetic. James Wright, a poet I respect greatly, also said that the difference between poetry and prose is basically a rhythmic one (D. Smith 1980,16-39 ). T. S. Eliot, who likewise figures large in this book, said similar things about "the music of poetry" -for example, that "the only absolute distinction to be drawn is that poetry is written in verse and prose is written in prose; or, in other words, that there is prose rhythm and verse rhythm" (Eliot 1917, 158). But how can we describe, or even find, that rhythmic difference? The question can probably never be answered in an absolute way. The mode of language we call "poetry" is too internally diverse, and too changeable over its history, to allow that. But using the insights of linguistics as well as other disciplines, we can make some revealing observations about the rhythmic features of Anglo-American poetry during the specific time period I'm most interested in here-roughly the 1940s through the 1980s. It turns out that we can be surprisingly specific about how those features differ in a particular author's prose and poetry from the same period. A LITERARY

2

Introduction

I will describe these features in detail in the chapters that follow. In a nutshell: poetry tends to be more compressed and to have more regular alternation than other forms of discourse. Specifically, poetry is compressed in that it has more stress density and more semantic density than prose. Stress density can be quantified and compared statistically; semantic density is more difficult to measure but is rather clear in certain aspects of language use, such as compounding. Poetry also shows more alternation, both in fairly quantifiable ways, such as regular alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, and in more qualitative ways, such as the repetition of syntactic patterns and of similar or regularly contrasting pitch contours. The general principles I present here are not new-they echo familiar textbook claims about poetry being "more concentrated" and "more patterned" than other forms-but the methods I have used to examine them are more original, more linguistically informed, and more precise than those of the standard textbook. What's more, the idea that these genre differences are susceptible of relatively objective empirical testing conflicts with some popular postmodern claims about language and textuality. My modest quantitative results would need to be broadened and reproduced before they would demand a rethinking of literary theory, but they do suggest that some of the tools we have inherited from formalist criticism should not be thrown out just yet. Now, let's go back to the beginning. Wright and Eliot said that (good) free verse is poetry because it has poetic rhythm. To understand that statement, we need to have some notion at least of the answers to the following questions: What is free verse? What is poetry? What is rhythm? What is poetic rhythm? This book keeps coming back to these questions and answering them in different ways. Let's start with some sweeping generalizations.

Sweeping Generalizations The mind yearns for order, for a sense that it understands, at least partly, how things are put together. One of the functions of poetry is to satisfy that yearning: poetic meaning connects and organizes seemingly disparate ideas. The ear also yearns for order. One of the functions of poetic rhythm and meter is to satisfy that craving too; they help to organize the potentially chaotic stream of sound we perceive. Yet these kinds of order cannot be supplied as raw stimulus to the nervous system; the mind and the ear must be educated to recognize the systems within which they operate.

Introduction

3

Human beings are born with a sense of rhythm at the direct, physical level of heartbeats, nursing, and breathing and with an innate capacity to learn higher rhythmic functions such as walking, speech, perhaps even music (see Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983). They are not, however, born knowing iambic pentameter. Sophomore literature classes struggle, year after year, to recognize where the stresses go in Shakespeare's sonnets. Yet once they do so, they know a system of such impressive and satisfying power that it seems natural and almost inevitable. It can be applied with only minor modifications to much of the greatest poetry in English from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries. A young poet would do well to master this system early on-and many do. However, most poems are no longer written in traditional meters. For decades, free verse of one kind or another has been the norm, iambic or dactylic verse the exception. How are we to perceive order in a form whose very name describes it as free? Though the newer system is not as neatly worked out as the older one, writers of free verse also must educate themselves, and their readers along with them, in the patterns of order that can be revealed in a constantly changing line. These writers and readers need to be familiar not only with traditional versification but also with the practices of the great free-verse poets. Even beyond that, they must understand that the rhythm of a particular poetic line may be defined less by its relation to the ancient or modern classics than by its relation to its own author's earlier works, or even to the lines immediately preceding it in the same poem. One of the goals of this book, in fact, is to explain in more detail what a rhythmically sensitive and linguistically knowledgeable reader of mid-twentieth-century poetry needs to know and notice in order to appreciate the nuances of its music. Again, I want to ask what about this poetry's form makes it poetic.

What Is Free Verse? I will begin by sketching an outline of some changes in English prosody over the last three centuries. This is not meant to be an exhaustive survey, or to suggest that no other-sometimes contradictory-developments were happening at the same time. It will, however, give a bit of historical perspective for the particular account of twentieth-century free-verse prosody that makes up the bulk of this book.2 Let's begin, as so many books on English versification do, with some lines from Alexander Pope:

4

Introduction What dire offense from amorous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things, I sing-this verse to Caryll, Muse! is due: This, even Belinda may vouchsafe to view: Slight is the subject, but not so the praise, If she inspire, and he approve my lays. ("The Rape of the Lock," 1:1-6 [(1714) 1969, 8o])

This was written in I7I4, at what might be called the peak of English prosodic regularity, or at least of confidence in the iambic pentameter as the ideal verse. There is no doubt that the basic pattern is "if SHE inSPIRE and HE apPROVE my LAYS." The lines have their prosodic complexities: the stop-and-start choppiness of line 3 (with three possible caesurae, after "sing," "Caryll," and "Muse"); the elision that allows two weak syllables to count as only one in "amorous," "trivial," and "even Be-"; and the inverted first foot of line 5, which, to be perfectly regular, would have to be pronounced "slight Is" rather than the more natural "SLIGHT is." But these are all conventional variations, expected and indispensable threads in the fabric of eighteenth-century iambic pentameter. There is nothing to shake our faith that we know exactly what kind of verse we are looking at. To see what has changed since Pope's time, let's look at a short progression of poets from the two centuries after him: Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, James Wright, Jimmy Santiago Baca. The list is chosen to illustrate one particular trajectory of change. I readily acknowledge that a different list- William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Allen Ginsberg, Leslie Marmon Silko, for instance, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Seamus Heaney-might lead us to focus on different attributes. Ultimately, though, this would be a difference in emphasis, not in theory; they all lead to the same set of possibilities. Each generation makes certain things possible for the next generation. Here is Robert Browning, 135 years after "The Rape of the Lock": Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity! Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back? Nephews-sons mine ... ah God, I know not! WellShe, men would have to be your mother once, Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was! ("The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church," 1-5 ((1849) 1993, 720])

Introduction

5

The metrical pattern in itself is still pretty regular, if a bit less so than Pope's. What strikes one about Browning, though, is how much less comfortably the words fit into the line; they strain against it, so much so that the syntax and sense sometimes seem wrenched. The meter itself could be from a Pope poem; the phrasing could not. "Nephews-sons mine ... ah God, I know not! Well-" can hardly be called a smooth and flowing line. Browning also has a different sense of how plot and character interact with versification: for Pope, the shape of the line gives rise to everything else; for Browning, the story rushes forward, putting its feet down just in time not to break the rules, in a kind of prosodic hopscotch. Traditional meter is still dominant in Browning's world, but nonmetrical considerations are wrestling with it. If the chief pleasures of reading Pope are in his smoothness and wit, the pleasures Browning provides are rougher, in prosodic tension and dramatic irony. Now let's move forward another thirty-five years or so, to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who died in 1889, though most of his poems were not published until 1918. His sonnets sometimes stay within the bounds of iambic pentameter or hexameter, but, even more than Browning, Hopkins seems driven to overload the lines with more stressed syllables, more words, more ideas than a pentameter or even a hexameter can comfortably hold (or than a reader can easily process on the first read-through). Sometimes, it seems, the only way he can make the lines at all the right length is to chop them, even in mid-word: My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chiefwoe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and singThen lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No lingering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'. ("No Worst, There Is None," s-8, ca. r885 [1948, ro6])

In its strongest form, Hopkins's impulse to overload the lines produces what he calls "sprung rhythm," where lines are loosely equivalent in number of strong stresses, but are only iambic in the loosest sense: I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! ... ("The Windhover," r-s, ca. r877 [1948, 73])

6

Introduction

The number of syllables per line ranges from the traditional ten (liner) to a high of sixteen (line 2). There may be several stressed syllables in a row, or so many unstressed syllables that the line feels anapestic, or both in the same line: "Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here" (1. 9 ). The first half of the line feels amphibrachic ("brute lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"); the second half has no unstressed syllables except perhaps the last. Yet one still gets the overall impression that Hopkins's verse belongs in the same broad category as Browning's: poetry where the length of line and the metrical pattern is an approximation to, a loose variation on, da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM. Fast forward another sixty years or so, toT. S. Eliot's last poetic masterpiece, Four Quartets: His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard, In the smell of grapes on the autumn table, And the evening circle of the winter gaslight. The river is within us, the sea is all about us; ("The Dry Salvages," II-I5 [r943, 35-36])

These lines have an immediately recognizable sense of regularity; they strike one as rhythmic and closely parallel to each other; they repeat almost the same grammatical pattern three and a half times. We may at first be tempted to hear them as iambic pentameter as well; the first four lines might bear scansion as pentameter if we allow some minor adjustments such as substitution of trisyllabic feet ("in the RANK") and promotion of very weak syllables such as "of" ("aiLANthus OF the APril").3 But the fifth line, though symmetrical in itself, is unmistakably different in kind from an iambic pentameter. In fact, the whole poem does what these lines doit follows one pattern long enough to establish its rhythm, then abruptly switches to another pattern. The sections are held together by a loose count of strong stresses (all five lines above are most easily described as four-beat lines), but even more by features other than stress. Prosodically speaking, Eliot believes in order, but in a constantly changing order. His rhythms and meters change the way time signatures change in music-especially in modern music (an analogy Eliot was quite conscious of). Robert Lowell, even more than Eliot, learned the craft of poetry through traditional meters. Breslin (1984), in fact, argues that Lowell's generation came of age in a period of reaction against the free verse of Eliot's contemporaries like Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Carlos Williams. Lowell's

Introduction

7

most famous early poems, such as "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and some Browning-like dramatic monologues, are unambiguous iambic pentameter. Later, many poems, such as "Grandparents," have some regularly iambic lines mixed with irregular and fragmented lines. The effect is to keep the pentameter norm in a reader's awareness but constantly to deviate from it in a kind of Oedipal undermining of the old order: X

I

/X/X/X

XI

They're altogether otherworldly now, I

X

I

X

X

\

I

X

XX

I

X

I

those adults champing for their ritual Friday spin I

X

XX

I

X

X

I

X

I

X

to pharmacist and five-and-ten in Brockton. /XIX

/XX

IX/

Back in my throw-away and shaggy span X\X/

I

X

X\

I

X

I

of adolescence, Grandpa still waves his stick X

X

X

I

X

like a policeman; ("Grandparents," 1-6 [1956, 68])

(In my transcriptions, x marks an unstressed syllable, j a stressed one, and \ a secondary stress.) Free verse predates both Lowell and Eliot, and perhaps even Hopkins; many would trace its roots to Whitman, Martin Tupper, Blake, Macpherson, or even the King James Bible, and on through a series of others (American, English, and French) who wrote apparently unmetered verse well before Ezra Pound's imagist manifesto (see Finch 1993, 83-88; Steele 1990). Yet in the 1950s, iambic pentameter was still the backdrop against which Lowell's various rhythms played. Later still, in 1959, one can detect only a faint echo of the pentameter line in Lowell: The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. ("For the Union Dead," 1-4 [1977, 135])

The first three lines have roughly the right number of stressed syllables, and the first one even has ten syllables, but none of them scans easily as an iambic pentameter. The fourth line is regularly iambic, but is only six syllables long (a trimeter). Lowell has crossed over into the realm of free verse. Like Lowell, James Wright also began his career writing regular iambic

8

Introduction

verse, but where Lowell's poetry evolved into something related but less regular, Wright's plunged into free verse headlong. His free-verse poems show little trace of traditional English meter: Antonio Machado follows the moon Down a road of white dust To a cave of silent children Under the Pyrenees. Wine darkens in stone jars in villages. Wine sleeps in the mouths of old men, it is a dark red color. ("Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959," rr-r6 [r97r, 122])

Yet Wright argues, and I would agree, that these lines are rhythmical, and that rhythm is a crucial component of their construction and of their effectiveness. It's just that their rhythm derives from something other than matching a traditional metrical line. One of the central tasks of this book will be to elaborate what its rhythm, and that of other free-verse poems, may derive from: local stress patterns, word length, density of stress, repetition of certain phrase structures, other kinds of sound patterning. Many of those same rhythmic principles will apply even to so recent a poet, and one so different from Wright, as Jimmy Santiago Baca: I toss yesterday's tortillas to pack dogs at my doorwith bare fangs and smoldering matted scruff-fur hackles, they grunt-scarf then slouch away. ("Day's Blood," r-5 [Gonzalez 1992, r3])

in kind reprimand Mama would say, "You were born of bells, more than my womb, they speak to you in dreams. Ay, mejito, you are such a dreamer!" ("Bells," 32-36 [Gonzalez 1992, 12])

However, Baca differs from Wright and Lowell in devoting more energy to the oral performance and electronic recording of his poetry (going so far as to use musical instruments and sound effects on at least one tape) and in speaking in a quite different dialect; ultimately these contribute important rhythmic elements that are not fully represented on paper. This fact, in turn, leads to some tricky questions about the nature of a poem: Is it

Introduction

9

strictly a string of words, or is how those words are said, and when and where, and who says them, also part of the poem? These questions will be discussed more fully in chapter 5. Again and again we see ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny, and vice versa, as the development of an individual poet mirrors that of English poetics and the development of poetics follows the changes arrived at by individual poets. Many other poets-old ones like Shakespeare and Blake, and recent ones like Denise Levertov-could be added to bolster the claim. The direction of change, in recent centuries, is usually from strict accentual-syllabic meters, such as iambics, to something else. But the question is, again, what is that something else? We can call it "free verse," but that is really only a way of saying "something else." Probably there are many answers to that question; a few of the most generally applicable ones are explored in this book. This is not the first attempt to describe the rhythmic devices of free verse; others have described particular aspects with some insight.4 But it offers a more comprehensive theory than most, using insights from linguistics, cognitive science, music theory, and literary theory, and it offers some new empirical evidence and methods of using primary texts. Last but not least, it offers some particular insights into the versifying practices of several influential mid-twentieth-century poets.

What Is (the Rhythm of) Poetry? There are two main groups who write about rhythm in poetry: poets, and linguists who come more or less from the formalist/structuralist/poetics tradition.5 Other sorts of literary critics and theorists generally focus on other aspects of poetry, if they are interested in it at all; other sorts of linguists are generally more interested in abstract linguistic competence and related issues, or in social interaction through language. But both poets and poeticists are interested in the question that runs throughout this book: What makes poetry poetic? That is, how is poetry different from other types of language? A common belief, a folk usage, connects the "poetic" with a certain exalted emotional tone ("poetry in motion"; "a young woman should be poem, not write one") 6 and, with respect to language, with a certain high register of vocabulary. Though this usage is quite common, and therefore must be considered a genuine part of the word's meaning, it is consistently rejected by highbrow critics and poets, just as they reject the popular iden-

10

Introduction

tification of poetry with rhyme (as in "you're a poet, and don't know it"). Some theorists argue that the distinguishing characteristic is meter. Some say it is the division of the words into lines. Some say it is semantic density, that is, more meaning in fewer words. Some claim that there is no objective difference. A very frequently encountered answer is, again, that the difference lies in "rhythm," but unfortunately it is hard to know exactly what a given author means by the word rhythm. Not only do poets use this term quite differently than linguists, but one linguist will differ from another linguist, and one poet from another poet, in their use of the term. This ambiguity is especially marked in free verse, where there is no obvious metrical template (such as the iambic pentameter) on which to center rhythmical discussions. Thus a large part of this study will be an effort simply to say how rhythm can be constructed in non-accentual-syllabic poetry. This will lead to two corollary questions: (1) How is poetic rhythm different from the rhythm of other kinds of language? (2) How can it be manipulated for expressive effects? Some very restricted forms of poetry seem to be susceptible of relatively simple-though far from obvious-answers. For Old English meter, Middle English alliterative verse, and the iambic pentameter, among others, theorists have come up with some rather elegant quasi-mathematical models (see, for example, Halle and Keyser 1966; Kiparsky 1977; Hayes 1983; Cable 1991, 1994). These models do not explain everything about the rhythm of the poetry they describe, and some do not even do as much as their authors claim they do, but they capture the most basic generalizations about the forms. These generalizations can be made partly because the authors of the poems in each tradition are, in specific ways, trying to be like each other; they are imitating a tradition and its forms, and so they hold some similar kind of metrical model in their own heads while they write. But when we get away from these models, into the various types of poetry known as "free verse," it is harder to make elegant generalizations. There's little agreement about what makes this verse metrical, or rhythmic, or even what makes it poetry at all. Some conservative literary critics, like Timothy Steele and Frederick Turner, argue that free verse in fact has more in common with prose than it does with the pre-twentieth-century tradition of poetry, that it is historically based on the model of prose rather than the model of poetry, which, they believe, by definition entails regular meter. Steele's argument (1990) is based on literary history (both modern and ancient), including many of the Modernist poets' own statements about the deadness of "verse" and

Introduction

II

the need for poetry that is "as good as prose." Turner's claim (I985) is based on cognitive science and cross-cultural comparison of verse forms. Still, they both start with similar assumptions about the nature of poetry and reach similar conclusions about the place of free verse in it. (It's worth remembering, though, that similar claims were made about blank verse during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see note I). On the other hand, some postmodern critics, like Stanley Fish, argue that the distinction between prose and poetry as texts is specious, that there is no internal, textual difference and that these two terms only denote two different ways of reading. Others-critics like Charles Hartman and linguistic anthropologists like Dell Hymes and Joel Sherzer-suggest that the division of language into lines is the defining characteristic of poetry, and that the poet's manipulation of line division is the primary versificational device of free verse. Poets who write free verse, however, though they may indeed believe that a poet can learn from prose models, may even recast parts of texts that were once prose as poetry, and certainly do devote some thought to line division, nevertheless usually want to insist that free verse is not the same thing as prose chopped up into lines, and that at least part of this difference is rhythmic or musical. It seems important to me to take their intuitions seriously. Unfortunately, they rarely articulate very clear or plausible explanations of just what free verse rhythm is. This book is an attempt to fill in part of that gap. A first, admittedly hazy, approximation might run as follows: Perhaps poets have acquired certain rhythms, certain melodies, in their minds, from reading other poetry, from their own previous writing, from hearing others speak. They have an idea of what sounds good, what sounds poetic. They have also acquired certain habits of speech, ways of putting things together that seem effective or euphonious or simply easy to bring to mind. The more they use particular speech patterns and particular rhythms and intonations, the more these habits coalesce into a system, an organizational mode that partially takes the place of the iambic pentameter or the alliterative line. At the same time, the poets still have all the tools of the English poetic tradition-rhyme, alliteration, alternating meter, enjambment, and so forthat their disposal. Free-verse rhythm is difficult to study partly because it is so complex; it can potentially operate on so many different levels. It is also difficult because the concept of "rhythm" itself is murky. The main task of chapter I is simply to define the word rhythm and the various concepts that it entails (meter, stress, timing, intonation, etc.) as they

12

Introduction

apply to free verse. The central idea is that rhythm, while it crucially affects our perception of time, is based not so much on objective timing as on the organization of prominent features of the text into a hierarchical and sequential structure. In Gerard Manley Hopkins's phrase, "any recurrent figure of sound," or perhaps simply any "recurrent figure" (of sound, grammar, or meaning), can be perceived as rhythmic. Thus features from the most basic levels of phonology (such as the segmental "feature") to the most complex aspects of phrasing and even discourse structure (such as the "intonation group") can be building blocks of rhythm, as long as they, or their structures, are repeated conspicuously enough. The rest of the book is devoted to examining specific cases of these recurrent figures in action, and to exploring the ways that they differ from the rhythmic figures of nonpoetic language. That rhythmic difference can be loosely summarized, again, in the following way: Poetry tends to be more compressed, and to have more regular alternation, than other forms of discourse. This is just as true of free verse as of traditional meters.

Whose Poetry Should We Study as Examples? The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, a widely used textbook, contains r8o poets, and even at that leaves out some who have been influential, including several of my favorites. The analytical methods I use are extremely time-consuming, and the issues this book discusses are broad. In order to examine these issues thoroughly enough to be coherent, it has been absolutely necessary to narrow the field. The present study examines only three poets in detail, and only parts of each one's work. Although Eliot, Lowell, and Wright are rather different in their thematic concerns and even in their forms, the choice to compare them is not random. In From Modern to Contemporary, James E. B. Breslin describes the way Eliot and the first generation of modern poets, but especially Eliot, formed a dominating presence that intimidated, influenced, and incited rebellion in the next two generations of American poets. In tracing the influence of these early giants on the third generation (those who came to prominence in the fifties), Breslin chooses to represent the various poetic schools with Lowell (representing the "Confessional" school), Wright (the "Deep Image"), Levertov ("Black Mountain"), Ginsberg ("Beats"), and Frank O'Hara ("New York"). Although I made my choices before reading Breslin, it is striking that our selections are identical, and I believe our reasoning is similar. No

Introduction

13

one book could hope to cover all the diversity of American poetry in recent decades; what we do is choose writers who are widely acknowledged to be influential, who are typical of the currents of thought we wish to discuss, and who we hope will provide interesting examples of the phenomena we are exploring. Eliot, Wright, Lowell, and Levertov all fill this bill; while the Beats and the New York school (and other poets who aren't exactly in any of these schools) would also be interesting to study from the point of view of this book, their poetics are different enough that they seemed to me less readily mixed with the others. A complete theory of free-verse rhythm, of course, would have to account for all schools, eventually. The Beats certainly have much to offer in the way of oral performance (see chapter 5), and the New York school in terms of, among other things, the boundary between prose and poetry (see chapter 3). But they remain beyond the range of this book. All the poets studied here have had well-documented influence on other major poets. All, except perhaps Baca, as I noted above, mastered iambic meters but early on in their careers drifted away from them in favor of experimentation with other forms. What regularities they found to replace the iambics they set aside will be different in each case, but they all had the same range of possible rhythmic devices to choose from, and their individual choices overlap considerably. Although I believe their prosodic practices resemble those of many of their contemporaries, ultimately it is not crucial to the goals of this book that these poets be representative of the whole of Anglo-American twentieth-century poetry. Instead I am making two assumptions about their value: (1) Because each of these poets is widely read and influential among other poets and critics, a careful analysis of their prosody will hold some inherent interest for those wishing to know more· about these particular poets or the history of versification; and (2) if we can carefully and accurately describe the prosodic practices of some poets, that will provide a useful base of comparison for the description of other, even very different, poets. Following, then, are very brief summaries of the key points about each of the three poets discussed in this book. INDIVIDUAL ASPECTS OF ELIOT, LOWELL, AND WRIGHT

Eliot, one of the most influential of all twentieth-century poets in English (both Lowell and Wright openly acknowledged his influence), was as interested in meter as anyone; his statement that "no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job" (1957, 31) is quoted endlessly. And yet, as we

14

Introduction

have seen and will see in more detail, his final great poem Four Quartets is indeterminate as to meter; some see its dominant style as free verse, others as a loose iambic pentameter, and others as an accentual meter akin to that of the medieval Piers Plowman. Actually, all are right in their own ways, but the rhythm of the poem may be understood better by looking at the particular syntactic, metrical, and intonational chunks that Eliot combines to construct it. It is the recurrent melodies and habits of speech that run through the poem, as much as line length or regular metrical models, that give it its rhythmical power. These aspects will be the subject of chapter 2. In addition, chapter 4 will briefly explore Eliot's unique intonation patterns in performance, which are remarkably patterned. They are intimately connected to Eliot's syntax but also reflect a more literal sense than even he probably intended by his famous phrase "the music of poetry." Chapters 3-5 will explore analogous issues in the free verse of Lowell and Wright, with occasional glances at other contemporary poets, such as Baca, Etheridge Knight, and Levertov. Because their works share many similarities, and also many illuminating differences, it seems advantageous to look at them together in the later chapters. For the purpose of introducing their work, however, it will be clearer to look at them separately; I include here summaries of the main points of inquiry for each of these two poets. Lowell, who was at one time probably the best-known living American poet, never quite relinquished his affinity for iambic meters; any examination of his free-verse rhythms therefore has to begin with an exploration of their connection to the iambic pentameter. But there are other rhythmic characteristics of his poetry that, while present in his early iambic poetry, come to the foreground when that meter is weakened. Among these are the idiosyncratic ways he changes the parts of speech of words, his use of newly coined compounds, his fondness for extremely complex noun phrases with many nouns and adjectives, and his frequent use of sentence modifiers before the main clauses of sentences. The first three of these can be grouped together as contributing to the poems' "compression," a word which is often associated with Lowell but which will be defined more carefully here than in previous work. When he reads aloud, Lowell's intonation patterns reflect that compression, especially when, at his most dramatic, intonational phrases go on for line after line with no pauses and no drop in pitch range. The discussion here will center on Lowell's first and best-known book of free verse, Life Studies, but will also refer to occasional selections from his other works.

Introduction

15

Wright's rhythmic character has less to do with compression than with economy. For the most part his words are short, he repeats key words often, and the prepositional phrases that are his most characteristic units of parallelism tend to be rather simple syntactically (though sometimes complex semantically). When he reads aloud, his tempo is painfully slow, and he pauses markedly after every phrase and every line end, again isolating the smallest units to let them resonate. The discussion of Wright will center on his first and best-known book of free verse, The Branch Will Not Break; his translations; his second book of free verse, Shall We Gather At the River; and his best-known later work (which Wright considered his most accomplished), To a Blossoming Pear Tree. The discussion of oral performance in chapter 6 leads us into other speech-related issues, particularly the significance of dialect, since different dialects are widely acknowledged to have different characteristic intonation patterns. Jimmy Santiago Baca (Chicano English), Etheridge Knight (African-American Vernacular English), and Denise Levertov (southern British English) provide three more fascinating examples of the ways ethnically influenced intonational melodies can become structural parts of "the music of poetry." Finally, I will argue that the rhythmic effects found in the work of these poets can be shown to be quantitatively andfor qualitatively different from the analogous effects in their own prose and in other non-poetic language. The frequency of stress, the choice of lexical categories, the intonational melodies, Eliot's two-stress phrases, Wright's use of prepositional phrases, and Lowell's use of compounds are all demonstrably different from the prose norms. This evidence presents a challenge for some popular literary theories of poetics, which frequently imply that different types of discourse differ only in interpretation and (what turns out to be the same thing) in the institutional pressures brought to bear on them, not in their construction. Although the social and individual construction of meaning is an interesting topic, I will try to demonstrate that linguistic form plays a distinct and integral part in that construction.

1. .. What Is Rhythm? (WHO'S ASKING?)

Free- Verse Rhythm: Some Definitions The central effort of this book is to explore the ways Eliot, Lowell, Wright, and the stream of Anglo-American poetry they represent, manipulate rhythm. Each of these poets, like many others, has explicitly named rhythm as one of the crucial and defining features of poetic language and of their own poetics. However, none of them explains very clearly what they mean by rhythm. Indeed, the term rhythm (like its cousin meter) is notoriously vague.1 It has been used over the years to refer to so many different things that anyone who wants to write about rhythm nowadays must first define it. Not, perhaps, in its broad outlines-we all recognize the presence of rhythm in a flamenco dance, a children's game of ring-around-the-rosy, a marching army, a West African drumming group; but what, precisely, is one referring to when one speaks of the rhythm in a particular text? Unfortunately, many of the related terms that one might use to define rhythm and meter are themselves ambiguous or controversial. What follows, therefore, is a definition not only of the word rhythm, but also of a number of other terms which, taken together, amount to an informal sketch of a theory of rhythm. In other words, I am trying to describe not just what rhythm is but how it works.

Isochrony vs. Salience It is clear enough that rhythm has to do with the organization of sequential events such as musical notes or heartbeats or, in the case of linguistic rhythm, sequential elements of language. However, there are at least two points of view on the nature of that organization: some people see rhythm as essentially a matter of timing, and others see it as a matter of cognitive

What Is Rhythm?

17

structure not strictly bound to real time. Members of the structure group define rhythm "as a pattern of events related to one another in terms of salience"; in contrast, members of the timing group see it as "the recurrence of an event at regular periods or intervals" (Couper-Kuhlen 1986, sr), or, in the less precise but more poetic words of Ezra Pound, "a form cut into time" (1934, 198). These two points of view are often referred to in discussions of poetic prosody as the "timers" and the "stressers": the "timers" say a line of iambic tetrameter has four evenly spaced beats, whereas the "stressers" say it has four peaks of prominence. Similarly, some scholars (Turner 1985; Lehiste 1991) have suggested that the poetic line, in various languages, is itself a temporal unit, with a strong tendency toward equal time intervals between line beginnings; others see the line more as a structural unit, regardless of how long it takes to say or read. These two points of view are certainly not mutually exclusive; many events or texts will be equally rhythmic by either definition. However, they do have different logical consequences. The timing view limits rhythmic phenomena to those that occur at equal intervals of time (that is, those which are isochronous), while the cognitive-structure view merely requires that the events be sequential (that is, one after another) and recognizable as patterns of prominence. These are significantly different analytical strategies, even though they may both be analyzing the same phenomenon. In theory, events separated by any time distance at all could be seen as rhythmic by the stressers, but in fact there are practical (even physiological) limits on our attention spans-on how long we can wait for the next shoe to drop, so to speak. (A bit more on that later.) Conversely, an absolutely strict timer could only see perfectly isochronous events as rhythmic, but perfect isochrony is rare if not impossible-in language, in music, and in almost every other domain one could think of. At the same time, only prominent events capture our attention enough to be felt as rhythmic. For example, if I stand on the south bank of a slow, calm river, some molecule of water will pass due north of me exactly every three seconds. This will not give me a sense of rhythm, however, because the isochronous molecules do not stand out from all the other molecules. On the other hand, if breakers crash on the shore by me at even approximately regular intervals, I will hear them as rhythmic. Thus both timers and stressers have to establish some range of time within which prominent, sequential events happen. Nevertheless, they may give rather different accounts of those events. A prototypically rhythmic event such as the ticking of a clock can be seen as rhythmic for at least two different reasons. From a pure timer's point of

r8

What Is Rhythm?

view, the spacing of a ticking noise at one-second intervals is rhythmic by definition, but from the stresser's point of view, what makes it rhythmic is not its inherent regularity but a hearer's organization of it into categories of more and less prominence, the ticks being peaks of prominence and the silent periods in between being valleys. Indeed, the stresser would point out, we tend to organize such peaks and valleys into higher-order categories, even if these categories do not necessarily correspond to any sort of objective features, so that a regular "tick-tick-tick-tick" is heard as "ticktack, tick-tack." Conversely, experiments have shown that a listener who is prepared to hear regularity will hear it even when the events in question are not technically isochronous; for example, a subject who is exposed to electronic clicks at varying intervals will overestimate the shorter intervals and underestimate the longer ones (Couper-Kuhlen 1986, 52). Both the perception of inequality and the perception of equality, where "objective" measurement does not back up these judgments, suggest that perceiving rhythm is a subjective, even interpretive, activity. Much of this perception is done subconsciously and not necessarily even by the conscious parts of the brain: the beating of the heart is urgently rhythmic (and "arrhythmia" can kill a person), but gaining conscious control of heart movements takes training and is never total. Walking, too, depends on a sense of rhythm in movement that we seldom think about. However, we can make this sense conscious, as we do when we synchronize our movements with others' in marching or dancing. The cardiologist and the choreographer cannot be unconscious of rhythm. Thus rhythm is both a lower-order, somatic kind of perception and an aspect of the most complex intellectual activity. The brain itself has unconscious rhythms that organize the firing of columns of neurons and the interplay of different areas of the brain; without these rhythms, thought would be incoherent. Turner (r985) argues that these neural rhythms are the source of poetic isochrony; he posits a worldwide universal of a roughly three-second line and links this line length with the amount of time the brain takes to transfer raw sense impressions to higher-order ganglia. This is a highly speculative claim; Turner's data allow but don't demand this interpretation. Even Lehiste's (1990, 1991) more modest claim that the poetic line, worldwide, is a temporal and essentially isochronous unit must be seen as at best a tendency; there are many obvious exceptions, including some free verse and some classical stanza forms (such as sapphics) that require radically unequal lines. Even if we assume that both scholars' claims are correct, one can draw very different inferences from them: Turner goes on to argue from

What Is Rhythm?

19

his survey of verse forms that strongly metered poetry is not only more natural than free verse but also more beneficial in enhancing important mental processes (stimulating right-brain/left-brain integration). Lehiste makes no such distinctions; she assumes that free verse should be included in her survey of poetic lines and does not note any discrepancies arising from that assumption. Each author could stand in for dozens of others who have taken similar stances, most of them on the basis of less hard evidence. The question of the "naturalness" of free verse depends so heavily on how you ask it (for example, how you define "natural") that it seems incapable of providing surprising answers. What is indisputable, and ultimately more interesting, is that rhythm itself is certainly part of our nature. If that is so, then it must be present in free verse and even prose. The question then is, again, how does it work?

Repetition Repetition is crucial to our perception of rhythm, for only when we recognize sameness or at least parallelism between events can we organize them hierarchically. We arrange individual instances of an event into pairs or groups, and those pairs or groups into larger groupings. The explosion of one firecracker is not a rhythmic phenomenon, but we may perceive the explosions of a string of firecrackers as rhythmic. They will certainly not explode consistently at even intervals of time, but after a few pops we will begin imposing a rhythmic structure on them and hearing unusually long or short intervals between pops as syncopations. Repetition is central to poetic rhythm, too. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins defines rhythm in poetry as any kind of "recurrent figure of sound" (emphasis mine), a phrase we will return to. Repetition, in fact, is important in all forms of discourse. Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Tannen (r989) point out that repetition in conversation adds to coherence: among other benefits, repeated words or phrases make perception more organized by giving hearers points of reference and marking off parts of the speech as conceptual units. In large part, this sense of coherence goes along with a sense of rhythm and results from some of the same structures. For example, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech, each time King repeats the phrase "I have a dream today," he is both making a point and establishing a rhythmic boundary. King establishes this boundary by repeating a clause, but any repeated linguistic unit can serve this purpose, on a larger or smaller scale.

20

What Is Rhythm?

STRESS

Stress is the most frequently studied of these recurrent linguistic structures, for good reason. It is traditionally said in prosodic studies that English is a "stress-timed" language, that is, stressed syllables tend to occur at nearly equal intervals of time. Some phonetic studies have provided experimental evidence of English tendencies toward isochrony: consonants in clusters are shorter than single consonants, a syllable in a sequence of several unstressed syllables is shorter than the same syllable between two stresses, and so forth. Some metrical phonologists, in fact, define stress in terms of timing, seeing prosody as largely a matter of aligning syllables, words, and phrases to a grid of temporal "beats." This is presumably an analogy to beats in music, with the stressed syllables corresponding to "downbeats" and the unstressed or more weakly stressed syllables corresponding to "upbeats" or "offbeats." (For one example, see Selkirk 1984.) But the intervals of time between stresses in English are not really equal, even when the discourse is sung or chanted. As Cutler comments, "The absence of perfect or even approximate isochrony in English stress intervals has been demonstrated over and over again" (1991, 157-58). Nor is the measurable interval between stresses consistently more equal in "stress-timed" languages like English than in "syllable-timed" languages like French. Instead, this difference may be a perceptual one based on the fact that some languages have a more noticeable distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables than others (Dauer 1983, cited in both Cutler 1991 and Lehiste 1991). In fact, it turns out that even beats in music are less isochronous than most of us would have guessed (see, for example, Sundberg 1991a). In acoustically analyzing recordings of Eliot, Lowell, and Wright reading their work aloud, I too have found that the time between stress peaks is highly variable (some intervals are less than so percent of others nearby). Even passages of Eliot and Lowell that seem to have a heavy rhythmic beat on the strong stresses are not truly isochronous. The actual timing is affected by many other factors, such as precisely which phonemes are used, how many unstressed syllables are between the stresses, where the line breaks fall, overall tempo of the discourse, the speaker's emphasis, and so on. Yet even though total isochrony does not physically occur, a sequence of two or three lines may show a striking amount of local isochrony (see chapter 4). It is also possible that previous experimental studies have underestimated

What Is Rhythm?

21

the amount of isochrony in English because of design flaws. The most interesting of these possible flaws is a problem that almost automatically arises from measuring the timing of speech instrumentally. At first glance, it seems natural to measure from the beginning of one syllable (or stressed syllable) to the beginning of the next or, less commonly, from the center of one to the center of the next. But it turns out that this may not be the way that living speakers and hearers perceive the timing of the same utterances. When asked to adjust the timing of a recorded list of one-syllable words so that they sound equidistant, experimental subjects do not separate the beginnings of all the words by the same amount of time. Instead, they consistently place certain words earlier with respect to the beat than others. This has led researchers, beginning with Morton, Marcus, and Frankish (1976), to postulate that each syllable has a "perceptual center" or "P-center" that is the result of its unique phonetic structure. This P-center, which seems to depend both on the particular consonants used before and perhaps after the vowel and on vowel length, is what speakers and hearers perceive as the timing pulse of the syllable, or "moment of occurrence" (Scott 1993, 223). Couper-Kuhlen speculates that if earlier investigators had measured "from the P-center of one stressed word to the P-center of the next stressed word, they would have found a much higher percentage of isochrony in the texts examined" (1993, q). However, there is so far no agreed-upon procedure for finding P-centers in natural speech. Scott (1993) argues, on the basis of experimental evidence, that an algorithm based primarily on the beginning of the vowel sound in each syllable comes close to accounting for the location of P-centers. 2 Her model, interestingly, is based partly on algorithms for the perception of beats and note "attacks" in music, which also depend on "rise time" of the amplitude (loudness, more or less) of notes. This model, unlike some earlier ones, shows promise for instrumentally analyzing connected speech, because it is entirely local: you don't have to look at the whole phrase, or even the whole syllable, at once, but only at the moment of vowel onset. However, as far as I know it has not yet been applied to anything but short experimental test utterances, and thus it sheds little light on whether spoken English is in fact isochronous. In contrast, Couper-Kuhlen (1993) bases her study on listeners tapping along with recorded natural speech; the taps are apparently meant to be the moment of perceived stress (a rough equivalent of a P-center). When the listeners feel that their taps are rhythmic, the passage is noted down as isochronous. This approach is clearly simpler to use on natural speech samples than an acoustic and computational approach would be, and it has

22

What Is Rhythm?

a certain internal logic: since P-centers are perceptual rather than physical, it seems consistent to use human perceptions rather than digital measurements to locate them. The only problem, it seems to me, is that it risks being circular: if subjects tap isochronously in such an experiment, how do we know if we are seeing the rhythm of the P-centers reflected in the tapping, or the rhythm of the tapping projected onto the language, or even the subjects' predilection for rhythmic perception superimposed on irregular (anisochronous) tapping? Even with this rough and generous method, though, Couper-Kuhlen only finds isochronous passages of very limited length, and there are many passages that her subjects found entirely anisochronous. The most we can say about the isochrony debate at this point, then, is that it is very complex and difficult to quantify and depends heavily on how you define your terms. Almost everyone agrees that language is rhythmic, but we don't yet agree either on whether it is isochronous or whether isochrony is an important condition of rhythm. These P-center studies, inconclusive though they are, do add experimental support to an important point: to claim that English stress is rhythmic we need not claim that stresses are equally spaced in time, or literally isochronous; what is important is that speakers and listeners perceive them as somehow temporally equivalent. Stresses are peaks of phonological prominence, and that prominence may make each stress seem to a listener to begin a new unit of time, equivalent though not equal to the previous one (just as each "I have a dream" begins a new unit of the speech, or the introduction of each new speaker at a boring conference session may allow a listener to check off another portion of the total time, even if the speakers do not hold forth at equal length). I've just said that stresses are peaks of phonological prominence, but the actual physical basis of that phonological prominence is not fully understood. Part of the linguistic competence of any speaker of English is to be able to recognize and produce stress in the right places in a phrase or sentence. Some untrained speakers-including some beginning linguistics students- have difficulty consciously locating stress, but they will still notice that something is off if stress is placed on the wrong syllable. Differences in stress placement are one of the ways that we immediately notice someone speaking with a foreign accent, or even a different dialect (as in "po-lice" VS. "po-LICE").

It is rather difficult, however, to get a computer to locate or produce that stress correctly. This is partly because stress has a number of acoustic markers in English: among them, in descending order of significance,

What Is Rhythm?

23

are pitch obtrusion (movement up or down), lengthening of a syllable, unreduced vowel quality (as opposed to the reduced central [i] or [;)]), and increased intensity or loudness (see Beckman 1986; Couper-Kuhlen 1986). Not all of these characteristics need to be present for stress to be perceived, though, and in some circumstances none of them has to be present; hearers hear stress where they know it "should" be. Indeed, even where the acoustic markers are present, they are subject to interpretation because, being defined in relative terms ("obtrusion," "lengthening," "increased"), they depend on the hearer's judgment of what that particular sequence of segments in that particular phonological context would "normally" sound like, if it were not stressed. In other words, we must subconsciously ask, "Obtruded, lengthened, or increased from what?" The relative importance of the different acoustic factors may also vary according to context. A 1978 experiment suggests that pitch is the most important signal in nuclear position (that is, in the strongest stress of the phrase), but duration and vowel quality may be more important in prenuclear position (that is, in syllables that are stressed but not as strongly as the nuclear stress that follows them) (Nakatani, O'Connor, and Aston 1981). Based on these phonetic facts, Beckman (r986, 85-93) questions even the notion that hearers perceive isochrony. Surveying a number of the experiments that supposedly provide evidence for a metrical grid based on timing, she finds much of the evidence to be ambiguous, capable of other interpretations, or called into question by later research. "If there is so little experimental evidence for the phonetic reality of such a timing structure," she writes, "how can we explain the perceived hierarchy of rhythms that the grid was meant to embody? A possible explanation is that the perceived rhythms are not strictly temporal periodicities, but rather a more formal matter." She suggests that the most salient physical signal of prominence may vary at different prosodic levels: from vowel quality at one level to duration (timing) at another to pitch at the highest level. She concludes: "This explanation amounts to a proposal that the metrical grid be interpreted as a metaphor for the particular way that prominent features alternate with nonprominent features at various levels of the prosodic hierarchy in English, rather than as an extrinsic device that controls the timing of the alternations" (93). This metaphor extends well beyond the phonetic components of stress. Prominent features that alternate with nonprominent features at any level of language, whether they be phonological, syntactic, or even semantic,

24

What Is Rhythm?

can be seen to fall into hierarchical organization analogous to the metrical grid. Rhymes alternate with non-rhymes, phonological phrases alternate with pauses, high or rising pitches alternate with low or falling ones, sentence premodifiers alternate with main clauses, parallel syntactic structures alternate with nonparallel ones, and so on. Thus the perception of stress in speech is, like the perception of rhythm generally, a subjective and interpretive activity rather than simply the registering of some objective feature. As Cutler remarks, discussing results of experimentation on how changing small rhythmic variables affect listeners' perceptions, "Listeners process linguistic rhythm in a rather active way" (r99r, r6o). This appears to be true even at the very basic level of parsing words in speech. Speech comes to the listener as an undifferentiated stream of sound, often without obvious spaces between words. How to segment this stream into words and morphemes is a basic problem of speech processing. Cutler suggests that one strategy English speakers employ is to anticipate stressed syllables as potential word beginnings; though not all stressed syllables are word-initial, this approach finds word boundaries correctly about three-quarters of the time. This would provide a motivation for listeners to actively seek out stress, and even to guess ahead of time where it will fall. In written language, of course, the perception of rhythm is still more dependent on interpretation: a written sentence provides much less phonological information and also less pragmatic information than the same sentence when spoken. Written language also lacks paralinguistic clues like facial expressions and gestures. Emphasis, intonation, timing, voice quality, and even stress and accent have to be supplied by readers, based on what they imagine about the writer's or character's intended meaning, emotional attitude, and dialect. These variables do not mean that prosody is entirely unpredictable. Most linguistic accounts of stress have offered rules for a basic, most-likely reading that can be made almost automatically from the syntax of the phrase and the morphology of the words. Speakers and readers will often deviate from this basic pattern, but not without some specific reason. The deviations, frequent though they are, can all be thought of as special cases. Thus readers' interpretations are certainly guided by the rules and conventions of the language, but they still have a good deal of leeway. For example, the stress pattern of a given piece of discourse is greatly dependent on its verbal and pragmatic context. Some phonologists claim that there are no neutral

What Is Rhythm?

25

contexts. As good stage actors know, the stress patterns in a given speech depend on which semantic and phonological contrasts are emphasized, which words are considered important, the overall tempo and emotional tone of the speech, which information is considered new and which old (or which is more "newsworthy," in Schmerling's [1976] formulation), and so on. Even the "citation" form of a word-the form given when a speaker is . asked to pronounce it in isolation- is itself a specialized context, a kind of one-word sentence (as in the answer to the question "How would you pronounce this?"); and the basic or "unmarked" stress pattern for a whole sentence is likewise only appropriate in certain contexts (see Couper-Kuhlen 1986, 48). In addition, stress patterns are also affected by their prosodic context. Strong stresses too close together are frequently moved farther apart by the "rhythm rule": "tennesSEE LEGislature" becomes "TENnessee LEGislature" (Hayes 1983); "exTREME UNCtion" becomes, in one Catholic schoolchild's perception of adults' pronunciation, "Extra MUNCtion" (Lisa Chavez, personal communication 1993). Syllables may also be promoted or demoted to a different level of stress in order to avoid dis-euphonic sequences. That is, we may increase the level of stress on some syllables and decrease the level on others in order to come closer to a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, or of strongly stressed and weakly stressed feet. For example, the first syllable of "confidential" may get more stress than usual when it comes in a phrase like Jerry Lee Lewis's song title "High School Confidential." Not "confiDENtial" but "coNfiDENtial." 3 There are, again, limits on this variability. For example, sentences a and b below are more likely to occur than sentence c even though all three are examples of the same kind of contrastive stress. a. It's THIRteen dollars, not fourteen. b. It's thirTEEN dollars, not thirty. c. ? It's thirTY dollars, not thirteen. The second syllable of "thirty" is too phonologically weak to be stressed easily, even in a contrastive environment. As further evidence that stress is not infinitely variable, there are a number of phonological rules that seem to make reference to lexical stressthat is, to the stress in the "dictionary" or "citation" form of the word, regardless of context. These include historical rules like Verner's Law and synchronic rules like the constraint in English against lax vowels in stressed open syllables: English has words like fsc 'ti/ (settee), but not fsc 'nj,

26

What Is Rhythm?

where /I/ is the vowel of "kid" (Beckman 1986). Despite the normal location of lexical stress, however, contrastive or emphatic stress can go almost anywhere: "He's the manipulaTEE, not the manipulaTOR." INTONATION

A further complication is the close interaction of stress with intonation. (It has even been suggested that they are basically one and the same phenomenon, but this view is disputed.) Together, these are the main prosodic features of English. Intonation is the pattern of pitch, which is roughly equivalent to fundamental frequency. English has a number of intonational "tunes" corresponding to different kinds of sentences; for example, the most common (though not the only) tune for yesjno questions rises at the end, while many declarative sentences fall at the end. These tunes, however, are tied to their sentences by their relationship to stresses, especially the nuclear (strongest, most obtruding) stress. One way of representing them, in fact, is with a series of abstract high (H) and low (L) tones, which are generally aligned with stresses and with the boundaries of the phrase. The tones themselves are marked by glides or jumps in the pitch contour. Thus, the total prosodic melody of an utterance is a product of individual accented syllables and the phrase's overall intonational contour. (For more details, see chapter 5.) Beckman (r986) suggests that the difference between stress and intonation in English is that stress primarily makes syntagmatic contrasts-it organizes sequential units; while intonation primarily makes paradigmatic contrasts-it distinguishes between possible alternative choices. Stress, for example, provides a framework for combining syllables into feet, words, and phonological phrases. Intonation, among many other functions, can let us know whether an utterance is a statement or a question. This difference, though, if it is valid at all, cannot be seen as absolute. Lexical (word) stress can distinguish alternatives such as IMport (noun) and imPORT (verb), but, as we will see in chapter 6, intonational phrasing also has a syntagmatic function in organizing sequential parallel phrases. It's worth remembering, too, that other languages, such as Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, and French, make different uses of pitch and stress (see Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, chap. 8).

What Is Rhythm?

27

Terminology of Versification and Poetic Language PROMINENCE/SALIENCE

So far, we have looked mainly at aspects of rhythm that could be found in any kind of language, not just in poetry. That is because there is not much difference between the underlying nature of rhythm in poetry and in other kinds of language. What is different is the significance of that rhythm, and the extent to which it is manipulated for expressive effects. Indeed, the ways in which particular features of language are made prominent parts of the rhythmic structure are a large part of what makes poetic language different from other genres. Pitch contours and stress cause us to perceive some syllables, and the words that contain them, as prominent. But there are other kinds of prominence as well. Traditional poetic devices such as alliteration, rhyme, and assonance can make particular phonemes or parts of syllables stand out, and larger structures such as anaphora (in its rhetorical, not its grammatical, sense), parallel syntactic structures, or unusual sound combinations (such as "Blouaugh!" in William Carlos Williams's "The Sea Elephant") can mark larger rhythmic units. Versification, or the structuring of lines of poetry, can, in theory at least, be organized around any of these features, or any others that could be arranged into recognizable patterns. As Brogan remarks in the widely read New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, "in poetry every repetition of sounds whether simple ... or complex ... is rhythmic" (1993, ro68). Old English meter, for example, depends on patterns of both stress and alliteration. Some poetry (like some of Ogden Nash's verses, or the inspirational "poems" about gridiron glory that football players used to recite at pep rallies in my high school) seems to require only that each pair of lines rhyme: It doesn't take much to fill their cup; All they want is for somebody to be eaten up. Therefore I say to you, all you poets who are so crazy about meek and mild little children and their angelic air, If you are sincere and really want to please them, why not just go out and get yourselves devoured by a bear. (Nash, "Don't Cry, Darling, It's Blood All Right," I7-2o [(I934) I98o, 7I])

Many of Marianne Moore's poems, like Japanese haiku, have a predetermined number of syllables per line. George Herbert's "Easter Wings" is

28

What Is Rhythm?

organized by the count of typographical letters and spaces in each line to form "wing" shapes. John Barth's "Glossolalia" is organized into stanzas or paragraphs having the same stress pattern as "The Lord's Prayer." The term meter is frequently used to refer to any kind of versifying principle, or, at least as often, it is used interchangeably with the word rhythm, or simply to refer to the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. In linguistics, meter is also used almost interchangeably with rhythm, but linguists typically see it as an aspect of word and syllable structure, and many phonological rules depend on whether a syllable is metrically "strong" (this may mean stressed, long, or closed by a consonant) or "weak." However, it is useful to keep the term meter separate from rhythm, stress, and even from syllable weight. In Cureton's formulation, meter is "our rhythmic response to (relatively) regular pulsations in a perceptual medium, to moment-tomoment alternations of inactivity and activity.... Technically, meter divides the text into a hierarchy of measures articulated by a hierarchy of metrical beats" (1992, 123-24). This rather strict and technical definition keeps meter focused on the simplest perceptible level, the beat; more complex metrical structures can be built up, but only as hierarchies of beats. (It also carefully avoids limiting meter to language.) By this definition, rhythm includes meter, but it also includes other aspects, such as the grouping of a text into phrases. What's more, Cureton argues that while meter in language is sensitive to prominent linguistic features such as stress, it is not identical to any particular feature but has its own autonomous existence. In particular, many people (including me) tend to equate metrical beats with stresses, but they are not necessarily the same thing, and Cureton even argues that metrical contour and stress contour within a poetic line are often at odds, with the strongest stress typically being the last one, but the strongest beat typically being the first one. I am not absolutely convinced by this latter claim, but it is intriguing, and it cannot even be discussed unless we have very precise definitions that distinguish stress from meter. For this reason I will also need to use the term stress pattern to refer specifically to the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables, without making claims about the meter. Thus each stanza of "Glossolalia," being identical in stress pattern to "The Lord's Prayer," is probably but not necessarily identical in meter as well. To get a crude feel for the difference, one might try singing a familiar tune with words whose stressed syllables do not line up with the beat. For example, to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" sing

What Is Rhythm?

29

I shot the sheriff but I

Did not shoot the deputy. The linguistic part of the mind knows where the stresses should be, but the musical part puts prominence on the beats wherever they fall. (I also think of certain Beatles lines, like "You got me so I can't sleep AT night" and "all of THE time.") Still, where there is no extrinsic tune to distort the pronunciation, meter and stress pattern are so closely related that in most free-verse poems it is not easy to find a difference. RHYTHM AND POETICISM

Rhythm, meter, intonation, and stress are features of language in general. This book, though, is mainly concerned with poetry. The next step, then, is to ask whether there is a special relationship between the "recurrent figures" that I have associated with rhythm and language that is specifically poetic. Roman J akobson defines poetic language as that which is "set toward the expression"; that is, it emphasizes its own language-ness rather than its representation of some external object or phenomenon (Steiner 1984, 200-204). The "poetic function" is that which "projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination"; that is, it makes sequential items such as words or poetic feet seem in some sense equivalent to each other (Jakobson 1960, 358). By his definition, the poetic function works in all kinds of language but is only dominant in poetic language.4 Thus in Jakobson's view, although such foregrounding features as rhyme, recurrent iambic feet, and metaphor exist in other genres, they are only definitive of poetic (or literary) language. Boase-Beier (1987), in contrast, defines poetic language as just those kinds of language that are not found in the "standard language," arguing that one finds constructions in poetry that would be considered unacceptable in nonliterary language. For example, she points out that Selkirk (1982) claims that compounding in English is restricted to certain classes of words, so that, for instance, there are no verb-adjective compounds; but such compounds are found "frequently" in poetry, she observes, as in Ted Hughes's "sag-heavy" and "hover-still." According to Boase-Beier, poetic principles interact with the rules of the standard grammar in well-defined ways to cause the relaxation of constraints such as the one against verbadjective compounds. It is not necessary to accept her theoretical claims, including her strict separation of poetic from standard language, to see that

30

What Is Rhythm?

such compounds do sound "poetic" to us, and that it is specifically their unusualness that makes them attractive to poets, and that also makes them prominent. Boase-Beier's claims, and some of her evidence, conflict with the views of a critic such as Fish (1980 ), who has claimed that there is no intrinsic difference between poetic language and non-poetic language except the way it is read, that readers find only and exactly what they are looking for in a piece of writing and therefore find poetry only where they are looking for it. Fish has a point; words such as "hover-still" do occasionally appear in writing one would not normally identify as poetry. However, they are, in BoaseBeier's term, "marginal"; they are highly marked, and sound literary to us. The problem for Fish's view is that such constructions are, again, typical of what is generally identified as poetry, but atypical of non-poetic language. We will explore in chapters 2-5 other features that distinguish poetry from non-poetry, among them certain patterns of stress and intonation. 5 There also seem to be intermediate categories of literary language, such as prose poems and short stories, whose structural characteristics fall between those of the genre we usually call poetry and those of other kinds of language (see chapter 3). The boundaries of these categories shift over time, of course, but they are no less useful for that. At any given time, we expect (consciously or subconsciously) to see certain linguistic features in a book of poetry, others in a book of essays, and still others in a molecular biochemistry textbook.

Expectation and Convention What we expect and what we do not expect has a great deal to do with rhythm, in particular. This is true in two ways. First, as I pointed out above, we have general expectations for the kind of rhythm to be used in a given type of discourse. A novel written entirely in regular dactyls would be strange indeed. Second, rhythm itself can be seen as a kind of structuring of expectations. Russian Formalists such as Jurij Tynjanov and Boris Tomasevskij saw this structuring of expectations, especially the expectation of recurrence, as the defining characteristic of rhythm; "rhythmcreating elements" could be anything that sets up, in a hearer or reader, an expectation that can be satisfied or frustrated (see Steiner 1984, qo-88). 6 Thus iambic meter sets up an expectation that the syllables that follow will also conform to an iambic pattern, and while that expectation will generally be met, it is just those places where it is frustrated ("inverted feet,"

What Is Rhythm?

31

trisyllabic feet, deviations of more arresting kinds) that are the most noticeable-sometimes making the verse more interesting, sometimes making it seem ugly or ill formed (or interesting to one reader, ugly to another)? The meter itself would not be noticeable if its regularity were not a marked deviation from the more heterogeneous metrical patterns of non-poetic language. At the same time, familiarity with the English literary tradition makes us more attuned to perceiving certain patterns such as the iambic pentameter, even in texts that are at best very irregular instantiations of it, such as the disputed passages of Eliot's Four Quartets we will examine in the next chapter. As Brogan comments, "Expectation turns out to be a more powerful force in perception than actual stimulus" (1993, 1067). Here is a more personal example: the first time I read Robert Frost's "For Once, Then, Something" (1979, 225), I took it to be an irregular version of iambic pentameter. The first four lines (with my slightly simplified scansion) 8 will suffice to show why that reading is plausible-and why it is wrong: I

I

X

I

/X

/X

X

X

X

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs I

IX

XXI

X/X/X

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing I

I

X

X

X

I

I

X

/X

X

Deeper down in the well than where the water I

X

I

XX

/X

I

X

I

X

Gives me back in a shining surface picture Look at the first line. It is eleven syllables long, the right number for iambic pentameter with a "feminine" (unstressed) ending. The line ends with a sequence of three iambs (including the feminine ending). The line begins with a trochee ("others"); the trochaic first foot is the most common substitution in traditional iambic verse. The only unusual feature, from the standpoint of foot-substitution analysis of iambic pentameter, is the trochaic second foot. Still, this line could easily fit into many clearly iambic pentameter poems. What makes it not iambic pentameter is the fact that every line follows exactly the same pattern: two trochees, three iambs, feminine ending. A reader, after three or four of these lines, comes to expect not xfxfxfxfxf but fxfxxfxfxfx. One deviation from the norm is merely

a variation, but several repetitions of the same variation make it the new norm. The embarrassing truth, however, is that the pattern established by these lines is not a new norm at all, but a very regular imitation of the classical Greek hendecasyllabic line (a trochee followed by a dactyl followed

32

What Is Rhythm?

by three trochees; the first and last trochees may be replaced by spondees [Turco 1986, 74]). Readers familiar with Greek verse will probably recognize the form sooner, because they have a ready-made label to put on it. But even readers familiar only with the most common English verse forms will find their iambic pentameter expectations subverted; until they recognize that these lines represent a separate form, they will feel there is something not quite right about them. EXPECTATION IN MUSIC THEORY AND POETICS

The importance of expectation has parallels in music theory. Narmour's "implication-realization model" of melodic cognition (1990, 1991), a synthesis of cognitive psychology and music theory, "asserts that listeners process all melodic intervals as primitive, bottom-up generative events. Generative events are of two basic types- those emanating from small intervals, which create expectations of continuing similarity, and those coming from larger ones, which create expectations of differentiated change" (1991, 48). Narmour goes on to compare these primitives of melodic cognition to our cognition of intonation contours in speech, suggesting that they may even be handled by the same neurological pathways. Although the details of this theory are beyond the grasp of a musical layman like me, the most relevant claim, for our purposes here, is that listeners' understanding of melody is a constant negotiation between expected intervals, implicated by what has come before, and actual ones, which may or may not be what was expected. Also, similar to what we have said about poetic rhythm, Narmour argues that expectation is generated both by the "bottom-up" processes mentioned above and by "top-down" systems such as styles and genres, which are learned and often conscious rather than "primitive" (1991, 53-55). Along similar lines, Sundberg (1988, 1989) and his colleagues, in trying to generate rules for a synthesizer to simulate the interpretation of music by skilled musicians (that is, to elaborate on the minimal information provided by the notes and other symbols on a page of sheet music), found it necessary to postulate, among other things, rules of "melodic charge" and "harmonic charge" to make certain notes and chords more prominent. The rules for these are precisely defined, but the basic idea is that the more frequently a given note of the scale occurs in a given context, or the more likely a given chord is in a given progression, the less "charge" it has. In other words, the less an audience is likely to expect a certain note or chord, the more the musician stresses it. This makes sense both in terms of pragmatics-it reassures the audience that it is not a wrong note-and in terms

What Is Rhythm?

33

of information structure: an unexpected note or chord carries more information than a completely predictable one (as long as it is not so unpredictable as to seem chaotic}. In this respect, musical "charge" is analogous to stress in language, but more precisely parallel to emphasis (where emphasis refers to semantic or intentional relations as well as to purely morphophonological ones). There are other similarities between musical and linguistic rhythm. The synthesizer must be given rules to shorten or lengthen notes, sharpen or flatten pitches, and increase or decrease amplitude in order to heighten contrasts (between long and short notes, high and low notes, large and small intervals, and so on) and to mark phrase and subphrase units. This parallels a speaker's use of stress, intonation, and duration to mark semantic contrasts and to mark off syntactic units. The musical rules also slow the overall tempo to mark the end of a larger unit such as a movement or whole piece, just as speakers tend to lengthen the end of a phrase (Cruttenden 1986, 39). Intriguingly, the mathematical function or curve that seems to work best in music is one that corresponds almost exactly to the curve of a runner's footsteps slowing from full speed to a stop. This fits in with the common intuition that many of the principles of rhythm carry over from basic body functions to music, to the change of the seasons, to language; that is, that they are in some sense "organic" (Levertov [1965] 1973) or "natural" (Hass 1984} or at least not confined to a particular domain of perception. Some theorists, in fact, argue that musical and linguistic rhythm are one and the same phenomenon. Our main concern here, of course, is with the latter domain, language, and more particularly with poetic language. Writers as diverse as Tynjanov, Edward Sapir (1921), and James Wright (Smith198o, 38-39) have identified rhythmic expectation as the defining quality of poetry. What sets up this expectation? Even in iambic pentameter, one of the best-defined English verse systems, the answer is complicated. The expectation is some combination of the number of beats per line (five) and the binary alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables (xfxfxfxfxf), but poets disagree on how closely this expectation must be fulfilled, and theorists disagree on how this expectation is constructed mentally (foot by foot, phrase by phrase, or line by line). These differences lead to different predictions about what will count as a well-formed line of iambic pentameter. Other, more "top-down" rhythmic expectations can be involved as well. For example, in Paradise Lost we expect enjambed lines to flow into one another and form rhythmic units (verse paragraphs) much larger than a

34

What Is Rhythm?

line; in "The Rape of the Lock," in contrast, we expect that each line will be a complete syntactic and intonational unit (will be end-stopped, in other words) and that each rhyming pair of lines will form a larger unit. All of these expectations may be frustrated from time to time in a given poem, but they are quite conventional, and a knowledgeable reader will instantly look for them. They derive not only from local, line-by-line observations, but also from general knowledge about the literary period and the specific poet's style. In free verse, the conventions dictating what to look for are not nearly so strong. In fact, the "free" part of "free verse" really refers to the absence of some traditional expectations. Some readers seem to see free verse as simply very loose instances of traditional metered verse, so they look for iambs, anapests, and so on. Eliot wrote, "Any line can be divided into feet and accents" ([1917] 1965, 185); Auden said that his ideal reader would be alert for obscure Greek feet (Fussell 1979, 3); Finch (1993) sees "the ghost of [traditional] meter" lurking and providing meaning in famously "modern" poems. Other readers, however, ignore the versification and read the text strictly for its prose meaning. Still others, such as Charles Hartman, see the relation between the line and the syntactic unit as the crucial feature, so they look for enjambment or "tension" there; or, like Tynjanov, they see the mere fact that graphemic lines divide up the continuous utterance into units or "rhythmical periods" as crucial. Beyond these possibilities, one can look for patterns smaller than the foot or larger than the line. In theory, a "recurrent figure of sound" might be any size and occur at any level of phonology, and indeed there is no obvious reason to think that rhythm must depend entirely on figures of sound rather than, say, figures of syntax or figures of semantics. In fact, in the case of sign languages, rhythm must depend on kinetic, rather than acoustic, prominences. We may be biologically disposed to respond more automatically to some types of rhythmic stimuli than others, and low-level sound prominences would certainly be among the more hard-wired. Still, rhythm is a mental ordering principle, applicable to any sequential phenomenon; it is not the sequential phenomenon itself. Of course, free verse may make use of the same rhythmic materials as metered verse: repetitions of onsets of syllables (alliteration), nuclei of syllables (assonance), rimes of syllables (rhyme), patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables ("meter"), or counts of syllables per line. But it is not limited to those devices. Couper-Kuhlen (1986, 52) cites experimental evidence that sensory impressions must be spaced close together (no more than three seconds apart,

What Is Rhythm?

35

according to one source) to be perceived as rhythmic. This would greatly limit the kinds of linguistic phenomena that could be considered rhythmic figures. Segments, syllables, feet, and short-to-medium words would be possible units, but not longer phrases, lines, clauses, or larger units such as paragraphs or stanzas. This three-second limit, however, is for very simple stimuli and does not take into account the possibility of hierarchically structured groupings of sensory impressions -like the return of a musical theme after some variations, or the stress pattern of "The Lord's Prayer" repeated over and over. As we will see, free verse, as compared to older English meters, being less narrowly defined by the syllable and the foot, places more emphasis on recurrences among larger units and nonphonological units: the word, the compound, the syntactic phrase,· the line (which may or may not be a phonological unit), the prosodic or intonational phrase, the stanza (a grouping of phrases and lines). Structuring with units other than the foot can, in fact, be considered a defining characteristic of free-verse composition. In order to illustrate this characteristic, though, we need to define several of these units more precisely, since they are sometimes used to mean different things.

Some Levels of Organization The glossary provides definitions for most of the linguistic terms used in this book; readers can refer to it as they go along. In this section I will discuss only those terms which are controversial or ambiguous, and which therefore could cause confusion. I am assuming that all the linguistic units up to the level of the foot-feature, phoneme (segment), onset, rime, syllable-are fairly well understood, and that if there are controversies about their status, those controversies do not affect the arguments expressed here. Similarly, although the categorization of constituents at the level of clause, sentence, and multiple-sentence units is often not agreed upon, these disagreements do not greatly affect the arguments of this book either. Traditional grammatical definitions of these categories will be adequate. (Readers unfamiliar with linguistic terminology should, again, refer to the glossary.) However, the intermediate units of discourse with which we will spend most of our time- feet, words, and phrases- may require more discussion. These terms are ambiguous in several ways, and are central to discussions of prosody; it will be important to establish which meaning of each word is being referred to.

36

What Is Rhythm? THE FOOT

One source of confusion is the fact that literary and linguistic prosodists often use the same words in different senses. For example, the term foot in traditional versification refers to a division of the poetic line, and does not have a fixed relationship to word or phrase structure. 9 That is, in a line of iambic verse, since it is assumed that feet will be two syllables each, the first and second syllables will normally be considered the first foot, the third and fourth syllables are the second foot, and so on. There are exceptions, but that is the basic assumption. In metrical phonology, however, the foot is identified not in terms of its position in the line, but in terms of the structure first of the word and second of the phrase. For our purposes, a simplified compromise version will be enough: a foot is a sequence of one or more syllables, one and only one of which is stressed.10 This definition of the foot is intended merely to provide a framework for describing recurrent metrical patterns, in the absence of a stable poetic line-length such as pentameter. It has the advantage of being simple and flexible, but has at least two potential weaknesses: (r) Under this definition, some of the traditional feet of classical prosody, such as spondees (two stressed syllables), pyrrhics (two unstressed syllables), amphimacers (three syllables, the first and last of which are stressed), and choriambs (four syllables, first and last stressed, with variations), cannot be described as single feet, but only as pairs or parts of feet. However, that does not seem to be a major disadvantage in analyzing free verse, where a pattern generally has to go on longer than two or three syllables to be recognized anyway. (2) Under my definition of the foot (as under most traditional poetic definitions), a single line might be analyzed into feet differently by different readers. For example, imagine a poet had written the line "Republicans eat the poor by the light of the moon." I take the stress pattern to be: X/XX

I

XI

X

X/

X

X/

Republicans eat the poor by the light of the moon.

One could claim that the first two feet are an iamb followed by an anapest (x/ xxf: repub: licans eat), an amphibrach followed by an iamb (xfx xf: republi: cans eat), two amphibrachs (xfx xfx: republi: cans eat the), a second paeon followed by a monosyllabic foot (xfxx f: republicans: eat), and so on. Again, though, I do not see this ambiguity as a drawback. If it is true, as I argued earlier in this chapter, that people actively shape the rhythms they hear based partly on their own predispositions, it is natural that some will be listening more for iambs, some more for amphibrachs. Some will be

What Is Rhythm?

37

paying more attention purely to metrical repetitions and will hear the line as all iambs and anapests (repub : licans eat: the poor: by the light: of the moon). Others will be more influenced by word and phrase boundaries and will hear foot boundaries as coinciding with them wherever possible (republicans: eat: the poor: by the light: of the moon). Still, some divisions do seem more likely than others; for example, I can't think why anyone would hear it this way: repub : licans eat the : poor by : the light of the : moon. Some theorists would argue that this definition of the foot is at odds with some psychological and linguistic descriptions of rhythmic perception. Music theorists and perceptual psychologists tend to see all metrical units as head first, as in musical measures: strong-weak or strong-weakweak. Metrical phonologists have a similar outlook, except that they tend to see all feet as binary, with different languages preferring either headfirst or head-last configurations: either all monosyllables and trochees, or all monosyllables and iambs, with trisyllabic feet either impossible by definition or exceptional. (Units with more than two or three syllables exist only at higher levels in the metrical hierarchy, as a result of combining feet into larger binary units.) Other prosodic theorists argue that the foot is simply not a useful concept; Cureton (1992), for example, points out that traditional accounts of "rising" and "falling" feet conflate the purely metrical phenomenon of beats with other levels of analysis, such as phrasing and tempo. Among all these conflicting definitions, mine has only this advantage: it allows me to refer most easily to the tradition of English criticism (going back at least to Coleridge and probably to the Renaissance) without violating too many tenets of linguistic theory. Since the word foot is hopelessly ambiguous anyway, we will defer to the doctrine of use and try to use the term in a way that is compatible with the widest and best-known circle of users. Where more specific technical concepts are needed, I prefer to introduce more specific words. The musical term measure, for example, seems the most natural name for a unit in the structure of beats and off-beats, divorced from stress, phrasing, sound quality, and semantics. Similarly, because of the above-mentioned ambiguities, the quantitative stress-pattern analysis in later chapters refers not to feet but to stringsa one-dimensional category that virtually ignores all aspects except stress. xj (unstressed-stressed) is one possible string, jx is another, xjxxjxjx is another, and so on. jxxxxxxxxxxj is also a string, but not one that actually occurs in any human language.

38

What Is Rhythm?

THE WORD

Feet and words are independent levels of analysis; a foot may contain more or less than a single word. Yet they are not completely independent. As we have seen, readers and listeners may be predisposed to hear foot boundaries as coinciding with word boundaries and even morpheme boundaries. Usually it is clear where a word boundary is, but occasionally that is not true. What is a "word" and what is not a "word" might at first glance seem obvious, but again there is a difference between the meaning of the common term, which corresponds roughly to anything that would be set off by spaces in print, and the "prosodic word," which may sometimes be only one morpheme of a longer print word (Beckman 1986). Compounds also create problems for the print conception of the word, since some compounds are printed as one word (weathervane) and some as two or more (high school), though both types have the same characteristic compound stress pattern and are syntactically equivalent (see chapter 3). A clitic phrase consisting of two or more words that are not divided by pauses or strong junctures may also in some cases be treated as a single phonological word. Here again, because clarity seems more important than precision, I will use the word word in its colloquial sense, meaning typographical word, and discuss compounds and other morphological issues separately. THE PHRASE

The term phrase is also used differently by different disciplines, but even among linguists it is ambiguous, for it refers to several different kinds of groupings of words. Anthony Woodbury, in his discussion of "rhetorical structure" in a Yup'ik Eskimo story,11 finds "at least five potentially independent types of recurrent, hierarchic organization," four of which involve the concept of the "phrase": pause phrasing, prosodic phrasing, syntactic constituency, and adverbial-particle phrasing (r987b, 176). Adverbialparticle phrasing is not as relevant for our English-language literary poets, though "discourse markers" such as "And ... "and "Well ..."may be important signals of structure, even in English poetry. The three other types of phrase are quite important. Woodbury, like other ethnopoeticists such as Bright, Hymes, and Sherzer, organizes prosodic phrasing into "lines" and several higher levels of groupings of lines. Because I want to reserve the word line specifically

What Is Rhythm?

39

for typographical lines of poetry, I will replace what Woodbury calls "the line" with the term intonational phrase. Intonational phrases are stretches of speech terminated by characteristic pitch sequences and followed usually, but not always, by pauses. They are not restricted to single words, nor do they pertain to any one level of syntactic constituency (that is, syntactic phrasing). As in most languages, a relatively high pitch at the end of a phrase tends to indicate that the speaker has more to say, while a lower (or steeply falling) pitch indicates that nothing more need follow (Bolinger 1978, 182; see chapter 5 for a much more extensive discussion of intonational meaning). On the basis of these final pitch contours, the intonational phrases can be grouped into larger units.U Woodbury calls these units "subgroup," "group," and "section." Brown and Yule (1983, 101) call one level of such grouping the "paratone," by analogy with the "paragraph." In poetry, the stanza is often, though not always, read as an intonational unit, with rising or level pitches at the ends of most intonational phrases, but a falling or other finalizing contour at the end of a stanza. Parallelism between lines and phrases may be emphasized by repeated intonational melodies. Closely related but not identical to the intonational phrase is the pause phrase. It is simply a period of speech marked off at both ends by a period (of varying length) of silence. (Because English has less tolerance than some languages, such as Yup'ik, for long periods of silence, we should probably include "filled pauses" as well as actual silence.) Woodbury (1987b) loosely organizes pause phrases into "clusters," with relatively shorter pauses between phrases within the cluster, relatively longer pauses before and after the cluster. Typically, pause phrasing and prosodic phrasing coincide with each other, but they may differ (a kind of enjambment), creating marked expressive effects. A reader may pause in the middle of an intonational phrase or run on from the end of one intonational phrase to the beginning of the next without pause. Pause phrasing, like intonational phrasing, is highly individual: Wright's pause phrases are much shorter on average, and his pauses longer, than Lowell's. Finally, syntactic constituency means here just what it means in generative syntactic theory: a syntactic constituent is a single syntactic unit in a hierarchy from lexical categories (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.), to maximal phrase projections (verb phrases, noun phrases, etc.), to clauses, to sentences (paraphrasing Woodbury 1987b, 188). A syntactic phrase, such as a noun phrase or a verb phrase, may or may not also be a pause phrase and/or prosodic phrase, so again there is the possibility of expressive enjambment. Chapter 4 will have more to say about the expressive effects of

40

What Is Rhythm?

enjambment, but we need to pause here for a moment to consider its theoretical implications. OVERLAPPING, MUSIC, AND RHYTHMIC STRUCTURE

Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) propose, as part of their theory of musical structure, that rhythmic groups do not overlap, either on the same level of the rhythmic hierarchy or even on different levels. Thus a note will belong to one musical phrase or another but not both at the same time; a phrase will belong to one larger section or another but not both; and a group at a higher level will contain a whole number of smaller groups-that is, a group boundary at a higher level of the hierarchy will always coincide with some boundary at each lower level. Lerdahl and Jackendoff suggest that their model of rhythmic structure, in particular, may represent a global cognitive function that works in language and other activities in much the same way it does in music. Cureton (1992) takes this suggestion further, and explicitly applies it to a theory of poetic rhythm. He describes rhythm as a broad-based form of cognition that comprises a hierarchy of rhythmic units from small phonological units to larger syntactic, semantic, and discourse units. He asserts that the nonoverlapping condition applies to rhythmic phrasing in language as well. Where there is ambiguity-a phrase that could belong to either a preceding or a following higher-level group-he argues that this ambiguity is aresult not of overlap but of reanalysis: we may perceive it first as part of one grouping, then, reading or listening further, change our minds and construe it with a different grouping. However, there is reason to question this aspect of Cureton's theory. It may be valid as a limitation on short-term attention. However, it's not necessarily true that, if an element is ambiguous, we first see it as belonging to one grouping, then change our minds and see it in the other, and keep it there. Instead, it may keep shifting back and forth in our minds, or both may seem right at the same time. The musical analogy is not the only one available here: 13 Several kinds of linguistic structure may have dual membership.l 4 For example, in Kahn's (1976) analysis of syllable structure, a consonant between two vowels is often "ambisyllabic," belonging perceptually and structurally to both the preceding and following syllable. This analysis solves enough problems that it is accepted by many phonologists, despite the theoretical messiness of allowing overlapping syllables.

What Is Rhythm?

41

Similar things happen even in discourse-level rhythmic groupings. In Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, he repeats phrases, notably "I have a dream today," that attach intonationally to the preceding discourse but syntactically and semantically to the following discourse. There is a pause and intonation break after "today" but not before "I"; yet the syntax and sense goes on: "I have a dream today [pause] that little children ...." The repeated refrain both ends one rhythmic unit and begins the next. It seems that "non-overlapping" is not a universal rule of cognition. It is also, I would argue, not a universal rule of poetic rhythm: But the last hophead is gone With the quick of his name Bleeding away down a new wall Blank as his nails. (Wright, "Inscription for the Tank," 13-16 (197I, 142])

Each line is a rhythmic unit (at least, that's how Wright read them aloud, with strong pauses and intonation breaks between lines). At the next larger level of grouping, it seems to me that the second line, in particular, belongs paired with both the first and the third one; that is, we hear both " ... is gone with the quick of his name ..." and " ... with the quick of his name bleeding away down a new wall." In the first pairing we tend to go on to interpret the third line as meaning the "hophead" is bleeding (scraping the wall with his nails). In the second pairing the name (letters, ink, figurative identity) is bleeding away. It does not seem possible to me to narrow it down to a single "correct" reading; Wright could have disambiguated the two with punctuation, in writing, or with different lengths of pauses and different intonation, in speech, but he did not. His unpunctuated line endings and cautious, rather flat oral reading preserve the ambiguity, both semantic and rhythmic. We hear both pairings at once, and what's more, the overlapping rhythmic units are a big part of what makes the passage feel poetic. Feet, words, and the different types of phrases are the linguistic units whose patterning will be discussed at the greatest length in succeeding chapters. Each can be repeated exactly or with variations to create a rhythmic figure, and all can overlap with each other and with typographical lines to create rhythmic complexity at different levels-that is, different types of enjambment. They are by no means the only potentially rhythmic units, but they are the most consistently rhythmic, and for that reason perhaps the

42

What Is Rhythm?

most complex. Their interaction will force the introduction of new, multilevel rhythmic categories, such as the two-stress half-line syntactic frames we will encounter in the next chapter.B It is partly because of this complexity that I have chosen to begin my applied analysis with T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Although many would argue that Four Quartets is not strictly free verse, it is a very useful transitional case. As Eliot experiments with versions of iambic meter, medieval strongstress meter, and an idiosyncratic type of formulaic syntactic parallelism, he reveals the potential of many of the rhythmic devices that will show up in the next generation of free-verse poets. Eliot's prosody is more solemn and more regular than many of his successors', but it represents a rhythmic motion that will continue, in starker form, in later poets like James Wright, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and even in more avant-garde artists.

2 ...

Eliot's 'Four Quartets' A TRANSITIONAL CASE

AS I mentioned in the introduction (and as few would dispute), Eliot's rhythmic experimentation has been much admired and much imitated by succeeding generations of poets. It has seemed to offer ways of exploiting the musical potential and the traditions of English verse without mechanically following the old metrical stereotypes. Yet there has been little agreement about the nature of the rhythmic structures Eliot actually produced. His poetry is of an interesting intermediate type, between the traditional accentual-syllabic verse forms of earlier poets like Browning, Yeats, and Swinburne (as well as later ones like Auden and Wilbur) and the less stress-oriented forms of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and their descendants. Another factor that contributes to the conflicting critical opinions is that Eliot's prosody also changed over time. By the 1940s, when he finished his last major nondramatic poem, Four Quartets, both Eliot's unique blend of different rhythmic principles and the uncertainty readers have had in determining the nature of those principles were at full maturity. Eliot's observation in 1917 that "any line can be divided into feet and accents" (r965, r85) anticipates the problems of ambiguity that have split metrical criticism of Four Quartets into apparent irreconcilability. Those critics who do choose to divide the line into "feet and accents" find that the Quartets "generally use the blank verse base of 'Prufrock' and the other early poems" (Matthiessen 1958, 134) or that they are made up of recognizable fragments of the blank-verse line (Hartman 1980, III-29). Others (often on the basis of Eliot's critical prose more than his poetry) call Eliot's poetry "free verse" and assume it has no meter. The largest number of critics, however, see the verse form of most sections of the poem as accentual,1 and agree on a definition of it as four or sometimes five strongly stressed syllables per line, with an entirely indeterminate distribution of unstressed syllables. 2

44

A Transitional Case

This chapter neither fully endorses nor fully rejects any of the conflicting approaches. Rather, I argue that the poetic rhythms of Four Quartets are in fact regularizations of some general tendencies of spoken English and that Eliot has manipulated these rhythms to create a basically accentual versification, built from recurring syntactic and intonational units. In this accentual structure, however, specific patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are not entirely indeterminate; they play a consistent and important mle in versification. When, in later chapters, we look at true free verse written by later poets, we will find little that had not already been tried by Eliot, just as there is little in Eliot that had not been done previously by someone. What is interesting is the particularity of the way each poet combines these principles of organization. We can begin to explore Eliot's meter by noting some points upon which those who have written on the subject do seem to agree. Whatever the "metric" is, for example, it is "flexible" or "loose." That is, the meter is free enough that Eliot can do many different things with it. For example, he can be "prosaic" and "colloquial" in some passages, intense and lyrical or even "didactic" in others. Accentual forms are often assumed to be less intense, more colloquial, than iambic ones, though this is a dubious assumption. Flexibility, of course, is also the primary characteristic and philosophical ground of free verse, but again this may or may not imply colloquialism and lack of intensity. Regardless of the subjective effects of the different prosodic systems, though, it is "flexibility" that allows Eliot to move from one to the other, not only from iambic/trochaic verse forms to accentual ones, but from one type of accentual line to another: six-stress to four-stress to three-stress to five-stress. Several critics (for example, Frye 1957a; Wimsatt and Beardsley 1959; Gardner 1949; Gross 1964) have pointed out that even within a given passage there may be lines of more than one sort, and I will argue that in fact sometimes a single line can be well formed in more than one system at a time. Gardner notes that Eliot's "new metric" provides a framework in which he can employ "at will rising or falling rhythms, and ... fall into the evenness of duple or the ripple of triple rhythms, according to the particular effect he wants" (1949, 29 ). Gross, though he is actually referring to The Waste Land, also puts it aptly: Eliot "alternates two metrical modes. More precisely, he sets two limitations on prosodic freedom. At one pole ... [is] a line of four strong stresses," while "blank verse is the other metrical pole of the poem" (1964, 187).

A Transitional Case

45

This "great rhythmic flexibility," according to Gardner and others, in turn allows Eliot to incorporate "speech rhythms" in his verse-"speech rhythms" as opposed to, for example, the rhythm of blank verse, which is "marked as poetical" and therefore supposedly "unsatisfactory" to modern poets. (It is hard to imagine anyone speaking many parts of The Waste Land or Four Quartets spontaneously; still, they are not in the traditional meters of nineteenth-century English poetry.) Gardner locates the origins of Eliot's new metric in Sweeney Agonistes: "Sweeney begins with speech .... Mr. Eliot tries to discover whether by stressing the characteristic rhythms of this speech we arrive at something that can be called verse" (1949, 25). Nevertheless, although several critics mention that Eliot uses "the rhythms of speech," few even try to describe linguistically what rhythms those are. 3 To find such a description, we must look first not to modern English, but to its medieval ancestors. Several critics, including Gross (1964), Salingar (1962), and especially Gardner (1949), have pointed out the similarity between the accentual pattern of Four Quartets and that of medieval accentual verse, which has also been described as having the rhythms of spoken English as its base. 4 Although the basis of Old English verse is controversial, the Middle English alliterative line, at least, is the great precursor of modern accentual verse. The typical line in such poems as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Cleanness consists of four or five stressed syllables, a variable number of unstressed syllables, and a strong medial caesura. It is not hard to see the resemblance between this and the description we have already seen of Eliot's four-stress line. One can easily take this analogy too far. The Middle English and Old English lines differ in important ways from Eliot's (not to mention from each other). The length of the line, the use of alliteration, the distribution of unstressed syllables, and the relationship between the first half and the second half of the line are all different. But the similarities are strong enough to provide a starting point for investigating Eliot's versification. For while the connection with medieval verse has been pointed out, no one has thought to apply to Eliot certain techniques of analysis that have been used with good results on medieval poems.

Half-Lines and Syntax THE HALF-LINE

To begin with, the principal unit of scansion in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English accentual verse is not the four-stress line but the two-stress half-

46

A Transitional Case

line. Although this division of the line has the fortunate effect of simplifying analysis by reducing the number of possible patterns (fewer words and fewer syllables make for fewer possible combinations), the main reason for using the shorter unit is the strength and regularity of the medial caesura in this verse. Now, the existence of such a caesura in the "four-stress" line of Four Quartets has already been noted. It is not always as strongly marked or as regular in its position in the line as the break in Old and Middle English verse, but there is still a good case to be made for the half-line as a prosodic unit in Four Quartets. Take, for example, the following groups of lines from "Burnt Norton" (BN), "The Dry Salvages" (ns), and "Little Gidding" (LG): Time present : and time past Are both perhaps present: in time future And time future: contained in time past. (BN 1:1-3)

There is no end of it, : the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering: of withered flowers, To the movement of pain: that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea : and the drifting wreckage, The bone's prayer: to Death its god. : : Only the hardly, : barely prayable ... (DS

2:79-83)

In the dark time of the year. : Between melting and freezing The soul's sap quivers. :There is no earth smell Or smell of living thing. :This is the spring time But not in time's covenant. :Now the hedgerow (LG I:II-14)

These three examples illustrate several points about the caesura: r. While there are not always exactly two strong stresses on either side of the caesura, normally there are. Even when there are more or fewer than four stresses in a line, the line is very likely to have its most noticeable syntactic/phonological break approximately in the middle. 2. There are often nonmetrical stylistic effects associated with the relationship between the two halves of the line. For example, in the above examples a word or concept in the first half of the line will be mirrored in a different form in the second half: time present/time past, present/future, time future/time past, withering/withered, movement/motionless, pain/ painless, drift/ drifting, bone j death, prayer j god, hardly /barely. In the third group of lines the pairings go from one second-half-line to the next first-

A Transitional Case

47

half: smell/smell, time/time's. Aside from any semantic or semiotic functions of this structure, the fact that it exists at all is evidence in favor of the half-line as a structural (though not necessarily a metrical) unit. 3· Intermixed with the four-stress lines are sometimes lines of two, six, or eight stresses. These, too, can usually be divided easily into sub-lines of two stresses each. 5 For example, line 83 of the passage from DS divides naturally into two halves of four stresses each (each equivalent to a normal whole line), and each of these halves breaks into two quarter-lines of two stresses each (equivalent to a normal half-line). Thus the two-stress half-line might be considered even more basic and consistent than the fourstress line. 4· Caesurae, as well as line breaks, normally coincide with the strongest syntactic and phonological boundaries, coming at the boundaries between syntactic constituents and often coinciding with punctuation marks (which we can take as rough indicators of phonological phrase boundaries). More surprisingly, in the lines from LG, every caesura falls on a sentence boundary, while the line breaks coincide with boundaries of a lower order, phrase rather than sentence boundaries. Thus in these lines, at least, the caesura is even stronger than the line break and the half-line is even more sharply marked off than the line. Lev)', noting a related phenomenon, calls attention to "the incongruence of line division and clause division, resulting in the surprising frequency of enjambment" in Eliot's poetry (including, but not limited to, Four Quartets) (1959, 54). She cites several examples to show how the two are slightly out of phase, including the famous opening lines of The Waste Land, where the last word of most lines belongs syntactically with the next line ("breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing f ..."); the end of "Choruses from 'The Rock,' " where rhetoric seems to overflow the boundaries of the lines so that one poetic line may take up three lines on the printed page; and the following lines from The Waste Land: In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the chapel, only the wind's home. (5:387-89)

For Lev)', this "predominance of the division into clauses over the division into lines" (a type of enjambment) leads to "the impression of a proximity to colloquial prose" (54). However, she points out that "while limits between rhythmic and syn-

A Transitional Case

48

tactic sections are being suppressed, new divisions are introduced into the inside of the sections; while the dividing points between the sections are invalidated, those inside them are strengthened" (57). That is, although enjambment causes one line to flow into the next and one sentence to flow into the next, it creates divisions or junctures within sentences and within lines. Most important for us, it creates strong caesurae within the lines. What Levy does not see, probably because she focuses more on the earlier poems and less on Four Quartets, is the logical extension of this tendency: when medial caesurae are so regular as to establish a norm rather than being felt as variations, they attain nearly equal status with the line endings as dividing points for the flow of language. In passages such as the ones above from The Waste LandV and LG 1, the divisions into lines and the divisions into clauses have returned to a kind of fixed relationship or regularity-but they have shifted off by a half-line or a half-clause; instead of Beginning Beginning

end. end.

we have end. end.

Beginning Beginning...

SYNTACTIC "FORMULAE" OR FRAMES

Even after we have recognized this curious relationship between clause and line it remains difficult to define, because the half-lines do not always correspond precisely to syntactic constituents of the sentence. A useful parallel, however, can be found in the "oral-formulaic theory" that has been proposed for Old English and other traditional verse forms. This theory originated in Milman Parry's work on epithets for gods and heroes in the epics of Homer (1971). He found that many such epithets were "formulaic" in that they were repeated regularly in the same position in the line, apparently more to satisfy the demands of meter than to add any significant information. A poet who memorized enough of these formulae would never be at a loss for a phrase to fill out a line: he could simply insert the appropriate formula. Such a skill has obvious value for an oral poet composing spontaneously, and Parry used the existence of formulae (together with other factors) as evidence of oral composition. Parry (1953) and Albert B. Lord (1960) developed the theory further with evidence from living Serbo-Croatian poet-singers, and Francis P.

A Transitional Case

49

Magoun Jr. applied the theory to repeated or nearly repeated phrases in Old English poetry (1953). Since Magoun's original work the theory has been both amplified and criticized by a number of scholars (see, for example, Watts 1960). I present the concept only as an analogy, of course. No one has suggested that Eliot composed his poems spontaneously and orally before an audience, like an ancient bard, and I am not about to propose it; but there are some suggestive structural similarities between Four Quartets and supposedly "oral-formulaic" Old English poetry. At first, formulae were defined as largely lexical; that is, while two instances of the same formula did not have to be identical in every detail, they were composed of the same words, with only minor substitutions and inflectional differences. There are some parallels to these lexical formulae in the Four Quartets. For example, LG I has eight closely related variations on or repetitions of the clauses "If you came this way ..." and "It would be the same ...." Similar word-for-word repetitions occur elsewhere in the poem as well. Even so, one cannot claim that a very large percentage of the poem is made up of these. Cassidy, however, proposes another definition of the formula, one that is more pertinent to Eliot. Following O'Neill and others, he classifies a large number of Old English poetic half-lines into twenty-five "archetypal syntactic patterns," or "frames" (1965, 78). The ten most common of these frames, according to Cassidy, account for almost 8o percent of the verses of the Old English elegies and Beowulf. These frames are based on the parts of speech of the words that bear metrical stress in each half-line. The most common of the twenty-five, for example, is labeled "AN" and consists of a noun and an adjective or a participle that modifies the noun. The following half-lines, for example, fit the AN frame: hrepene sawle guorinc goldwlanc wea widscofen The order of components is flexible, and any unstressed words such as prepositions or articles are ignored. Cassidy's patterns for Old English do not, of course, perfectly fit Eliot's poetry. But with them as a model I have defined my own frames for Four Quartets. Again, the half-lines are characterized not by their precise constituent structure but by the syntactic function of the words bearing stress. 6 We must keep in mind that I am analyzing only parts of one poem, not a large corpus, and that the poem in question is unmistakably literary, not

50

A Transitional Case

oral. Still, the resemblance to Old English verse is striking. Following is a list of the most common lexica-syntactical frames: r. Adjective-Noun (30.3 percent): This is the rough equivalent of Cassidy's frame AN. (Notice, though, that the percentage of AdjectiveNoun frames in Eliot isJlearly twice the I5·9 percent Cassidy gives for the equivalent pattern in Anglo-Saxon elegies!) It has the syntactic shape (U) NP[(Det) (Adj) N], where N stands for noun, NP stands for noun phrase, Adj stands for an adjective or adjectival (such as a participle) modifying the head noun, Det stands for a determiner or determiner-like word, and U stands for other unstressed function words, such as prepositions or conjunctions. As in common linguistic notation, parentheses mean an element is optional, and square brackets represent phrase boundaries. The N always bears stress; if there is an adjective, it takes the other stress; if not, a few determiners, such as emphatic demonstratives and quantifiers, may be stressed. Examples:

shrieking voices (BN 5: I 53) the soundless wailing (ns 2:I) other echoes (BN I : I 7) Noun (6.o percent): similar to Adjective-Noun, but here the noun is the only metrically stressed word. It has at least one stressed syllable, sometimes two (if a secondary stress is strong enough to be promoted). The shape is (U) NP[(Det) N]. In its simplest form, then, it is just a single noun, N. 2.

eructation (BN 3: ro8) and for generation (EC I:Io) and the seagull (ns I: 33) 3· Noun-Prepositional Phrase (9.I percent): an NP with a PrepP complement or postmodifier, (U) NP [NP PrepP]. Generally it is the two nouns, or nounlike units such as gerunds, that bear the stress. The Word in the desert (BN 5=I55) of the world of fancy (BN 3:120) and a time for living (EC I: IO) 4· Verb-Object (6.I percent): a verb and its object, with any unstressed words that fall in the same phrase, (U) yp[V NP]. The verb and noun each receive stress.

A Transitional Case

51

and to make an end (LG 5:215) describe the horoscope (DS 5:186) release omens (ns 5:189) 5· Subject-Verb (4-3 percent): a verb (usually intransitive, and therefore not part of no. 4) and its subject.

footfalls echo (BN r : n) while the world moves (BN 3:124) the dahlias sleep (EC 1:22) 6. Verb-Prepositional Phrase (4.8 percent): a verb and a prepositional phrase complementing or modifying it (locative, motion, time, manner, purpose, means, accompaniment, etc.), (U) yp[V PrepP].

we die with the dying (LG 5:228) we are born with the dead (LG 5:230) if you came at night (LG r: 26) 7· xl + x2 (!!.3 percent): any coordinate word or phrase structure (smaller than a clause); most often NP 1 andjor NP 2 , but also Adh andjor Adh, V1 andjor V2 , appositives, etc.

fur and faeces (EC r : 7) pastimes and drugs (DS 5:195) or a factory, or a bypass (Ec r:4) 8. (Aux)-Verb (3.3 percent): a stressed verb, with no other major category stressed in the same half-line. It may or may not have an auxiliary verb (Aux), and the Aux is usually unstressed.

reflecting (LG r : 7) evoke (ns 5:187) shall we follow (BN r:r8, 21) 9· X- Linking Verb- Y (6.4 percent): two words linked by a linking verb (be, seem, etc.); normally the subject and complement of the copula, (U) NP "BE" {

~£p

} .

LocativeP and the pool was empty (BN r: 39) here is a place (BN 3:90) his rhythm was present (Ds r:n)

52

A Transitional Case

IO. Adverb-Complement (5.5 percent): an adverb that modifies a linking verb, plus the complement of the linking verb. is only a shell (LG I: 3I) is often the end (LG 5: 2I4) it is always a seamark (ns 2:I2I) These frames, because they combine syntactic, phonological, and even semantic information, are ontologically slippery objects. Yet the concept of the half-line in itself is not difficult. It is a rhythmic group: the lowest rhythmic grouping contains one metrical stress and the surrounding unstressed syllables (typically it is one "clitic phrase"). The second level groups these units into half-lines of one to four (preferably two) first-level groups. At the third level, half-lines are paired or grouped into larger units. Although other groupings are possible, these third-level units are normally lines consisting of two half-lines: 3[ 2 [

][

I (

Is an open

field,

or a factory,

or a bypass

(Ec I :4)

The frames given above are the most common one- and two-stress patterns. But half-lines that have three or more stressed syllables have the potential to fit more than one syntactical/metrical frame at once. Conversely, half-lines that fit into more than one of these frames at once will have more than the minimum number of stresses. My procedure for such lines was simply to list them in both categories and count them as one of each: 7 ro/8 History is now and England (LG 5:237) I/4 The gloomy hills of London (BN 3:no) The effect of this is to create a potentially large number of new, complex, frames. However, only about 9 percent of the verses are complex in this way- about the same percentage that have more than two stresses (see section titled "Stress Patterns" below). Thus these verses are also "complex" in the generative metrists' sense: they are marked cases, rarer and therefore less expected or "simple" than the average two-stress verse. It makes sense, therefore, to categorize them as variants or combinations of the simple two-stress frames. The ten most common frames account for about 87 percent of the verses

A Transitional Case

53

of Four Quartets-quite comparable to Cassidy's 78 percent for Beowulf. Even if we throw out all the variants-the complex lines mentioned in the preceding paragraph, and also those that don't fit their models perfectlywe still have about 78 percent. Adding a few less common frames (three to five, depending on how you count them) brings the total up to 97 percent (see Cooper 1988 for a fuller list). Even more significantly for our emerging picture of the construction of the poem, the three most common frames account for over 50 percent of the half-lines. It seems likely that such a limited number of patterns occurring so frequently as line-endings or line-beginnings will be perceived, if only subconsciously, as recurring, rhythmic units.

Frames, Meter, and Line Structure Because these frames are some of the most common syntactic patterns in English, the fact that they exist in Four Quartets is trivial, not significant at all. There are, however, at least two significant aspects of the classification of verse into these types: the distribution or frequency of occurrence of particular types, and the relationship between syntax and line structure. For example, it is not at all surprising to find Adjective-Noun combinations in the poem. But it is interesting that so many half-lines seem to be composed of one and only one Adjective-Noun noun phrase. Similarly with the other common frames, we notice not that they occur but that they make up the basic structures on which half-lines are built. In turn, these recurring syntactic/stress patterns help to determine the purely metrical stress patterns of the half-lines. It is true that there is no one-to-one correspondence between frames and specific stress patterns. But there is a correspondence. 8 Take, for example, the most common frame, Adjective-Noun. It is likely to be implemented as either Preposition-Determiner-Adjective-Noun or Determiner-Adjective-Noun. It will therefore often begin with one or two unstressed syllables from the preposition and/or determiner, followed by the lexical stress patterns of the adjective and noun, which have a limited number of possibilities depending on the number of syllables. If, for example, each of the substantives has exactly two syllables, we are likely to find these patterns:

xjxjx an easy commerce of autumn flowers

54

A Transitional Case

the only wisdom the soundless wailing etc.

xxfxfx of the timeless moment on the autumn table in a formal pattern and the wailing warning etc. Or, if one of the substantives is monosyllabic and the other disyllabic:

xfxf the formal word in windless cold the tolling bell with playing cards etc.

xxfxf like a broken king through the vibrant air and the lotos rose in a drifting boat etc. The other frames, of course, also have their characteristic rhythms. To take just one more example, here is a pattern typical of the Noun-Prepositional Phrase frame:

xxfxxfx at the end of a journey on the edge of a grimpen by the currents of action and approach to the meaning

Stress Patterns Given the number of frames, and the number of possible implementations of each frame, one would expect that there would be many different met-

A Transitional Case

55

rical patterns, and in fact there are. One would also expect that the patterns would not be randomly distributed among all possibilities -that there would be some regularities among them, that some patterns would be more likely and thus more common than others. This is also true. In order to test these predictions, I scanned all the sections of clearly four-stress lines in Four Quartets. For each line I located the medial caesura: I divided the line at a primary syntactic break or punctuation mark if one was available; in the minority of cases where no break was clearly stronger than the others, I simply depended upon "ear," dividing stresses evenly when in doubt. For each of the resulting half-lines, I located strong stresses (see note 7 for the method of scansion) and recorded the exact sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables: xlxl, xxlxlxx, etc. Finally, I compiled these results statistically. Now, the number of syllables per half-line varies from two to ten. The number of stresses varies from one to four. Within these parameters, I,ou patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are mathematically possible (though not all are phonologically plausible). Only I02 half-line patterns actually do occur, and of these, many occur only once or rarely. The I2 most common patterns account for more than half the verses, while the 26 most common account for 73 percent of the total. Table I is a list of these 26 most common patterns. We can make several observations about this distribution. First, only one of the 26 (xxlx) does not have exactly two stresses. In fact, of all the half-lines I scanned, about 85 percent have two stresses; of the remainder, IO percent have three stresses, 4 percent have one stress, and fewer than I percent have four stresses. Two stressed syllables per half-line is clearly a norm, though not an absolute rule. We can make some further generalizations about the distribution of unstressed syllables. If we average the number of syllables in each position in the line- before, between, and after the stresses-we get this "average half-line": (r.3 unstressed) (r.o stressed) (r.54 unstressed) (.96 stressed) (.64 unstressed)

Or, rounding to the nearest half-syllable: I.5X

I I.5X I ·5X

Approximating this in whole syllables: I-2X

I I-2X I 0-IX

56

A Transitional Case TABLE I.

Stress Patterns and Their Frequency Pattern

xfxfx xxfxfx xxfxf xfxxfx xfxf xxfxxfx fxxfx xfxxxfx fxfx fxxf xxfxxf xxfxxxfx

Number of occurrences

Percentage of total verses

51

18

6.5 5.9 5.5 5.2 4.7 3.8 3.8 3.6 3.4 2.8 2.7 2.3

------------------------------

------------------------------

------------------------------50 %

xffx xfxxxf xfxxf xxfxxxf xxff fxf xff xfxfxx xxfxxfxx xxfx xxxfxf xfxxfxx xxxfxfx fxxxf

17 16 15 15 14 14 13 12 12 12 11 10 10 10

2.2 2.0 1.9 1.9 1.8 1.8 1.7 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.4 1.3 1.3 1.3

46 43 41

37 30 30 28 27 22 21

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------73

If we therefore allow one or two unstressed syllables before the first stress, one or two unstressed syllables before the second stress, and zero or one unstressed syllable after the second stress, we generate the following permutations: x

I x lx

X

I

X

I

lxxlx lxxl xxl x lx xxl xI xxlxxlx xxlxxl

x x

These include the six most common patterns, and all eight are among the fifteen most common. Together they account for 284 half-lines, or 36 per-

A Transitional Case

57

cent of the total sample. The further a pattern gets away from this ideal template, the less common it is likely to be. 9 Figure r shows this distribution graphically. The numeral at the top of each bar is the number of syllables by which it deviates from the "ideal" template; the bars in the center match the template perfectly, while those to left of center are missing a syllable from the template and those to right of center have an extra syllable. 10 Only one pattern, the least common of those shown (/xxxf), deviates in both directions-it is missing a first unstressed syllable but has a surplus syllable between the stresses. The bell curve shows a regular falling away from the norm, with but two minor exceptions: xxfxxf and xfxxf, both perfect fits to the template, occur significantly less often than expected. (This gap is a bit puzzling; perhaps these patterns are too suggestive of the short anapestic lines of limericks.) Otherwise, the data are quite orderly and suggest further generalizations within the limits of our small sample: extra syllables in the middle of the half-line appear to be more acceptable than at the beginning or end; missing syllables at the beginning are more common than in the middle; missing unstressed syllables are more acceptable than missing stresses. Now, despite this statistical model, we are still left with the question of why the unstressed syllables are distributed in the way they are. The distribution is not random, nor is it maximally symmetrical (though symmetry plays a part). For the most part, though, it does fall out from very basic phonological principles. LENGTH OF LINE

Our basic unit of time in Four Quartets is the half-line, and half-lines tend to be similar in length. Because of the so-called stress-timed nature of English, half-lines with the same number of stresses will tend to be roughly similar in time. Half-lines with similar numbers both of stresses and of syllables will be even closer to equivalence, both in actual timing and in perceived timing. Both of these factors are reflected in Four Quartets. In the passages in question, there are normally two stresses per half-line. Half-lines with one, three, or four are rarer, as we have seen. In addition, there is an average of just less than six syllables per half-line. Again, the further from the average, the rarer the pattern is likely to be. "Burnt Norton," however, averages just under five syllables per half-line (Figure 2). Corresponding to this difference is a different distribution of metrical patterns, with the four-syllable patterns fxfx, xfxf, and xffx, especially, more common than

60 0 50

"'t:

0

0

0

Q)

0

~

0

40

:::> 0 0 0

0

1

30 1-

0

1

1

v

.0

E 20 1:::>

z

2 10 0

1.5

1

1

1

~

:::::X

x X

~

~X

~

X

0

1

'"I X

~

1 1

0

.

x~ ~

. -.-. I

~ ~

x xx x X

~

~

~

~

.

1

1

~ ~

X

~X

x ~X

~X ~ X

1

x ~ x ~ x ~ ~ x x ~ x ~ X

X X

X

X

X X

X

X

Pattern

Note: Numbers above each bar indicate number of syllables of deviance.

FIGUREr.

1

1

1

I III

. . ~

1

Four Quartets: Frequency of pattern and deviation from template

X

X

I

X

~ ~

x~ X

x·

6o

A Transitional Case

in Four Quartets as a whole. "Burnt Norton," published before the other quartets were begun, dances to a slightly but detectably different (quicker, more iambic/trochaic) rhythm. "EUPHONY" OR "EURHYTHMY" Modern linguistic metrics suggests that ordinary spoken English actually favors some metrical sequences over others. This claim is supported, or at least not contradicted, by Four Quartets. In addition, however, Eliot seems to use certain patterns in ways that cannot be predicted by the general metrical rules of spoken English; these, we may assume, are stylistic choices of the author. To begin with, as I mentioned in chapter r in discussing the "rhythm rule," speakers of English avoid using strong stresses too close together; that is, they avoid creating a "stress clash." Sometimes they even alter the normal lexical stress patterns of their words to avoid stress clash, so that, in some contexts, "corNELL HOCKey" is pronounced "coRnell HOCKey" (Hayes 1984, 35). (Stresses may clash, or be "too close" to each other, even if they are not adjacent, if the intervening syllables are too weakly stressed. For the sake of simplicity, however, I am treating "stress clash" and "stress adjacency" as though they were identical.) At the same time, speakers also avoid sequences of too many unstressed syllables in a row, and if such a sequence comes along they tend to add stress to, or "promote," one of the unstressed syllables. Cureton, on the basis of Gestalt psychology and music theory, suggests that a rhythmic group can have no more than three contiguous weak constituents; when applied at the syllable level, this means that a stress can be preceded by no more than three and followed by no more than three unstressed syllables (1992, r85). This entails a theoretical maximum of seven syllables in a stress group. We should then expect a theoretical maximum of eleven syllables for a two-stress halfline (xxxjxxxjxxx), which matches well with the actual maximum of ten syllables in a half-line. These stress groups can thus be rather larger and more variable than feet (which in metrical phonology are generally binary: xj, jx, or/), but their size and internal structure are still limited by rules. In Four Quartets, each pair of successive stressed syllables is normally separated by at least one, but seldom more than two or three, unstressed syllables. Only 14 percent of the half-lines have internal adjacent stresses. The tendency to avoid stress clash holds up between half-lines, as well as within them: 77 percent of all half-lines begin with unstressed syllables, and 62 percent end with unstressed syllables. There is also a difference be-

A Transitional Case

61

tween the first half of the line and the second in this respect: the second half has a greater tendency both to begin and to end with unstressed syllables. (For example, xxjxjx occurs thirty-three times in second half-lines and only thirteen times in first half-lines; jxxj occurs nineteen times in first half-lines and only three times in second half-lines.) This distribution also helps to make adjacent stresses between half-lines less likely. When a stress clash does occur, though, the speaker (according to Selkirk 1984) adds extra "demibeats" of time, lengthening the first stressed syllable andjor adding a pause between them. This has the effect of slowing down the utterance, an effect that Eliot seems to use deliberately sometimes, notably in BN and LG: '\

I

/

\

I

I

Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws, '

I

I

or over a dark lake ... (LGI:36-37)

Here the adjacent stresses at the ends of the half-lines are like deep bells marking the cadences, slowing the ends of the lines. Thus lines with stress clash have their stylistic uses. That is one reason why stress clash actually occurs more often in Eliot's poetry than in his prose (see "Prose vs. Poetry and Poetry vs. Poetry" below). Hayes (1984, 44-51) even goes slightly beyond the concept of stress clash in his theory of "grid euphony." He postulates a "quadrisyllabic rule" and a "disyllabic rule," which state that speakers of English manipulate accents in order to approximate as closely as possible a pattern consisting of a strong stress every four syllables, with a less strong stress halfway between. This would make the ideal something like Kipling's "Danny Deever": \X

I

X

\X/X\X/

X\

X

I

For they're done with Danny Deever, you can 'ear the quickstep play. X/XX

X/X

X

X

\XI

/X

The Regiment's in column, an' they're marchin' us away. \X/

X\X

/XX

X

I

X

'\X/

Ho! the young recruits are shakin', and they'll want their beer to-day. \X/X

\X/X\X/X

After hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'! ((1892] 1988, 191) VARIOUS METERS OVERLAID

This "quadrisyllabic" tendency of English combines with Eliot's own stylistic manipulations to produce many lines that could pass for iambic or trochaic pentameter, hexameter, and so on:

62

A Transitional Case

The surface glittered out of heart of light (BN r: 39) The formal word precise but not pedantic (LG 5:222) We can actually scan such lines in both systems at once, with the accentual (four-stress) above and the accentual-syllabic (iambic pentameter) below (where w is a weak and S a strong metrical position, and: is a boundary between half-lines or between feet): X/

X

I:

X/

X

X

X

I

X

The formal word precise but not pedantic (LG 5:222) w

S

w

:

S

w

:

: w

S

S : w

S

(w)

This line can even be read as a quadrisyllabic, or dipodic (or second paeonic), meter; others are even clearer examples of quadrisyllabics: XX

XXIX

/X

XXI

X

XX/X

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning (LG 5:224)

We must keep in mind, though, while noticing these tensions, that the lines from the four-stress passages that can reasonably be scanned as iambic, even allowing for the traditional substitutions, are a minority at best. The consistent pattern, the framework, is the four-stress line; the duple and triple rhythms occasionally superimposed over that framework are ornamental rather than structural. Yet they are not insignificant, because they remind us of the other metrical tradition that Eliot always saw "lurking behind the arras" (1965, r87). And the ornamentation is sometimes quite striking. We have shorter duple lines, I

X

:

X

:x

I

/:

X

I

That blows before and after time

(BN

3:105),

I

:

anapestic lines, X

I

X

:X

:x

I

X

X

X

t:x

X

X

and approach to the meaning restores the experience (ns 2:94), amphibrachics, XI

X

:

X

I

X

:

X

I

x: X

(1)

Fruition, fulfillment, security X

I

X

:X

I

x:

\

I

X

: X

I

X

:

or affection X

or even a very good dinner (ns 2:91-92), and other more idiosyncratic patterns that may be repeated a few times in a particular passage and then forgotten. (For more on temporary patterns, see chapter 3.) Such lines are surely deliberately "euphonious" or, in some cases per-

A Transitional Case

63

haps, anti-euphonious. Much of Eliot's artistry lies in the interplay of the different meters-not only as they vary from passage to passage, as many have remarked, but as they are overlaid upon each other, running simultaneously. It is this interplay that leads Hartman (19 8o) to analyze the Four Quartets as being, along with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, indeed, virtually all of Eliot's poems, composed of either variations on the iambic pentameter line or recognizable fragments of the more common variations. He calls this composite structure vers Iibert! (as opposed to vers libre)-that is, verse that is not "born free" but that begins with a traditional meter and breaks out of that meter's bonds (n3).U Of course, taken to the extreme, this kind of analysis would be tautological: any single foot, for example, can be seen as a fragment of an iambic pentameter line, and thus any line at all could be claimed to be made of pentameter fragments. But Hartman does not take it so far; instead, he ultimately admits that in many passages "syntax contributes proportionally more to rhythmic control, and metrical approximation recedes into the background," and that "vers libire is not in itself a prosody" in the Quartets (126, 129). What he cannot see, possibly because of his iambic orientation, is the presence of an accentual prosody and the structural importance of its relation to syntax; he tends to brush off accentual versification as a misunderstanding (as does Steele 1990) and treat syntax as either ornamentation or punctuation.

Prose vs. Poetry and Poetry vs. Poetry In the previous section we concentrated mainly on the relationship of the language in the Four Quartets to "ordinary" spoken language. But we also need to see in what ways it is similar to other poetic language, and different from non-poetic language. Again, we would like to think the verse is not merely prose with a carriage return after every four stressed syllables. In order to back up this assertion, though, we need some specifics about what constitutes poetic language. Byers (1979 ), taking her cue from some suggestions by the literary theorist Northrop Frye (1957b), describes a live experiment in which she compared acoustic readings of mundane prose passages (a newspaper, for example) with readings of poems she considered "non-metrical." In this way she came up with empirical (though hardly objective) evidence for principles Frye and others produced mainly through introspection. Frye iden-

64

A Transitional Case

tifies as characteristics of much spoken poetry "slow movement, regular pitch patterns, emphasis on vowel sonority, and involved patterns of alliteration" (Byers 1979, 368n.2). Similarly, Byers finds that poetry, compared to prose, (1) is slower (read more slowly); (2) is divided into shorter, more equivalent, tone units; (3) has more pauses; (4) has a lower average pitch; (5) has a narrower pitch range; and (6) has "more simple falling melodies and unit nuclei." Byers's last three observations-those concerning pitch range and melody-are not borne out by Eliot's oral performance of his poetry, as we will see in more detail in chapter 5. He reads with a moderately wide pitch range, and uses complex rising and falling pitch melodies. Also, several of these categories vary from poet to poet; for example, observations 2 and 3 may be true of Eliot but certainly are not true of Lowell. Some of Byers's other observations, though, are more plausible-at least as evidenced in Four Quartets. We have already seen that half-lines are similar in length and in syntactic composition. It should not be surprising, then, that they are also equivalent as tone units. Byers, in fact, notes that "when the poet uses punctuation to insist on unit boundaries, more often than not he is enclosing a two-stress unit (54% of the time). And when a speaker can place his own boundaries, he usually creates two-stress units too (63% of the time)" (371). These units are, not surprisingly, more similar to each other in duration than the units Byers finds in prose (though probably less so than their counterparts in Four Quartets). Lehiste (1985, 1991) similarly contends that poetic lines tend to be of regular duration almost universally, in various types of poetry and in various languages. SPEECH RATE, STRESS, AND WORD CHOICE

The matter of "slow speech rate" is more complicated. Byers writes it off to "seriousness, or formality, of genre." But there are surely other possible causes. One is the division into shorter syntactic and semantic units and the corresponding greater frequency of pauses in Byers's selection of poems (though other poetry read aloud can be marked by a distinct lack of pauses). Another cause of slowness can be the more frequent occurrence of strongly stressed syllables. This is partly a result as well as a cause; Barry notes that "a line of poetry has generally fewer groupings of sound than a line of prose because verse makes a deliberate effort to emphasize sound structure, and so permits a greater proportion of syllables to become relatively conspicuous" (1969, 1-2). That is, in poetry a syllable capable of bearing stress more often really is stressed (and this holds true whether that

A Transitional Case

65

"real" stress is marked by acoustic features in an oral performance or by a mental perception of stress in a silent reading; see Addison 1994 for more on this distinction). But tempo and grouping are only a part of the explanation. If you analyze passages of Eliot's prose and of his poetry with a linguistic grid system, such as Selkirk's, you find higher columns of grid marks occurring closer together in the poetry. The input into such an analysis, where the text is written, initially includes only syntactic phrasing, morphological structure, and lexical stress. So the effect of greater density of stresses can't be attributed entirely to different ways of reading or styles of oral performance. What gives rise to this difference between written genres is, to a large extent, the selection of words (diction) and the distribution of word-level syntactic categories (parts of speech). Adjectives and nouns are more frequent, relative to other categories, and shorter in Eliot's poetry than in his prose. These selectional differences are also true of Wright's and Lowell's poetry as compared to their prose, and-according to Tarlinskaja (1984)of the eighteenth-century poetry and prose of Pope, Swift, Fielding, and Austen. (Chapter 3 will go into this distribution further.) In a 750-word sample from Eliot's essays and an equal sample from Four Quartets, I found that the poetry has significantly more nouns than the prose has-about 25 percent of the total number of words, versus 20 percent in the prose.U It also has significantly more monosyllabic nouns (12.5 percent vs. 4·5 percent); the nouns in the poetry are shorter and thus have fewer unstressed syllables. Furthermore, the poetry has almost twice as many adjectives (n.5 percent vs. 6.5 percent) and almost twice as many monosyllabic adjectives (3 percent vs. 1.5 percent). Combining the two categories, the average noun or adjective in the poetry is 1.9 syllables long; in the prose, 2.6 syllables. Since these are the two most consistently stressed categories of words, the differences in distribution partially explain the fact that the poetry has more strong stresses closer together. Eliot's prosody exhibits characteristics of "nonmetrical" poetry. The verse moves slowly, with strong stresses relatively close together. It breaks down into phonological and syntactic units of similar length, normally of two stresses each. At the same time, there is a great deal of variety in the arrangement of stresses. But Eliot has exploited these features to create a poetry that is certainly rhythmic, and arguably even metrical, in its own way. Just as iambic poetry could be said to exaggerate the natural alternating meter of English, Eliot exaggerates the natural two-stress subdivisions.

66

A Transitional Case

Within these subdivisions the unstressed and stressed syllables are arranged in a fairly orderly way, often so as to approximate duple or quadrisyllabic rhythms, or sometimes to temporarily create accentual-syllabic regularity of other sorts (dactylic, amphibrachic, etc.). Thus these four-stress passages of Four Quartets are accentual and accentual-syllabic and free verse-all at once. Their meter is not that of Piers Plowman, nor of The Duchess of Malfi, nor of "The Sheep Child." Although Eliot does not rigidly follow any metrical rules beyond those that order the English language generally, there are nevertheless strong and identifiable principles, subtly different from those which govern other kinds of speech, which help to determine which metrical, syntactic, and intonational patterns he will use. Eliot's artistry inheres in his manipulation of the interplay between these principles.

3 ··· Particles and Atoms of Free Verse LOWER-LEVEL FIGURES OF SOUND

ELIOT's four-stress meter is challenging to describe, as we have just seen, but most readers do seem to agree that there is some kind of metrical regularity in it. In free verse, such as that which Lowell and Wright began writing in the late 1950s and early 196os, many readers see no such metrical regularity. A number of writers (Lehiste 1991, for one among many) have in fact said that the only consistent difference between free verse and prose is that free verse is divided into lines. This sounds flippant at first, but it actually turns out to be a meaningful distinction; line structure has profound effects on the way we perceive other aspects of a poem's structure. Nevertheless, being chopped into lines is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a piece of discourse to be recognized as a poem. On the one hand, there are many kinds of writing divided into lines: grocery lists, price sheets, computer programs, and so on. This does not mean that they are all free verse. True, anything with lines can be read as a poem, but some things do not make very interesting or emotionally involving poems. In fact, one might say that's why we have poets: to put together interesting and emotionally involving poems. And because we do not expect a grocery list to reward our close reading in that way, we do not approach it as a poem. On the other hand, if a poem is printed in paragraph form it is still, arguably, a poem. This is true not only of "prose poems," but also of ordinary verse. Indeed, medieval manuscripts often saved parchment by writing poetry in paragraph form (that is, filling out the left and right margins), and no one seemed to mind. Still, medieval strong-stress verse, or medieval and later iambic verse, has regular enough lines that they can be recognized as units even if they are not displayed as graphic lines. And when we recognize one of these traditional line patterns, we instantly know it is meant to be poetry and bring all our

68

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

poetic assumptions and knowledge to bear on it. English poetry that does not make use of the powerful iambic or strong-stress traditions has to establish its status as poetry by other means; it must establish and work within its own rhythmic framework. In this chapter I explore some of the ways Lowell and Wright, in particular, create poetic rhythms using figures at the lower levels of the phonological hierarchy; in subsequent chapters I will look at higher-level figures. I begin by showing what becomes of the iambic tradition in some of these less metrically regular poems, and then examine the use of units other than poetic feet to create rhythmic expectations: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, stress patterns larger than a foot, stress clash, diction (especially length and category of words), and compounding.

The Remnants of the Iambic Tradition In the preceding chapter we saw that the term vers libere or "freed verse," meaning verse that is clearly rooted in the iambic tradition but has broken or loosened some of that tradition's bonds, is not an adequate description of Eliot's prosody in the Four Quartets. That poem is more organized within its own system and less similar to the traditional iambic pentameter than the term vers libere would suggest. For much of Lowell's poetry, however (as for some of Eliot's other poems), the term is quite appropriate. Almost all of Lowell's well-known early work, in Land of Unlikeness, Lord Weary's Castle, and The Mills of the Kavanaughs, is simply highly wrought iambic pentameter- "bound verse," to reverse the metaphor. Although Lowell continued to write some poems in traditional iambic forms throughout his career, he also wrote poems, especially in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and (much later) Day by Day, that have few obvious traces of the iambic line; these are free (rather than "freed") verse. But between these two poles are poems like "To Delmore Schwartz" and "Grandparents" (from Life Studies) and many of the later sonnets from The Dolphin and Notebook, which in differing degrees stray in and out of the iambic pentameter tradition- doing so regularly enough for the iambic lines to be considered more central to their poems' rhythm than Eliot's occasional pentameters in the Quartets. Most of the lines in "To Delmore Schwartz" are, in fact, pentameters: We couldn't even keep the furnace lit! Even when we had disconnected it, the antiquated

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

69

refrigerator gurgled mustard gas through your mustard-yellow house. (I959, 53)

But the pentameter lines are consistently broken up by shorter and more irregular ones such as the third and fifth lines above. Toward the end of the poem, these irregularities come to dominate the rhythm: In the ebblight of morning, we stuck the duck 's webfoot, like a candle, in a quart of gin we'd killed.

The poet Robert Duncan says of these lines, When [Lowell's] line grows irregular, it conforms to the movement straining for balance that a drunk knows. Betrayal is imminent ... the concept of the verse is not free, but fearful. Where in the later poetry of [William Carlos] Williams the end juncture makes possible a hovering uncertainty in which more may be gathered into the fulfillment of the form, in the Life Studies of Lowell the juncture appears as a void in measure that is some counterpart of the void in content. How I we feel I can this I foot I get across to I that line. ([r96r] 1973, 202)

Duncan is alluding partly to Lowell's notorious emotional instability and manic-depressive illness, as well as to the "void" that many critics see when Lowell seems to them to be merely name-dropping and indulging in banal "confessions." But there is also an important prosodic point underlying Duncan's comments: we feel a "void in measure" because we expect a measure which is not there, the iambic pentameter. It is worth noting, though, that the irregularities in "Delmore" have mainly to do not with the type of feet but with the number of feet per line; the shorter lines are almost all fragments of common iambic pentameter lines. Indeed, even in Lowell's much-quoted quotation of Schwartz misquoting Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," X

/X

\

X

I

X

I

X

I

X

We poets in our youth begin in sadness; X/XX/

I

XIX\X

IX

thereof in the end come despondency and madness;

the second line is simply a (rather complex and hard to scan) six-footed alexandrine. In Wordsworth's original, it seems fairly natural:

70

Lower-Level Figures of Sound VI. My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought, As if life's business were a summer mood; As if all needful things would come unsought To genial faith, still rich in genial good; But how can He expect that others should Build for him, sow for him, and at his call Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all? VII. I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride; Of Him who walked in glory and in joy Following his plow, along the mountainside: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. (1965, 166-67)

Taken out of the context of Wordsworth's modified spenserian stanza,l where an alexandrine would be the expected last line, the line is read as a pentameter, and sounds metrically deformed. (Lowell's or Schwartz's alteration, switching "come" and "in the end," add to this deformation.) Just as the poem's content is a trope on the traditions represented by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Eliot, Harvard, the rituals of hunting, Joyce, and Freud, Lowell's metrical tropes work by establishing the expectation of a traditional pentameter line and frustrating it-even by taking parts of another traditional form out of context. He is using the meter not only for its rhythmical value, but also for its iconic value, as a marker of institutional history: Spenser-Chatterton-Wordsworth-Schwartz-Lowell. This use of meter fits the Oedipal theme that runs through Life Studies-breaking away from the dominance of the father, and of the Father. 2 "Grandparents" operates along similar lines but strays further from the pentameter base. It has many verses that are not obviously pentameters or even iambic: Grandmother, like a Mohammedan, still wears her thick lavender mourning and touring veil. (1959, 68)

It also has some lines that are clearly pentameter, though they are a minority, concentrated mainly in the first part of the poem. But intermediate

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

71

between these two poles are its many lines that are iambic (or trochaic) but vary in number of feet: No field is greener than its cloth, where Grandpa, shooting for us both, once spilled his demitasse. His favorite ball, the number three, still hides the coffee stain. Never again to walk there, chalk our cues, insist on shooting for us both. Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me!

Thus in this poem the iambic meter becomes expected even where the line length is irregular. The non-iambic lines play against this expectation. The semantics of the poem concern the speaker's grief at the passing of the old (grandparental) order and his need to set up his own ("The farm's my own!"); the meter shows increasingly bold forays away from the old meter in which Lowell had established his career as a poet. Many of Lowell's poems, however, do not depend in this way on the expectation of iambic regularity. Lowell said that he originally wrote many of the Life Studies poems in regular four-foot couplets and later went back and "loosened" them up, but while traces of these four-foot lines are visible even in some poems that do not seem overwhelmingly iambic ("Skunk Hour," for example), others, such as "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow," show few such traces: Up in the air by the lakeview window in the billiards-room lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour, my Great Aunt Sarah was learning Samson and Delilah. (1959, 6r)

Thus in Life Studies there is a continuum of meter from iambic pentameter to free verse, as though the new, "free" lines were emerging before our eyes from the wreckage of the older tradition. (Although free verse had already existed for many decades, it was a new and difficult form for Lowell.) One might expect to see a similar process in James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (in 1971, nr-36), his first book to break away from the iambic line. His early iambic poems are even stricter in meter than Lowell's. But in contrast to Lowell, Wright seems to have made a rather

72

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

sharp division between his iambic and non-iambic poems. Although he, too, continued to write some regular iambic poems even after free verse had become his primary medium, few if any of his poems could be characterized as "freed" verse, or in-between meters; one can usually tell by a quick glance if a Wright poem is free verse or else pretty regular iambic pentameter or tetrameter.

Creating New Expectations Although Wright's free verse does not pay homage to the iambic tradition in the same way as Lowell's and Eliot's, this does not at all mean that configurations of feet, or of stressed and unstressed syllables, are not important in it. Complex, ad hoc patterns are frequently repeated and varied within a given poem, but these patterns must establish themselves independently, without the aid of the well-worn and inviting iambic groove for the reader to fall into. These are not mere rebellions against iambic meter, or conversations with it; they are their own systems. Such poems, even more than Lowell's "freed verse" or Eliot's four-stress verse, must depend on devices other than mere regularity of feet to determine their rhythm and mark them as poetic. Most of these rhythmic features are not absent from iambic pentameter, "freed verse," and strongstress poems, but their structural importance is magnified in the absence of those meters. As we noted in chapter r, at the most atomistic linguistic level, phonemes or even distinctive features may be organized into recurrent figures of sound, which are the basis of rhythm. These interact with features at a slightly higher level, such as alliteration, assonance, half-rhyme, and rhyme, which are just different labels for the repetition of the onset (beginning), nucleus (middle), coda (end), and rime (middle and end) of a syllable. The repetition of a whole syllable, the logical next step up, also occurs. Consider, for example, in Wright's "In Fear of Harvests": It has happened Before: nearby, The nostrils of slow horses Breathe evenly, And the brown bees drag their high garlands Heavily, Toward hives of snow. (1971, II2)

Lower-Level Figures of Sound Here, the repetition of

fhf, fbf, fnf,

/g/, and

fi/

73

(the vowel of "Breathe

~venly"), the rhyme and near-alliteration of "slow" and "snow," the allit-

eration and near-alliteration of "breathe ... brown ... bees," and the repetition of the syllable fli/ at the ends of lines 4 and 6 all contribute to the densely woven effect. They combine with clashing stresses, short lines, and the semantics of "slow," "evenly," "drag," and "heavily" to force a slow, measured pace through the poem. It is important to realize that this is a complex interaction between genre expectations, semantics, and phonology, not a one-to-one correspondence between "sound" as signifier and "sense" as signified. 3 As Fish (1980) has pointed out, it is possible to find some sort of pattern in absolutely any piece of writing, if one reads it as a "poem." For example, the preceding sentence has many stressed words beginning with /p/, though I did not try to write it that way, and it does not strike me as especially poetic. Nevertheless, there are good arguments against simply abandoning sound patterns as arbitrary or subjective. For one thing, certain features, such as clashing stresses and clustered consonants, demonstrably affect the timing-and therefore the rhythm-of the utterance, whether it is read as a "poem" or not. Tsur (1992) also argues that there is a distinct "poetic mode" of speech perception, in which we combine both the linguistic ability to extract only the meaningful details from the complex stream of speech and the nonlinguistic ability to hear sound more holistically. If so, sound patterning need not be linguistically meaningful to be poetically significant. Ultimately, though, the reading of poetry is inherently subjectivelike all perception, only perhaps more so. One has to base an argument about poetic structure on a reader's judgment of what is significant, just as a linguist bases an argument about syntax on some speaker's judgment about what is grammatical. (For practical reasons, the person making these judgments is usually also the one making the arguments-the author.) Thus the repetition of the sound fhf, for example, is significant if a reader perceives it to be significant-in this case, if a reader perceives it to be a noticeable part of the rhythmic structure of the passage. There is evidence that the phoneme involved occurs more frequently in this poem of Wright's than in an average utterance in the English language, but that evidence is neither necessary nor sufficient to show that the sound is really noticeable. 4 Its repetition is made prominent by its location at the beginnings of words and at the beginning of a line, by the proximity of its occurrences to each other, by being part of a more complex network of similarities (high/hives, _hea~ily/.hi~es, has/happened, _heavily/even!y), and by the semantics and genre of the poem, which encourage a slow, emphatic reading.

74

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

Lowell uses sound patterning in similar ways, as in "troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics," hfrAb~s~ snreks rend tauxmts klres1ksj ("Uncle Devereux"), where the repetition of the voiceless stops and fricatives jtj, jkj, jsj, jxj and /J/, and the fact that it has so many closed syllables beginning and ending with consonants, create difficult clusters: hfr/, fmsnj, jxnj, jtsklj. These combine with the semantics of the poem and the foreignness of "Tauchnitz" to make not only the character it is attributed to (Aunt Sarah) but also the phrase itself seem "troublesome." Again, there is no reason to suppose that voiceless sounds or clusters or affricates inherently suggest troublesome personalities, but in this semantic context they may. Lowell also sometimes uses lower-level phonological figures in a more systematic way, occasionally with alliteration and near-alliteration, as in Grandfather and I raked leaves from our _4ead fore.Qears, defied the dank weather with _4ragon .Qonfires. ("Dunbarton," 35-38 [I959, 66])

Here the alliteration combines with two-stress lines or half-lines and the content of the poem (cleaning up the ancestral cemetery) to suggest an imitation of Old English elegy. But the alliteration here is both more complicated and less regular than the Old English pattern; for example, "forebears" and "bonfires" share all but one of their consonants, but do not strictly alliterate on the onset of the stressed syllable as an Old English alliteration would have to do. Also, they are in different lines, while Old English alliteration usually occurs only within a line. Much more often rhyme plays a structural role: Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. ("Skunk Hour," 7-I2 [I959, 89])

Each line in this stanza rhymes or nearly rhymes with another, and in fact one of the few regularities in the poem seems to be that a line, however long or short, must end in a rhyme of some kind. However, the rhyme scheme varies greatly from one stanza to another, and many of the rhymes are unstressed, imperfect, or internal (for example, "privacy ... century,"

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

75

"Bean ... men," "eyesores ... shore"). As he does in other poems with the tradition of iambic pentameter and the older tradition of alliterative halflines, Lowell uses the traditional device of rhyming stanzas, but does not adhere to the tradition very strictly. Other free-verse poets, of course, use rhyme and near-rhyme even more conspicuously and less regularly. One such poet is Sylvia Plath (who studied with Lowell but probably didn't learn this from him): You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. ("Daddy," 1-5 [1961, 49))

Now, to what extent are these sound patterns rhythmic? Well, to the extent that they elicit a rhythmic response. And that means they are rhythmic to the extent that we readers notice them, consciously or unconsciously, as patterns; to the extent that we feel a sense of return with each iteration. Lacking experimental psychological data on how the average reader responds to these poems, I must assume that any pattern I can notice is potentially rhythmic. These examples from Lowell show a rather free variation from the traditions they hark back to. Even so, these examples use rhyme and meter in a much more regular, prominent way than Wright's free verse ever does. Wright's style would not allow him to play the kind of game Lowell does in "To Delmore Schwartz," in which he conspicuously ends a line with the notoriously hard-to-rhyme "oranges," leaves the reader in anticipation for several lines, and then anticlimaxes with the very shaky rhyme "hemorrhages." The joke depends on the expectation of a rhyme, however irregular the rhyme may be. 5 The fact that Wright does not play with traditional kinds of meter and rhyme the way Lowell does, however, does not mean that stress patterns and rhymes do not feature prominently in his rhythms. In "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium," for example, the ear yearning for order can perceive several phrasal patterns of stress repeated and developed throughout the poem: Mother of roots, you have not seeded The tall ashes of loneliness For me. Therefore, Now I go.

76

Lower-Level Figures of Sound If I knew the name, Your name, all trellises of vineyards and old fire, Would quicken to shake terribly my Earth, mother of spiralling searches, terrible Fable of calcium, girl. I crept this afternoon In weeds once more, Casual, daydreaming you might not strike Me down. Mother of window sills and journeys, Hallower of scratching hands, The sight of my blind man makes me want to weep. Tiller of waves or whatever, woman or man, Mother of roots or father of diamonds, Look: I am nothing. I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes. (1971, III-!2)

The first phrase of the poem, "Mother of roots," establishes the pattern

fxxf as an important motif, which is returned to near the end of the poem in lines 15 ("woman or man") and r6 ("Mother of roots" again). It is varied only by one unstressed syllable, fxxfx, in lines r6 ("father of diamonds") and 17 ("Look: I am nothing"). In the middle of the poem, this simple pattern is expanded by something like reduplication to make the pattern fxxfxxfx in line 8 ("mother of spiralling searches"), which is repeated, with only one weak syllable added, in the very next phrase as fxxfxxfxx ("terrible fable of calcium"). Another slight variation, fxxfxxxfx, appears in line 12 ("mother of window sills and journeys"), and in liners the poem again returns to the form fxxfxxfx ("Tiller of waves or whatever"). These patterns are not only strings of syllables, but are all whole phrases, and with only one exception are not interrupted by line breaks. Many of them are syntactically parallel, as well: "mother of ___ ," "father of ___ ," "tiller of ___ ." Thus other levels of organization line up with and reinforce these stress patterns. There are others of these repeated patterns. The only iambic sequences of any length, however, are in lines 9-ro, "I crept this afternoon/ in weeds once more," and perhaps line 14, "The sight of my blind man makes me want to weep." Although they are plausible iambic pentameters (with one tri-syllabic foot), this is not enough to establish metrical expectations. So the importance of the metrical figures in the poem's rhythm does not come from the authority of the iambic tradition, nor is it established by the consistent repetition of a single kind of foot. The poem is not in a traditional meter, nor even in and out of a meter (as in "freed verse"), but it has a prominent stress patterning of its own.

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

77

Diction and Stress Sequences The stress patterns given above are, I believe, real and important. Identifying such patterns, however, is rather subjective, as we saw with patterns of phonemes. Two strings are similar if they feel similar to a reader. A pattern and its variations occur often enough to be rhythmical if they feel rhythmical to a reader. This is one reason not everybody likes the same poets; a certain poet's rhythmic sensibilities must match up with a particular reader's. I have found, in my modest career as a poet, that certain readers "hear" what I'm trying to do in a poem on their first reading, while others never get it. This does not necessarily mean that the first group are smarter or better readers of poetry; they are better readers of my poetry, which is a very different matter. Different readers bring, apparently, different processing strategies to the work, different sets of priorities for what types of features and patterns to listen for. Cognitive psychologists have come up with some basic principles for how people recognize similarities in simple stimuli (see chapter r), but clearly when the stimuli are more complex the principles of recognition interact in different combinations for different people. There is another aspect of stress patterning that is more quantitative and less subjective-and consequently less intuitive as well. This aspect is the frequency of stress clash. Studying stress clash may be a way of demonstrating empirically that free-verse rhythm is not identical with prose rhythm, and also of showing the relationship between diction, lower-level syntax, and meter. Of course, in these skeptical days, we can hardly call any analytical procedure completely objective, particularly not any procedure having to do with language. But counting syllables, lexical stresses, and parts of speech can be done fairly mechanically, is relatively objective, and produces interesting results. Stress clash, remember, means a sequence of two or more lexical stresses that are adjacent or so close to being adjacent that they cause speakers to alter either their timing or their stress patterns. 6 We have already seen (chapter 2) that for Eliot the predominance of nouns and adjectives, and especially of monosyllabic nouns and adjectives, helps make clashing stresses more frequent in his poetry than in his prose, and sequences of several consecutive unstressed syllables less frequent. This is even more true of Wright. The statistical results of my survey of stress clash in Wright and Lowell appear in Table 2. In The Branch Will Not Break (hereafter Branch), sequences of two or more stressed syllables in a row occur almost three times as often as they do in samples taken from Wright's Collected Prose, while in

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

78

TABLE 2.

Stress Density String:

II

I II

XXX

xxxx

.082 .012 .040 .007 Branch free verse Pear Tree free verse .068 .013 .039 .006 .060 .008 .040 .006 Pear Tree prose .011 .045 .008 .057 Life Studies free verse .015 Lowell, Collected Prose .037 .004 .072 .021 Wright, Collected Prose .028 .003 .090 Note: Density is given here in descending order; numbers represent the probability of any given syllable's occurring at the beginning of the given string.

To a Blossoming Pear Tree they occur over twice as often as in the prose. Sequences of three or more stresses in a row occur at least four times as often in the poetry as the prose. Correspondingly, sequences of three or more unstressed syllables in a row occur less than half as often in the poetry as in the prose. Lowell's non-iambic poetry in Life Studies, too, has more adjacent stresses and fewer strings of unstressed syllables than random samples of his prose written at about the same period, though the difference is less marked than in Wright's works. Sequences of two consecutive stresses occur about r.25 times as often in the poetry as in the prose, while sequences of three consecutive stresses occur twice as often in the poetry. Conversely, sequences of three and four unstressed syllables in a row occur, respectively, about one and a quarter and one and a third times as often in the prose as in the poetry. Interestingly, Wright's prose poems in Pear Tree (simply called "prose pieces" by Wright) are much more similar, in this respect, to the verse poems in the same book than they are to his other (criticaljautobiographical) prose, a fact that complicates Wright's claim that they are obviously prose, not poetry, and that there is no reason for confusion on the subject (D. Smith 1980 ). They bear some semiotic markings of prose on the pageparagraph form, justified margins, and so on-but it is not obvious that these constitute the defining difference between poetry and prose as genres. Their stylistic features, such as rhythm, and their social function as short expressive pieces in an artistically illustrated and finely bound volume of poetry are arguably more significant. We can summarize the quantitative results by arranging the different samples in order of their conformity to two general, crudely stated principles. A selection has more "stress density" if it has more sequences of adjacent stresses (//, ///) and fewer of adjacent unstressed syllables (xxx,

Lower-Level Figures of Sound TABLE

79

3·

Stress Alternation String:

xf

xjxj

jx

fxfx

Life Studies free verse .310 .098 .294 .085 Pear Tree prose poems .320 .090 .290 .070 Pear Tree free verse .310 .080 .284 .065 Branch free verse .283 .304 .064 .078 Lowell, Collected Prose .295 .275 .056 .061 Wright, Collected Prose .259 .291 .049 .061 Note: Alternation is given in descending order; numbers represent the probability of any given syllable's occurring at the beginning of the given string.

xxxx); poems tend to be more dense than prose. It has more "stress alternation" if it has more iambic or trochaic sequences (xf, xfxf, fx, fxfx). Even free-verse poems tend to show more alternation than prose, though naturally less than iambic verse. The results are as shown in Tables 2 and 3· Although there is some inconsistency among the poetry samples, the division between the poetry, as a group, and the prose, as a group, is consistent in every column. Stress density and stress alternation are not exactly opposites, even though absolute density would logically mean zero alternation and absolute alternation would mean zero density. Because prose tends to have more sequences that don't count in either category, verse tends to be both more dense and more alternating than prose. However, within the poetry selections, it does seem (from this limited sample) that the higher on the density list a sample is, the lower it is on the alternation list. As we saw in the last chapter, the frequency of stress is crucially affected by the selection of words-partly by the choice of parts of speech (nouns almost always receive full stress) and partly by the choice of individual words within a given category: red tide has clashing stresses, while reddened tide (morphologically derived from red tide) and crimson tide (made by the selection of a synonym instead of red) do not. As we examine these poets' patterning at the level of the word (the next level above the foot), we see more clearly than ever the interrelatedness of the various linguistic levels and components: a word is a phonological unit, marked by juncture and singled out by some phonological rules, but it is also a unit of syntax, morphology, and semantics. Choice of words will affect and be affected by all these aspects. The difference between Wright's prose and his poetry, like Eliot's, shows the importance of this selection of categories and selection of words. The poems in Branch have a greater proportion of nouns than do the prose

So

Lower-Level Figures of Sound TABLE

4·

Parts of Speech (expressed as a percentage of total words) Nouns (common and proper)

Adjectives

33.2 32.5 26.7 24.9 23.2 21.2 19.9 19.8

13.7 8.3 9.3 11.3 10.6 8.5 6.5 11.5

Lowell, Life Studies Wright, Branch Wright, Pear Tree prose poems Eliot, Four Quartets Wright, Pear Tree verse Wright, Collected Prose Eliot, prose Lowell, Collected Prose

TABLE

5·

Percentage of Nouns and Adjectives That Are Monosyllables

Wright, Pear Tree verse Eliot, Four Quartets Wright, Branch Wright, Pear Tree prose Lowell, Collected Prose Lowell, Life Studies Wright, Collected Prose Eliot, prose

Nouns

Adjectives

54.2 49.7 49.6 49.3 40.0 39.1 32.7 23.5

48.1 24.7 64.5 20.8 27.6 26.3 13.6 24.5

samples (31 percent of all words vs. 20 percent), and of those nouns a higher proportion are monosyllabic in the poems (50 percent of nouns vs. 33 percent)? The proportion of adjectives to the total sample is virtually the same for the poetry and the prose (8.6 percent vs. 8.8 percent), but the proportion of those adjectives that are monosyllabic is again much higher in the poetry (63 percent vs. 13 percent). These percentages, collected in Tables 4 and 5, certainly have much to do with the differences in frequency of stress clash we saw earlier. Wright's style had changed somewhat by the time he wrote Pear Tree, away from the "deep image" of Robert Bly and toward a balanced, conversational style influenced by the Latin poet Horace. Partly because of his use of many multisyllabic Latin and Italian words, the poems in Pear Tree are less compact, more like Wright's prose. At the same time, the prose in the book is really prose poetry, different stylistically from Wright's critical essays and letters. Nevertheless, Pear Tree shows the same word-level poetic features as the earlier books, only less marked. The prose poems fall between the two categories; their use of nouns is similar to that in the

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

8r

poems, while their use of adjectives is similar to that in Wright's other prose. Twenty-seven percent of the words in the prose poems are nouns, and 49 percent of these are monosyllables, both of which ratios are roughly comparable to the poems in Pear Tree (23 percent, 54 percent). But while 9 percent of the words in the prose poems are adjectives, only 2r percent of these adjectives are monosyllables, as opposed to r2 percent and 47 percent, respectively, in the poems of the same book. This may explain why, even though 88 percent of the nouns in the prose poems and 89 percent in the poems are stressed on their first syllable, the incidence of stress clash is still lower in the prose poems than in the poems in Pear Tree. 8 Some striking effects of Wright's word choice are noticeable in his poetry even without statistical comparisons (and in fact, the statistical comparisons would be less meaningful if this weren't the case). The free verse in Branch strives for simplicity of language and reverberation of meaning, and this favors a monosyllabic style; scholarly latinate polysyllables are, for the most part, out of place here. Although Wright, like Eliot and Lowell, occasionally uses a great variety of styles and registers, including long words and many consecutive unstressed or weakly stressed syllables, his most characteristic style (especially his early style) makes highly marked and even regular use of these lexical monosyllables: And the brown bees drag their high garlands ... Cool dark green moss ... Wine sleeps in the mouths of old men, it is a dark red color ... Sometimes this consistency of word length becomes almost a verse form in itself, a syllabic versification which regulates not the number of syllables per line but the number of syllables per word-one, with an occasional variant of two syllables: ... two deer fled past just now. I want an owl to poise on my grave Without sound, but In this mean time I want bone feet borne down Cold on stone. ("The Idea of the Good," 8-13 [1971, 173])

Similarly, "Sun Tan at Dusk" (r97r, 176) is fifty-seven words in thirteen lines, counting the title; of these, only six words have two syllables, and the rest have just one.

82

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

Lowell's verse is less monosyllabic. His choice of parts of speech is similar in some ways to Wright's, but he uses significantly more adjectives and more polysyllables. The proportion of nouns in the total sample (in Life Studies and Collected Prose) is even a bit higher than Wright's: 33 percent for poetry, 20 percent for prose. In both Lowell's prose and his poetry, the number of adjectives is rather high: 14 percent of all words in the poetry, 12 percent in the prose. For both nouns and adjectives, however, the percentage that are monosyllables is similar for prose and poetry (39 percent vs. 40 percent for nouns, 26 percent vs. 28 percent for adjectives). 9 This is more monosyllables in the prose and less in the poetry than either Wright or Eliot use. Also unlike Wright and Eliot, Lowell seems to use words of similar length in both genres. Thus it is not surprising that Life Studies is at the top of the list for stress alternation, but ranks lowest of the poetry books (though still above the prose) in stress density. Nevertheless, although the individual breakdowns (and styles) are different, all three poets' diction produces two similar results: their poetry, relative to their prose, (r) consistently has more nouns and tends to have more adjectives and (2) has more monosyllabic nouns and adjectives. (Claim 2, of course, may be due to either the high total number of nouns and adjectives or the high percentage of those nouns and adjectives that are monosyllables. In Lowell's case, the percentage of nouns and adjectives that are monosyllables is about the same for both genres, but the percentages of monosyllabic nouns and adjectives relative to total words are higher in the poetry simply because it contains more nouns and adjectives. Conversely, in Wright's case, the total number of adjectives is similar, but the percentage of adjectives that are monosyllables is much higher in the poetry.) Lest we lose sight of the main point among all these statistical details, let me reiterate the significance of these numbers. Modest though they may be, they make certain facile theoretical claims more difficult to maintain. If further studies with larger samples and more varied writers show similar results, the theoretical point will be inescapable: anyone who wants to argue that free verse is merely prose broken into lines, or that any differences between poetry and prose are merely interpretational, not formal, ought to be able to explain why these writers (and, I believe, many others) do not show the same formal properties in their poetry as in their prose. My explanation, again at a very general level, is that certain meters, rhythms, and registers of vocabulary sound more poetic to individual writers than others do. And again, this claim will probably come as less of a surprise to a general reader than to a literary theorist. The college poetry-

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83

writing textbooks' exhortations to "trim, tighten, compress, eliminate fat" probably have some of the effects described above, though not in a consistent way: the leader of one workshop I recently sat in on advised aspiring poets to avoid adjectives altogether because they "slow poems down"; yet the poets in our study actually use more adjectives in their poetry than in their prose. For the most part, though, what I am calling stress density and what creative writing teachers call compressed language refer to very similar characteristics; likewise, what I am calling stress alternation is not too different from what they call smooth, flowing, or simply iambic, rhythm.

Compression in Morphology and Compounding Diction, then, is a significant aspect of a poet's style. In general, using more monosyllabic content words, and fewer polysyllables and function words, will contribute to an impression of density-not only stress density, but a feeling of having more meaning packed into a smaller space. The idea that poetry is "dense" or "compressed" is, again, common in introductory literature textbooks, but it is usually not defined very carefully. In this section I want to explore some specific ways in which compression can be achieved. For Lowell, the proportion of nouns and adjectives, and the frequency of stress clash, are not merely a matter of word choice; they also have to do with the forms of words. Lowell manipulates morphological processes, particularly those of functional shift, derivation, and compounding, to help create his characteristic diction. He often takes words that would most often be used as nouns and makes them into adjectives or verbs. He makes adjective-like modifiers either by adding participial endings to nouns-"garaged car," "T-shirted back," "finned cars," "scything prow," "sheepdog's nursing patience"- or simply by using them as adjuncts in compounds: "Rocky Mountain chaise longue," "diamond edge," "B.U. sophomore," "rope shoes," "hermit heiress," "fairy decorator." Or sometimes he makes nouns into possessives with attributive force (technically possessives are determiners, not adjectives, but they still have the semantic effect of modifying the nouns that follow them): "your child's red crayon" (which means, not the crayon belonging to your child, but your crayon such as a child would use); "the basin's mirror" (where the basin is a mirror). To make verbs from nouns, he typically simply conjugates the noun as either a participle- "book-worming" around the house, "wolfing the stray lambs," "kiting me over the chimneys"- or a finite verb- "craned toward

84

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

Harvard," "cartwheeled for joy," "flounders," "horses at chairs," "spider the billiards table," "nose forward like fish," "roller-coaster" down hills. (It is peculiar how many of these denominatives come from words for animals; they are specialized semantic classes as well as syntactic categories.) Occasionally Lowell uses nouns made from adjectives- "a secret dank," "crummy with ant-stale"- but much less often than the other way around. Derivational endings, such as -ize or -ate, occur, but not unusually often, and almost always in forms that are already well established in the language. For example, Lowell describes Czar Lepke as "lobotomized" ("Memories ... ," 46), but if that word did not already exist, a more Lowellian (Lowelling?) form would be "lobotomied." In general, the semantic and rhythmic effect of these usages is to add to the compression of the language, which means, roughly, that they help to add layers of imagery and meaning and bring semantically important words and rhythmically stressed syllables closer together. Compare Lowell's phrases spider the billiards table "dragon" bonfires scything prow with these rough paraphrases: cast lines of shadow that look like spiderwebs on the billiards table bonfires that we pretended were dragons [the "pretended" part is implied by the quotation marks, another means of adding meaning without adding words] prow cutting something down [people, in this case] as a scythe cuts grain The relative compression of the first group should be intuitively obvious, but I will define what I mean by "compression" more precisely with respect to another aspect of word selection that crucially affects stress and rhythm, that is, the use of compounds. Both Wright and Lowell make very prominent use of compound words, though they use them in rather different ways. Compounds affect rhythm in several ways, but the most direct way has to do with stress. According to the traditional generative phonology accounts (based on Chomsky and Halle 1968), the "compound stress rule" in English is different from the phrasal

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85

or "nuclear stress rule," which tends to put the strongest stress on the lexically stressed syllable of the last major word of the phrase. Some scholars have questioned this account of stress,10 but, regardless of the underlying rules, the surface result is that compounds tend to have different stress patterns from similar phrases without compounds. Compound stress patterns are also different from (noncompound) lexical stress patterns, which normally include one primary stress and, in longer words, secondary stresses two or three syllables apart from each other and from the primary stress. In simple compounds, on the other hand, the strongest syllable of the one word (most often the first) receives primary stress, and the strongest syllable of the other word receives weaker stress, regardless of the number of syllables in between.U So the compound "blackbird" has a distinctly different stress pattern from either the phrase "dark bird" or the word "grackle." An interesting example of the connection between compound stress and meter is the old advertising jingle "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet." I scan it as follows: I\

I \

I

X\X

/X\

Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet

In one sense, it is regularly trochaic: each odd-numbered syllable is stronger than the even-numbered syllable that follows it. But that doesn't quite describe it; as readers old enough to remember the melody that goes with it will recall, "baseball" and "hot dogs" are rhythmically equivalent not to "apple" but to "apple pie and" or to "Chevrolet." In musical terms, the downbeats come on base, hot, ap-, and Chev-; the upbeats come on ball, dogs, pie, and -let; and the syllables -ple, and, and -ro- come between beats. Thus the weaker syllable of two-syllable compounds is not unstressed but has a weak lexical stress. (We might also notice in passing that the jingle illustrates two other metrical principles we have already discussed. First, it is dipodic [chapter 2]; that is, it has perceptibly regular meter at two levels: two-syllable units and four-syllable units. And second, it is an illustration of the "English rhythm rule" [chapter 1]: because of the way the first two compounds establish the meter, the stronger stress tends to get shifted from pie to ap- and especially from -let to Chev- in the last two phrases, in order to keep the meter regular at both levels.) This difference between compound and noncompound stress was important enough in Old English verse to be a basic structural feature of its meter; compounds were expected in certain types of lines but not in others (see Cable 1991). Neither Wright nor Lowell depends on compound rhythms

86

Lower-Level Figures of Sound

quite to that extent, but their compounds are numerous and prominent, and they add greatly to the complexity of the stress patterns they are a part of. For example, compare these phrases by Wright, the first group containing compounds: 0

1

3

1

2

between railroad ties 0

2

1

3

1

2

00

the Shreve High Football Stadium 0201030

the yellow-bearded winter the second group without compounds: 00100

200

into tottering palaces 0

1

0

2

3

the vaguely stunned smile 0

1

2

the white hair Although both groups of lines have a similar range of levels of stress (where a higher number means a stronger stress), and both even have clashing stresses, the difference is that the level of stress of the stressed syllables (those labeled with a number greater than zero) in the second group grows higher the nearer the syllable is to the end of the phrase, while in the first group they go up and down at different levels as you read from left to right. This makes for a less predictable, more interesting stress rhythm. Lowell's compound stress patterns also have this advantage, of course. But for Lowell, especially, the use of compounds seems to have another function as well: they are another part of his drive for compression. Semantic relationships that might otherwise be expressed with several more words (prepositions, conjunctions, copulas, relative clauses) are combined into short, pithy, and sometimes ambiguous compounds; Lowell sometimes makes connections morphologically that other writers might make syntactically. "Chalk-dry," for example, seems to mean "as dry as chalk"; "measuring-door" means "the door upon which measurements were marked" (not "a door that measures"). A compound like "love-cars" may have more than one meaning, but it refers roughly to "cars in which people are making love." The range of possible syntactic and semantic relationships between the parts of a compound is very wide,12 and Lowell exploits this wide range. There are relationships of means ("pen-writing" = writing with a pen), attribution ("pink-veined" = veined with pink or having pink veins), loca-

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tion ("sea-duty" = duty on the sea), causation ("pipe-dreams" = dreams caused by smoking drugs in a pipe), purpose ("sea-sleds" = sleds for use on the sea [?];"boys' store" = a store for boys), and genitive relationships ("ant-egg" =egg of an ant; "seedtime" =time of being a seed, or perhaps of sowing seed, i.e., youth). Frequently, as in "Puritan-Pumpkin colored," compounding is also a way of making nouns or noun phrases, including even compound nouns, into adjectives, participles, or verbs. Many of Lowell's compounds are essentially lexical similes, such as "chalk-dry," "stogie-brown," or "fish-blue-eyes": dry as chalk, brown as a stogie, eyes blue as a fish. Others are metaphors. These fall into most of the categories identified by Brooke-Rose in A Grammar of Metaphor (1958): I. The compounds may combine their two or more parts to replace another term, named or unnamed. Some examples: "seedtime" = youth; "ginger snap man" = Uncle Devereux; "flame-flamingo" = a color. "Your ... kitten ... cartwheeled" means the kitten spun like the wheel of a cart, or perhaps it was simply as playful as a child doing the maneuver known as a cartwheel (kittens can't really do cartwheels). This "simple replacement" is by far the simplest and most common kind of metaphoric compound. 2. They may suggest the identity of the two parts. For example, in "starlanterns" the lanterns are, metaphorically, stars. 3· They may attribute the characteristic named by the compound, usually by means of a verbal suffix, to another word. For example, "chickenhearted shadows" attributes hearts to shadows, and adds that those hearts are like those of chickens. "Fire-breathing Catholic C.O." attributes to Catholic conscientious objectors the ability to breathe fire.

Although the web of syntactic and semantic relationships expressed by Lowell's compounds is obviously complex (perhaps even more complex than the above examples suggest), the rhythmic effect is almost always toward eliminating function words and moving major-category words, and thus stresses, closer together. Both the rhythmical and the semantic compression this produces are hallmarks of Lowell's style. I will have more to say about this density of style in the next chapter; Lowell's phrases as well as his words are heavy and agglutinative. Boase-Beier argues that the formation of compounds such as "love-cars" operates from the application of a general principle that operates only in poetic language, the "Principle of Compression," which encourages "form[ing] linguistic structures with a larger number of elements in their

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semantic representation than in their surface form" (1987, n9). This Principle of Compression subsumes such more specific principles as a "Principle of Compounding," a "Principle of Ellipsis," and so forth. Her contention is that while any two words could theoretically be combined into a compound, this process in non-poetic ("standard") language is highly constrained by requirements of intelligibility. The second word is generally the head (though other writers on the subject, such as Selkirk [1983] and Liberman and Sproat [1992], have pointed out several classes of left-headed and nonheaded or "exocentric" compounds). Either the other, nonhead, word must be an argument (or semantic argument) of the head, or they must both be arguments of an unnamed predicate, or the two parts must be related by a few other stereotyped semantic relationships; or else the compound's meaning must be recoverable, in strictly defined ways, from the immediate context. (The meanings of compounds in this latter category are, obviously, highly context dependent.) But in poetic language, according to BoaseBeier, some of these requirements are relaxed, apparently because poetry licenses other means of interpretation such as metaphorical interpretations (where "metaphor" is narrowly defined to exclude non-poetic usages). For example, although Selkirk (1983) claims that verb-adjective compounds are not allowed by English, there are numerous counterexamples in English poetry, such as Ted Hughes's "sag-heavy" and "hover-still" (Boase-Beier 1987, 25). Essentially, the claim is that whereas other kinds of discourse value clarity more than poetry does, poetry values compression relatively more, so that compounding, ambiguity, ellipsis, metaphor, and so on are ways of carrying more meaning in less linguistic space. For Boase-Beier, "poetic language" and "standard language" are mutually exclusive, and principles such as the "Principle of Compression" are what distinguish the two. She has to hedge this absolute distinction a bit, for example by allowing for "intrusions" of poetic language into standard language, so that her conception of "poetic language" resembles Jakobson's "poetic function" (1960) more closely than it resembles the particular genre of writing generally known as "poetry." But unlike Jakobson, Boase-Beier formulates specific rules to account for the differences between "poetic" and "standard" language. Her suggestion that many of her poetic principles may be universal characteristics of poetry in different eras and different cultures is not proven and would be hard to prove.U Still, a principle of compression certainly does seem to be an essential part of contemporary English language poetry-especially, perhaps, Lowell's. Less obviously, this sort of compression is also an essential part of poetic

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rhythm. Not only does it add to the concentration of lexically stressed syllables, as we have seen, but the reading of "structures with a larger number of elements in their semantic representation than in their surface form" is inherently slower and more laborious, with each word receiving more attention, hence being more prominent, than would be the reading of structures with a one-to-one relationship between semantic representations and surface forms. Along with slowing the overall tempo (which, as we recall from the previous chapter, Byers suggests is a characteristic feature of poetic reading), this attention to every word leads to the stressing of more of the potentially but not inherently stressed syllables in the passage-a tendency, again, that La Driere (1974) argues is characteristic of poetry as opposed to prose. So compounds are important in making poetry poetic, but especially important are the ones that would be unusual in other types of language. The principle of compression also encourages structures other than compounds, of course; the morphological idiosyncracies of Lowell that we saw above provide many examples. Wright, however, does not use these devices as conspicuously as Lowell, and his compounds, while they have many of the same metrical effects as Lowell's, are semantically and syntactically quite different. We do not get the feeling, as we do with Lowell, that Wright is trying to cram as many semantic units as possible into the smallest possible linguistic space. His compounds are overwhelmingly made from nouns, and these noun compounds are seldom turned into other parts of speech. Most of them are fairly well established English lexical items, not new amalgamations by the poet. Where Lowell has "geese-girl sisters," Wright has "a goosegirl"; where Lowell has "stogie-brown," Wright has "stogie butt"; where Lowell has "ebb-light," Wright has "light bulb." Thematically, too, these compounds reflect Wright's major themes of agrarian life and nature opposed to urban or industrial life. Any group of words randomly selected from The Branch Will Not Break, for example, would include a fair portion of vocabulary related to the field and the factory. But with their special rhythmic and semantic/relational properties, compounds tend to be especially prominent examples, and they almost all fit into these thematic categories. There is the special class of industrial words: "coal hill," "coal seams," "slag heaps," "slag piles," "strip mines," "blast furnace," "grease rags," "freight yards," "steel mills," "waste water." There are items of modern (industrialized) life: "stogie butts," "shopping centers," "chiropractors' signs," "bottle caps." On the other hand, there are many words for animals: "woodchuck," "chicken hawk," "butterfly";

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words for plants: "elderberries," "briar leaves," "elmfoakjapplefmaple trees"; features of the earth and its waters: "sand shoals," "well spring," "sandstone"; the diurnal cycle: "daylight," "sundown," "nightfall"; and farming terms, often representing, in their two halves, the interaction of humanity and nature: "hay rake," "corncrib," "vineyard," "cowbells," "cutter bar," "barbed wire." Only a few of Wright's compounds ("rootlong," "sun-blooded," "moon-slime") are not familiar combinations, and just as few are obviously metaphorical in the way many of Lowell's are-though almost all denote images, and all images can be interpreted metaphorically.

Repetition of Words As these examples suggest, Wright, unlike Lowell, is notable less for the creative morphology of his words than for his emphasis on a small number of established words. An aspect of his word selection that has often been noted is his repetition of a limited set of key words, over and over in poem after poem. According to the poet and critic Robert Hass, "Someone has calculated that the words dark, darkness, and darkening appear over forty times in the twenty-six pages The Branch Will Not Break occupies in the Collected Poems. Green must appear at least as often" (r984, 29 ). Other favorite Wright words include black, white, tall, tree, old, drunk, oak, ash,

lovely, lonely, terrible, hallway, stairway, water, butterfly, beautiful, diamond. It is easy to see that the repetition of such words is a notable component of Wright's style in general, but it is harder to connect it specifically to the rhythmic component of that style. And yet it plays a role. Of course the preponderance of monosyllabic adjectives and monosyllabic or first-syllableaccented nouns in this list contributes to the monosyllabic rhythm and frequency of stress clash we saw above. But there is another, more subtle, rhythmic effect as well. When a word is repeated, that repetition in itself is a "recurrent figure" both of sound and sense. This is sometimes quite plain in the rhetorical figure anaphora, as in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," where at least forty-five long and unequal lines in a row begin with the word who; that word becomes the marker of a new logical and rhythmic unit: the beginning of each deep breath. 14 Where the repetition is less regular and less frequent, the effect is less marked, but it is an open question how infrequent and irregular the repetition must be before it is no longer perceived as rhythmic. For example, in pages rr4-22 of Wright's Collected Poems, the word "dark" occurs at least one time each in twelve poems in a row, usually near the end of each poem.

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(Semantically related words such as "black" and "evening" also show up several times in the same span.) To sensitive readers these iterations may well become a structural marker of a sort, repeatedly creating- and satisfying-an expectation that the poem will likely make reference to darkness. (Before they can put the poem to bed, they must be told that it is dark outside.) Breslin (1982, 45) points out that the recurrence of images like the moon (even where particular words are not repeated) makes it possible to read the whole of Branch as one integrated poem, each image being a sort of theme with variations. Or there may be more idiosyncratic repetitions within a single poem, as in "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium," which both begins and ends with the words "mother of roots" and "ashes" (and has "mother of ___ " several times in between), a kind of return to the refrain as in a song. If this sort of cycle does not seem like the same kind of measurable acoustic and physiological phenomenon as the time between stresses, perhaps we can think of it as only an analogy, a recurrent figure of thought that makes an intellectual rhythm. On the other hand, we have seen that even the length of time between stresses, and even the recognition of stresses, is more subjective and variable than one might imagine, so perhaps the recurrence of words, or even images, may be somewhere on the same continuum of rhythmic figures as the recurrence of stress. The separation of purely phonological aspects of rhythm from syntax and semantics becomes harder and harder to maintain the higher in the phonological hierarchy we look. Since rhythm is essentially a perceptual (and therefore subjective) phenomenon, and the mind presumably perceives phonological, syntactic, and semantic form almost simultaneously, it becomes difficult to focus on the perception of one aspect of poetic language to the exclusion of others. It is important, nevertheless, to notice that many of the rhythmic features we have looked at are, in themselves, features of poetic language, or indeed of poetry, as opposed to other kinds of discourse. That is, poetry is not only a different kind of reading from other types of discourse; it is also a demonstrably different type of writing. And the central differences have to do with rhythm. In the next chapter we will look at some larger aspects of this poetic rhythm, at the level of the phrase and the line.

4. .. Molecules and Crystals of Free Verse LINES AND PHRASES

METER, in music or in language, is the basic structure of beats in time; in English it is closely related to (though not identical with) stress and thus belongs in chapter 3· Cureton (1992) argues that much of the writing in English criticism that purports to be about "meter" is actually a confusing mix of meter, phrasing, lineation, syntax, and sometimes other factors. However, suprametrical factors (what Cureton calls the "grouping" and "prolongational" structures) are also important parts of the rhythmic structure of language, and therefore of poetry. Indeed, it would be difficult to describe meter itself without an understanding of those rhythmic factors that are not meter. One of these factors is the way words are put together into phrases, sentences, and, in poetry, lines. In free verse, these groupings do not depend in any strict way on metrical structure-as opposed to, for example, end-stopped heroic couplets, in which a line must be five feet, containing ten or eleven syllables, and normally ends at a major syntactic boundary. In free verse, line length and syntactic constituency (phrasing) are related but more or less independent rhythmic structures, which must be analyzed separately. In this chapter we will look at some ways that syntactic phrasing and the division into lines contribute to the rhythmic structure of a piece of verse. In chapter 5 we will look at some ways that intonational phrasing adds yet another layer. As the midlevel structures of poetry, these are in many ways the (literal or figurative) tunes with which a poem is put together.

The Line One of the most controversial issues in discussions of free-verse rhythm is the nature of the line. Lineation is probably the most immediately recog-

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nizable visual characteristic of written poetry, but its importance in poetic structure, as well as its relation to linguistic organization, is complex, variable, and highly disputed. Some linguists and critics argue that "this organization into lines is frequently ... little more than a typographic convention" (Crombie 1987, 12). They point out that some obviously metrical verse such as Old English poetry, in the old manuscripts, is not divided into what we think of as poetic lines, and that some prose, especially rhythmical prose such as John Donne's sermons, can also be seen as verse; they say explicitly or implicitly that only the rhythmic structures that can be heard in speech are relevant. Others see lineation as the defining characteristic of poetry or of verse. 1 The term line can even be used to refer to unwritten language: Sherzer (1982), like other anthropological linguists and "ethnopoeticists" (Hymes, Tedlock, and Bright, for example) argues not only that "the line" is a "basic unit of discourse" even in nonliterate societies, but that any "discourse organized in terms of lines is poetry" -including varieties from magical healing chants to fishermen's conversations. THE LINE AS A PHRASE MARKER

This lack of agreement parallels a widespread uncertainty over just what it is that line divisions are supposed to represent. Many poets and critics think of them not as sound but as some kind of more abstract structure (see, for example, McPherson 1973; Hall 1974). For some, they are purely visual, ways of forcing the eye and attention to focus on one major image or idea at a time. Sayre (1983), for example, sees this visual aspect as the central organizing principle of William Carlos Williams's versification. Others feel that the free-verse line bears, or should bear, some strong relationship to the syntax and phonology of the poem. Within this latter group, there have long been two contradictory prescriptive notions of what that relationship should be. Some feel that syntax and line structure should be antagonistic toward one another, that the lines should cut across the linguistic boundaries (and thus be heavily enjambed). Perloff (1985) and Hartman (198o), for example, both criticize the work of several poets for making lines and phrases identical. They argue, in different ways, that the interplay between lineation and syntactic phrasing is the central dynamic of free-verse rhythm; if line divisions too closely follow syntactic boundaries, they produce "flatness" or lack "tension." Carruth (1971), conversely, criticizes certain poems for almost exactly the opposite reason: for having lineation that is not recoverable once the poems are rewritten in paragraph form. Their line structures are not "shaped by the movement

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of language." 2 Although their value judgments directly oppose each other, implicit in both of these arguments is an assumption that readers expect lines normally to coincide with syntactic phrases; otherwise there would be no tension created when they fail to coincide. Yet others argue that syntax should not, positively or negatively, determine line structure. Many of them try to define the line in phonological or physiological terms, as a breath (Olson [1951] 1973) or breath group (Lieberman and Lieberman 1972), as a vague "unit of rhythm" (Simpson 1973), or, usually implicitly, as a pause phrase or intonational phrase. The one thing most of these accounts have in common is that, although they seldom say so outright, they seem to assume that there is a pause at the end of each line. We shall see in the next chapter that this is not necessarily true phonetically: oral readers do not always make a perceptible pause between lines. Nevertheless, there may be some kind of mental expectation of a pause. Hall (1974, 85) points out that this was a clear convention before the nineteenth century-eighteenth-century Shakespearean actors such as David Garrick were harshly criticized for not clearly pausing at the ends of lines-and argues that early free verse, such as William Carlos Williams's, depends on some trace of this convention surviving. Steele (1990) also points out that in the nineteenth century it was common practice in schools and even poetry readings to sound out the lines and accents in exaggerated fashion; the growth of free verse, he suggests, was partly a misguided reaction against this caricature of versification. Whether this expectation of a pause has survived into the present time in the United States, where the dominant literary form is prose and the dominant poetic form is (written) free verse, is debatable. Conservatively, we can say at least that a reader finds a visual break at the end of a line, which may have some of the effects of a pause in speech. Similarly, the assumption that each line is expected to be a syntactic phrase is supported, if weakly, by the texts themselves. Our poets divide lines more often than not (but by no means always) at the more salient syntactic boundaries. We have already seen that Eliot's lines and half-lines tend to be syntactic units, though there are certainly exceptions. Wright most commonly divides lines between sentences, between clauses, before prepositional phrases, to separate appositives or vocatives or items in a list, or after a sentence premodifier-just the sorts of places one would expect to find pauses (and frequently punctuation). But it is not necessarily the case that each line is one and only one syntactic constituent of any kind; it may contain several parallel phrases, or parts of one or more. Wright some-

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times divides lines in very unpredictable places: between an adjective and the noun it modifies ("old/ Man," "dark/ Blood"), between the parts of a compound participial modifier ("creosote / Soaked"), between a verb and its infinitival complement ("going/ To take"), between a relative pronoun and its own clause ("what/ I was doing"), between a preposition and its noun-phrase object ("among/ old lonelinesses"), and so on. Such exceptions are rare in Wright's earlier free verse (Branch) and somewhat more common (especially the adjective/noun divisions) in later works such as Pear Tree and This Journey. Even aside from the exceptional ones, there are, of course, more potential locations for line breaks than actual breaks, and why Wright (or any poet) passes over some and uses others is a complex question which we will explore in a moment. Lowell's practice is similar, except that many of his exceptional line divisions appear to be placed to get rhymes at the ends of lines. Setting these rhyming lines aside, Lowell's free-verse lines are overwhelmingly divided between phrases, with only a few exceptions: divisions between a determiner and the rest of its noun phrase ("Boston's / 'hardly passionate Marlborough Street'") and a handful of others. But Lowell's lines can be quite uneven in length, divided at spots that are surprising even though they fall at syntactic boundaries and may even divide equal-level syntactic categories, such as NPfVP: The corpse was wrapped like pannetone in Italian tinfoil, where a division after "wrapped" or "pannetone" might be more predictable, simply on the basis of length. As I mentioned earlier, Lehiste (r99r) says that, cross-linguistically, lines within a poem tend to be of equal duration; clearly this is not always the case in free verse. As readers, we seem to make the following limited assumptions: we expect a line to be a syntactic phrase,3 and we expect it to be a phonological phrase of some sort, marked by pause, final lengthening, andjor intonation. We should say, more precisely, that it is a syntactic and phonological phrase in the most unmarked case, because all of the poets we have looked at have some or even many lines that are not syntactic constituents and would not be phonological units in ordinary speech. It is not clear, though, how the marked lines-the ones that don't meet these expectations-are to be read. Take lines like Lowell's Failing as when Francis Winslow could count them on his fingers

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(where one expects the unstressed pronoun them to be attached to the verb) or Wright's But by night now, in the bread lines my father Prowls, I cannot find him: so far off

(where one expects the relative clause "my father prowls" to stay together): Are the unpredictable line divisions meant to be read as phonological or even pseudosyntactic boundaries, making odd but suggestive units of things that would not ordinarily be grouped together? The fact that Wright is the only poet we've seen so far who, in tape-recorded performances, consistently pauses at the end of every line (and he pauses at almost any excuse, not just line ends) does not mean that the others are not thinking of the lines as phrases at some more abstract level. Since these poets most often make their line divisions coincide with the more salient syntactic boundaries, or with other places where one might naturally pause in speech, there may be a subconscious implication that every line is to be read, or heard, as if it is a phrase. This would lead to tension, and sometimes temporary ambiguity (or occasionally a resolution of ambiguity) when line structure is superimposed over other organizational structures. Poetic tension is dissonance between what is expected and what occurs. One of our expectations seems to be that all levels of rhythmic organization will line up with each other; when they do not, it creates tension. This type of tension is what is often called "enjambment." 4 As I discussed in chapter I, Cureton (1992) argues that because of the hierarchical nature of rhythm, well-formed rhythmic structures do not have overlapping or ambiguous boundaries: what is a boundary at a higher level will always be a boundary at a lower level. This does seem to be what we normally expect. However, we must take the term well-formed in a special sense, weaker than its usual meaning in generative linguistics. If Cureton's rule is taken as an absolute prohibition, it rules out most kinds of enjambment. Many coherent, understandable, and effective poems (as well as other discourses) violate this principle. THE LINE AS EXPRESSIVE DEVICE

One effect of the overlapping of syntax and lineation is that the way a line is divided can influence the way a reader parses the sentence. In the following two lines, for example, the placement of the line division causes

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us to temporarily read both instances of the word "dark" as nouns, and the second sentence as an exact repetition of the first: I am the dark. I am the dark bone I was born to be. (Wright, "Before a Cashier's Window ..." [1971, 148])

(On a phonological level, the division also encourages us to focus on the pairing of "dark" and "dark" in the first line, and "bone" and "born" in the second.) There are many similar examples. Thus the lineation can emphasize temporary syntactic ambiguity. It can also help to avoid ambiguity. Line divisions can serve as a kind of nonspecific punctuation. This is especially important for poets who, unlike Eliot, Wright, and Lowell, use virtually no explicit punctuation or capital letters; but it's significant even for those who use more punctuation. Consider the Wright lines above: " ... my father/ Prowls ...." As it is written, one is not sure at first whether "my father prowls" is a relative clause or a main clause; "My father prowls in the bread lines, I cannot find him" or "I cannot find my father in the bread lines that he prowls." Now consider these two revisions: But by night now, in the bread lines my father prowls I cannot find him: But by night now, in the bread lines my father prowls, I cannot find him:

The first revision favors the relative-clause interpretation, while the second favors the main-clause interpretation. Neither revision rules out the other, less favored interpretation, however; we are not required to treat a line as a syntactic constituent, but we do seem to look for such interpretations first. The free-verse line also has uses less directly linked to phrasing. Among them are grouping phrases together, controlling the tempo (or "cadence") of the poem, emphasizing particular words, and creating other kinds of tension. The poet Sandra McPherson has enumerated some of the extralinguistic uses of lineation: the line is "a module of interest, surprise, or direction, which offers itself as distinct from what precedes and follows" (1973, 54). Lines also provide a sense of "scale"; each line is presumed to be equally "heavy" in some sense (not necessarily in terms of isochrony).

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Thus if there is only one word in one line and six words in the next, the word that takes up a whole line will be relatively "heavy." Finally, according to McPherson, there is "suspense" from one line to the next, and the lineation guides "our response to the speed of the poem." The effect of line length on speed presents an interesting contradiction: the "suspense" and pause involved in moving from one line to the next should slow a reader down. Shorter lines should tend to slow us down, longer lines to speed us up; lines of approximately equal length create an impression of even reading speed, and markedly unequal line lengths create a jerky effect. At the same time, though, one often comes across the claim (in Lowell's criticism, for example) that dividing a poem into short lines makes it read faster. This suggests that at least some readers and writers feel the line as a temporal unit in itself, regardless of its actual duration, and that the more lines per minute one takes in, the faster the tempo feels-even if the words per minute are the same or fewer. A good example of the pacing/weighting effect occurs in Wright's poem "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio." After four stanzas of longer (mostly four-to-five-foot) lines, the poem narrows to one- and two-syllable lines, then abruptly opens out into even longer lines: Then from the bottom Of that absolutely Smooth dead Face

We Climbed Straight up And white To a garden of bloodroots, tangled there, a vicious secret Of trilliums, the dark purple silk sliding its hands deep down In the gorges of those savage flowers, the only Beauty we found, outraged in that naked hell. (1977, 34-35)

The verticality of the short lines is surely mimetic of the cliff face to some extent, but it also slows the pace of the poem to a crawl, word by word. The longer lines and more complicated, paratactic syntax that follow not only speed the flow from word to word again but complement the effect of lushness and (moral) confusion produced by the semantics of the stanza. At the same time, our vertical progress down the page is undoubtedly much

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faster in the section of short lines, while the eye movement turns horizontal in the longer lines; in this sense the shorter lines are faster. Either way, the contrast between the two helps mark out distinctly separate rhythmic groupings of lines, along with the shift of tone. (For more on the interpretation of this poem, see Cooper 1996b.) Conversely, in "Beautiful Ohio" (Wright 1977, 62), when four lines in the middle of the poem are abruptly twice as long as those before and after, the rhythm changes; the effect is akin to that of extrametricallines in Old English verse. Thus groups of lines can be tied together into rhythmic units by grouping according to similar length. (Free verse whose central rhythmic structure is the regulation of the length of its lines or phrases [cadences] is sometimes called "cadenced verse," a term attributed to Amy Lowell; see Malo£ 1970 and Allen 1948.) Lines can also, of course, be linked by rhyme (as we saw in chapter 3), by intonation (as we will see in the next chapter), and by many other kinds of marked parallelisms. Some examples of other kinds occur in Wright's "To a Blossoming Pear Tree" (1977, 60-61). The first nine lines of this poem are a kind of nature ode, resembling some of the Latin odes of Horace and the German poems of Goethe and especially of Theodor Storm, as in Storm's "Woman's Ritornelle" (translated by Wright in 1966): Blossoming myrtle treeI was hoping to gather your sweet fruit; The blossoms fell; now I can see I was wrong.

The first nine lines of "To a Blossoming Pear Tree" resemble this poem not only in its subject matter and apostrophe, but in its tightly bound three-line stanzas. These lines are held together by several kinds of parallelism at once: Beautiful natural blossoms, Pure delicate body, You stand without trembling. Little mist of fallen starlight, Perfect, beyond my reach, how I envy you. For if you could only listen, I would tell you something, Something human.

We might summarize the semantic parallelism, roughly, by saying that each stanza, and also the group of three stanzas taken together, moves from

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praise of nature to a focus on human qualities. The rhythmic parallelism works at the syllabic, stress, and syntactic levels. The length of the lines in syllables goes 8-6-6, 8-6-5, 8-6-4; in other words, each successive line in a stanza is slightly shorter than the previous one, and each successive stanza's last line is slightly shorter than the previous one's. The stress count of the lines, as I scan them, is 3-3-2, 4-3-2, 3-3-2-again, closely parallel, but this time the three-stanza structure is symmetrical. The syntactic parallelism goes beyond the fact that each stanza is a sentence. It is tightest in the first two lines: Adjective-Adjective-Noun I Adjective-Adjective-Noun (producing similar stress patterns: lxxlxxlx, l_lxxlx). The first two stanzas also parallel each other, though more loosely: the first line of each is a noun-phrase vocative, the second is some modification of that noun phrase (a descriptive appositive noun phrase or a pair of modifiers), the third is the main clause. This structuring is so tight that one might be tempted to call it something other than free verse, but the next section of the poem is much less regular. There are occasional parallels ("Of some mocking policeman I Or some cute young wiseacre"), hut the only consistent feature is that the lines are mostly of similar length. This difference in rhythmic structuring mirrors the change in content, which becomes less formally meditative and more personal-the account of a pathetic old man propositioning the speaker. At the end we have a kind of reprise of the apostrophe, but with a very different line structure from the beginning: Young tree, unburdened By anything but your beautiful natural Blossoms And dew, the dark Blood in my body drags me Down with my brother.

Again we get the semantic parallelism (the tree followed by the human), but the unruly length of the second and third lines and the enjambment of several give this stanza a much less even rhythm. The clearest examples of the effects of line divisions come in nearminimal pairs, where the same wording is reanalyzed with a different line structure. There are many examples of this; one of the cleanest comes in Wright's "The Best Days" (1977, 50). The Latin epigraph, Optima dies prima fugit, is translated three times in the body of the poem. The first time it appears is the most enjambed and divided, written on three lines:

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The best Days are the first To flee. The second instance combines the first two lines: The best days are the first To flee. The last instance is all on one line: The best days are the first to flee. Thus we move from a slow reading, pausing twice as though to ponder the individual words, to a faster reading that gives extra weight to the short second line ("to flee"), to a complete thought read as a unit, perhaps because we are by now so familiar with it. SUMMARY OF LINE STRUCTURE

The lineation of poems we have looked at makes most sense if we think of the line as being a separate level of rhythmic organization, but generally equivalent to a phonological phrase, bounded by pauses. It is frequently also an intonational phrase and a syntactic phrase, but tension can be created by making boundaries at these various levels fail to coincide. Other expressive and rhythmic effects can also be achieved through lineation: manipulating the tempo, influencing the parsing of syntactic structures, grouping lines together, emphasizing certain words or even sounds (as in the case of end-rhyme), and so on. It is clear that in the poems of our study the line is an important structural unit, not a trivial typographical convention. However, it is by no means the only unit of poetic grouping structure, or the only thing that marks these texts as poetic. Each type of phrasing has its own potentially rhythmic structure: the melodies of intonational phrases have their own integrity, which does not always respect line boundaries. The percussive rhythm of pauses often goes along with line breaks, but may be either more or less frequent. Finally, recurrent figures of syntax also play a role in poetic rhythm and poetic structure-as we shall now see.

Syntactic Phrasing and Figures of Syntax Aside from graphical lines and stanzas, the other aspect of grouping structure that we can read fairly unambiguously from the written page is syn-

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tactic phrasing or, more broadly, syntactic structure. Theories of syntax differ, of course, but mostly at a fairly high level of abstraction; most of the time we can agree on how the stream of speech is divided up into basic groupings like noun phrases, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and sentences. What's more, written language makes the task easier by using mostly complete sentences, and by giving us some extra clues such as marks of punctuation and capital letters. Parsing-perceiving these groupings and consigning them to categories-is an important part of language processing in general, and it is also an important part of perceiving rhythm. Along with the grouping function of syntax, there are also figures of syntax similar to the figures of sound and meaning we have already explored. Syntax, in fact, helps to construct rhythm at several levels. As we have seen in previous chapters, to the extent that syntax determines word order and word category selection, it also helps to determine the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables-meter. At a higher level, the phrasal and clausal structures of syntax play a large part in the determination of phonological phrasing and intonation. Finally, syntactic structures are a hierarchical organizational system in their own right; they can be thought of as a kind of mental rhythm. They form their own patterns in time, and a repeated syntactic pattern, like a repeated sound pattern, is also a recurrent rhythmic figure. In a sense, the characteristic syntactic patterns of a poet are that poet's rhythms. We have begun to see this in the way Eliot's four-stress meter, far from resembling prose with a line division every four stresses, repeats similar kinds of phrases. We have also begun to see this in the way Eliot's, Lowell's, and Wright's word-level syntactic categories differ between their poetry and their prose. The same relationship holds when we look at the larger syntactic patterns of Lowell's and Wright's free verse. Each poet has his or her own characteristic patterns. For a free-verse poet, the patterns of syntax and morphology reveal not so much a set of absolute rules for a predetermined verse form as a set of habits of speech and of thought. 5 The term habits here is not meant to imply laziness or unconsciousness, nor certainly a particular (discredited) theory of language acquisition connected with Behaviorism. Nonetheless, each poet apparently prefers certain ways of composing sentences over others. A certain mind at a certain time uses characteristic linguistic patterns different from the characteristic patterns of others, in the same way that (as we shall see) it can have characteristic intonational tunes for poetry. (These patterns,

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in other authors, are predictable enough that they have been used statistically to prove or disprove authorship of disputed texts.) The poets acquire such patterns and tunes, presumably, from their own biological and cultural frameworks, including the structure of the brain, the language (including poetry) they have previously heard and read, and even what they themselves have said and written. They also, presumably, exercise some conscious control-not that they necessarily think, "I think I'll try to include about 0.4 relative clauses per line," but surely they are aware of syntax at some level. They know whether they are repeating parallel patterns, whether their sentences are complex or simple, and so on. To take a famous and rather blatant example, Ginsberg certainly knew that he was repeating the same clause type over and over in all the lines in "Howl" ([1956] 1988) that begin with "Who ...." Such patterns, or habits, are seldom so obvious in Wright's and Lowell's work, but they are prominent enough and frequent enough that they create their own set of expectations in a reader's mind, particularly since they often also combine with repeated metrical and lexical motifs. Thus they are the basis for several levels of rhythm. WRIGHT'S PREPOSITIONAL RHYTHM

One such pattern is easy to see in Wright's "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium" (whose stress patterns we examined in chapter 3): the way the poet uses the preposition of. The of-phrases (all modifying noun phrases) dominate the rhythm of the poem: poetry of calcium mother of roots the tall ashes of loneliness all trellises of vineyards and old fire mother of spiralling searches terrible fable of calcium mother of window sills and journeys hallower of scratching hands the sight of my blind man tiller of waves or whatever mother of roots father of diamonds

Prepositional phrases are, of course, extremely common structures in English-! use eight of-phrases in this paragraph alone-but this poem is,

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I would guess, even more loaded with them than the average piece of discourse. What's more, the semantic relationship between the first noun and the second is not stereotypical; a reader often has to make some sort of metaphorical leap in order to interpret these phrases. Wright uses these structures for an ambiguous, open link between words; 6 they are, in this poem, his chief means of introducing surprising juxtapositions of images. (In RomanJakobson's terms [1960], these prepositional phrases are one of Wright's main ways of projecting from the "axis of equivalence" onto the "axis of combination.") Thus this construction is a basic component of the "deep imagism" Wright was adapting from Robert Bly and several nonEnglish surrealist poets at the time he wrote this poem. We noted in chapter 3, too, the similar metrical patterns produced by these phrases, even within so small a sample. All of the following stress patterns occur in of-phrases in "Calcium"; although they include many variants, the patterns in each group bear a strong family resemblance. jxxxjx jxxxjxj jxxjxxjx jxxjxxjx jxxjxxjxx jxxjxxxjx jxxj jxxj jxxjx

These similar patterns of stress, or phonological emphasis, correspond to similar patterns of syntactic and semantic emphasis; taken together, they are a choreography of language. Such patterns are a crucial part of the almost perfect syntactic parallelism of "Spring Images" (1971, 129): Two athletes Are dancing in the cathedral Of the wind. A butterfly lights on the branch Of your green voice. Small antelopes Fall asleep in the ashes Of the moon.

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Each stanza follows this basic pattern (where capitals indicate verbatim words, lowercase indicates word-level category, and parentheses indicate an optional element): [determiner/adjective noun] verb [IN/ON THE [noun [OF determiner (adjective) noun]]]

The of genitive link is not this prominent in all of Wright's other poems, but it is important throughout Branch and in many of his later poems. And since it is especially prominent in the first few pages of Branch, which is Wright's first and best-known book of free verse, we as readers feel the structure as marked whenever we come across unusual examples of it from then on. The structure can be highly metaphorical, as in "Poetry of Calcium" or the following: hives of snow blossom of fire the hallway of a dark leaf the dark hands of Chicago the ruins of the sun the dark waters of the spirit the soul of a cop's eyes hallways of a diamond At the other end of the spectrum, it can be essentially descriptive: a whole season of lamentation and snow a shining circle of police sandstone blocks of a wellspring Rhythmically it varies from short and simple: the pillows of the sea (xjxxxj) a fold of echoes (xjxjx) the edge of town (xjx/) to the long and complex: the slow whale of country twilight (xjjxjxjx) the scorched fangs of a light bulb (xjjxxf\) the dark green crevices of my childhood (xjjjxxxxf\)

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This usage is probably influenced by Wright's interest in and translation of Spanish-language poets, such as Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Jorge Guillen, Miguel Hernandez, and Juan Ramon Jimenez at the time he was writing his early free verse. Hernandez's poetry is loaded with these surrealistic of-phrases, as in "El tren de los heridos" ("The Train of the Wounded," 1967). Neruda's "Algunas bestias" (which begins, "It was the twilight of the iguana") is also full of these of/de-phrases. Because Spanish de sometimes serves functions similar to not only English of, but also with, from, out of, or -'s, it can be rather pervasive. Take the end of the first stanza of "Algunas bestias" (r964a): Los monos trenzaban un hilo interminablemente er6tico en las riberas de Ia aurora, derribando muros de polen y espantando el vuelo violeta

de las mariposas de Muzo. Era Ia noche de los caimanes, Ia noche pura y pululante

de hocicos saliendo del /egamo, y de las cienegas soiiolientas un ruido opaco de armaduras volvfa al origen terrestre.

Wright's first published translation (Nerudar967a), reproduced here, actually rewords several of Neruda's de-phrases (a later version eliminates still more), but they are still prominent: The monkeys braided a thread Endlessly joyous with love Along the shores of the dawn, Demolishing the walls of pollen And startling the butterflies of Muzo Into flying violets. It was the night of the alligators, The night pure and throbbing gently, Night of the snouts emerging from ooze, And out of the lazy marshes The sad noise of skeletons Returned to the earth where they began.

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In the same issue of The Sixties in which Wright's translation of "El tren de los heridos" appeared was also Wright's English poem "In Memory of Leopardi," containing such passages as this: ... the dark jubilating Isaiah of mill and smoke marrow. Blind son Of a meadow of huge horses, lover of drowned islands Above Steubenville, blind father Of my halt gray wing ... (1967, 43)

and more-eleven of these structures in twenty-two lines? Of, however, is not the only preposition worth noting in Wright's style and rhythm. Where Lowell's obsession, for example, is to describe or even compound things, Wright's seems to be to locate them. At, over, on, around, beyond, to, under, by, between, with, and perhaps most notably in and into are the words that function as glue to hold Wright's poems together. They locate his subjects and objects in relation to each other. Frequently they combine with the of-structures we have just seen, and with each other, to form a continuous prepositional rhythm, as in these excerpts from different poems: Listens into the hallway Of a dark leaf Plunged into the dark furrows Of the sea for the bodies Of children in the black waters Of the suburbs

Poems like "Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959" (1971, 121-22) depend heavily on these structures, both semantically and rhythmically. Throughout the poem, the relative location (literally and metaphorically) of Eisenhower, Franco, the state police and prisons, Spanish villages, and spiritual things is crucial. The poem is built on lines like these: And come down in the slow dusk Of Spain. Franco stands in a shining circle of police. (II. 4-6)

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Lines and Phrases Antonio Machado follows the moon Down a road of white dust To a cave of silent children Under the Pyrenees. Wine darkens in stone jars in villages. Wine sleeps in the mouths of old men (II. n-r6)

embracing

In a glare of photographers. (II. r8-r9)

Their wings shine in the searchlights Of bare fields In Spain. (II. 22-24)

These prepositional phrases are rhythmically crucial not just because of their frequency, but because they are integral to the line structure. Notice how at least one boundary of every prepositional phrase begins or ends a line, while most of the lines begin or end (or both) with a prepositional phrase boundary. This prepositional rhythm is at its most regular in "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" (1971, 114). Here is the poem in full, with prepositional phrases bracketed: [Over my head], I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep [on the black trunk], Blowing [like a leaf] [in green shadow]. [Down the ravine [behind the empty house]], The cowbells follow one another [Into the distances [of the afternoon]]. [To my right], [In a field [of sunlight] [between two pines]], The droppings [of last year's horses] Blaze up [into golden stones]. I lean back, (as the evening darkens and comes (on)). 8 A chicken hawk floats (over), looking [for home]. I have wasted my life.

The rhythm of the poem is overwhelmingly determined by the prepositional phrases. Most of the lines have a natural pause or caesura in the middle, between a prepositional phrase and another (prepositional, noun, verb, or adjective) phrase. Further, the position of these complements and modifiers

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in their sentences creates a tone of cautious symmetry: every main clause in the first three-quarters of the poem is preceded and followed by prepositional phrases. Lines n and 12, though, are slightly different- a bit longer, and with verbal embellishments (a subordinate clause and a participial phrase) instead of nominal ones. In these sentences the main clause precedes everything else. The last line, finally, is short and uncomplicated: subject-verb-object. The overall effect is of a movement through three moods. The balanced, descriptive first ten lines give a sense of stillness and harmony; the next two, less symmetrical and more clausal, suggest a change coming; and then the last line hits quickly and startlingly, forcing us to reread the rest of the poem in a new light. This ending is so powerful only because it has been set up by the lulling rhythms and pastoral images of the preceding lines. It is not that prepositional phrases are inherently lulling or simple sentences inherently startling, but the way they are used here augments the moods suggested by the meanings of the words. LOWELL'S COMPLEX NOUN PHRASES, MODIFIERS, AND CLAUSES

An important layer of Wright's rhythm, then-especially in his earlier free verse-is established by these recurrent prepositional phrases. Similarly, we saw in chapter 2 how important certain kinds of two-stress noun phrases are to Eliot's rhythmic structure in Four Quartets. In Lowell's Life Studies, too, certain kinds of noun phrases are similarly prominent in the rhythm, but instead of having two stresses, the most noticeable have multiple stresses. As we began to see in the last chapter, Lowell's idiosyncratic use of compounds combines with other of his grammatical habits to create highly marked, noticeable, often long and complex chunks of verbiage that have to be taken as units. Among these habits are his use of functional shift; genitive -'s (especially for nonpossessive meanings); slangy American idioms, which stand as prefabricated pieces of language; contractions (especially -'s); and long strings of adjectives and other modifiers modifying a single noun. None of these formations is unusual in written English, but Lowell uses them often enough and in near enough proximity that they impart both compression and a certain blockiness to his style. We have already seen examples of the lexical formations mentioned in the previous paragraph. When these combine with some of his syn-

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tactic practices they create highly distinctive noun-phrase clusters. Corn has noted Lowell's long-standing fondness for the rhetorical figure known as the tricolic, a sequence of three adjectives ("flippant, forceful, jabbing worldliness"), which Lowell "probably learned as an undergraduate classics major" (1987, 43). But Lowell loves to make long strings of (sometimes compound) adjectives, adjectival modifiers, and nouns, whether they are classical rhetorical figures or not: half and half yeasty, wheezing homemade sarsaparilla the imperishable autumn display windows the ever-blackening wine-dark coat his recent unweathered pink-veined slice of marble slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle orange Puritan-pumpkin colored girders In reading aloud, Lowell tends to perform phrases such as these without pause and all on one pitch level, making the rhythm feel crowded and hurried, the words difficult to process so fast-even though his tempo in terms of syllables per second may not be unusually fast (see the next chapter for more on this). There are other ways of making big piles of words stick together as units. Lowell, despite or perhaps because of his sometimes conspicuous erudition, is quite fond of the phenomenon known as the idiom chunk: a string of fossilized language that means something different, as a unit, than the sum of its parts. These are often slangy, often decidedly American, but what is notable about them rhythmically is that they have to be taken as chunks (almost like compounds) rather than as sequences of individual words. A few examples: had thrown the sponge in threw cold water on What makes him tick? blew their tops and beat them black and blue Often, as in the last example, idioms get piled on top of one another, and frequently they are mixed metaphors or used in inappropriate contexts: the lights of science couldn't hold a candle to Mary talk cold turkey [= talk turkey+ cold turkey?] too boiled and shy and poker-faced to make a pass

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These idioms make a sharp contrast in tone, though not necessarily in rhythm or syntax, with the more learned and polysyllabic register of Lowell's vocabulary, such as: these victorious figures of bravado ossified young Thirsting for I the hierarchic privacy I of Queen Victoria's century her gilded bed-posts shine, I abandoned, almost Dionysian In keeping with the breeziness of some of the idiom chunks is Lowell's fondness for contractions. Their rhythmic effect is typically to eliminate a word and an unstressed syllable, creating more compression at lower levels. In many cases they also create a more regular, iambic alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables: the farm's my own golf's a game the season's ill my mind's not right they're altogether otherworldly now he'd rather marry (Try substituting is, are, or would back into the lines and see what happens metrically.) Another feature of Lowell's syntactic rhythm is his use of complex modifiers, especially participial phrases and, even more especially, nonrestrictive premodifiers. Perloff comments on the semantic importance of these: "To qualify, to modify, to suspend the narrative movement so as to define and to discriminate-this is Lowell's syntactic impulse" (1973, IOI). There are other ways of achieving these semantic effects-series of fragments, for example-but Lowell's way has its own peculiar rhythm. 9 These modifiers of Lowell's typically precede the subject of the main clause of the sentence, contributing to a peculiarly balanced or swinging syntactic rhythm (analogous to, but not the same as, Wright's balanced rhythm in "Lying in a Hammock"). A few examples from "Memories of West Street and Lepke" (1959, 85-86): Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house ...

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Lines and Phrases Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail ... Wearing chocolate double-breasted suits, they blew their tops ...

This feature sometimes becomes almost regular, as in (the partially iambic) "Home After Three Months Away" (1959, 84), in which every sentence in the third stanza (as well as many others) begins with a premodifier: Recuperating, I neither spin nor toil. Three stories down below, a choreman tends our coffin's length of soil, and seven horizontal tulips blow. just twelve months ago, these flowers were pedigreed imported Dutchmen; now no one need distinguish them from weed. Bushed by the late spring snow, they cannot meet another year's snowballing enervation.

Some similar features of Lowell's style complement these. Perloff points out the poet's fondness for lists of attributes-which also sound most "Lowellian" when they occur before the main clause-and lists of objects. For example, in "Lepke": Attributes: Hairy, muscular, suburban .. . Flabby, bald, lobotomized .. . Objects: two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate ... a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags ... Following the terminology of Miles (r964), Perloff argues that Lowell's high ratio of nouns and adjectives to finite verbs marks his style as highly "phrasal" rather than "clausal." Lists such as the examples above, clearly, add to this ratio. (Perloff also points out that frequently in such lists the last item will be surprising, often so much so that the list can be considered a "false series." For example, "suburban" is hardly the expected next term in the series [describing two pimps] "hairy, muscular, ___ .")

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Lowell's syntax uses every device available to expand, elaborate, and add on. Even coordination, through the use of coordinating conjunctions and through apposition, though common in all English-language writers, seems pushed a bit farther in Lowell's poetry, sometimes to the point of creating a paratactic structure in which links between clauses need not be very precise. "Lepke" contains eleven coordinating conjunctions in fifteen sentences; what's more, they are often used in slightly unidiomatic ways, as in "where even the man I scavenging filth ... I has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate, I and is a 'young Republican.' " Here the location of the long verb phrase before the short one makes the second verb phrase ("and is a 'young Republican'") sound like the last item in the list of possessions. Lowell seems to like syntactic structures that force the reader to go back and reanalyze; for me as a reader this adds a stopping-and-starting element to the rhythm, though oral readings do not reflect this quality. Many of these characteristics are not limited to Lowell's free verse, and in fact he acquired them before he began writing free verse. For example, Perloff (1973, 121-22) points out how he transforms Jonathan Edwards's prose in "After the Surprising Conversions" (from Lord Weary's Castle, 1946). Here is a passage from Edwards's "A Faithful Narrative": He was a Gentleman of more than common Understanding, of strict Morals, religious in his Behaviour, and an useful honorable Person in the Town; but was of a Family that are exceeding prone to the Disease of Melancholy, and his Mother was killed with it. ([1749] 1972, 206)

And here is Lowell's version: A gentleman Of more than common understanding, strict In morals, pious in behaviour, kicked Against our goad. A man of some renown, An useful, honored person in the town, He came of melancholy parents; prone to secret spells, for years they kept aloneHis uncle, I believe, was killed of it: Good people, but of too much or little wit. (r946, 6o)

That Lowell chose this episode to work with is revealing, and what he does with it is also revealing. He makes "a gentleman" into the subject of a verb which is not in his source; both the subject and the verb are now stressed,

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and the verb is much later in the sentence, after three postnominal modifiers of the subject. He begins the next sentence with two noun-phrase appositives before the subject. He makes Edwards's relative clause "that are exceeding prone to the Disease of Melancholy" into two adjectival modifiers, one of which again precedes the subject and verb phrase of its clause. Finally, he adds another noun phrase, "good people, but of too much or little wit," as an appositive to "parents." These alterations, taken together, add not only to the "phrasal style" but also to the symmetrical rhythm. In addition, even though Lowell has added several new phrases, totaling twenty-four words and thirty syllables, to Edwards's description, the total number of words in Lowell's passage is only five more than in Edwards's, and the number of syllables only ten more. Lowell's drive is again to compress. Lowell's style, of course, changes through time. His early poetry was noted for its choices of unusual finite verbs, but by Life Studies (1959) his verse was more "phrasal" in style, and in the later sonnet sequences such as Notebook (1969) we find poems full of noun phrases that do not even correspond to any verb phrase, and participial-phrase modifiers that do not modify anything, as in these lines from "Randall Jarrell": Grizzling up the embers of our onetime life, our first intoxicating disenchantments, dipping our hands once, twice, in the same river, entrained for college on the Ohio local. (1969, 24)

We never do get the subject and predicate of that sentence.10 As an example of unattached noun phrases, take these lines from "Long Summer (#4)": The vaporish closeness of this two-month fog; thirty-five summers back, the brightest summer: the Dealer's Choice, the housebound girls, fog lifting. (1969, 6)

(For more on this, see Perloff 1973, 123-27.) Wright's style, too, changes over his career, though never again as radically as in the change that produced Branch. Few poems in Pear Tree resemble "Poetry of Calcium," for example ("Neruda" is one exception). But the later poems do retain traces of his earlier habits of speech (heavy use of prepositions, repetition of key words), while adding new kinds of figures

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such as parallel sentence structures ("It is summer chillblain, it is blowtorch, it is not f Maiden and morning"; 1977, 34), the manipulations of line length and division we saw earlier in this chapter, and more. In the last two chapters we have been moving from smaller rhythmic figures to larger ones. This look at figures of syntax takes us almost as far as this book can reasonably go. The sentence is not necessarily the largest unit that can be considered part of the grouping structure of rhythm, but looking at larger units- the verse paragraph, the page, the whole poem as part of a book-would require a rather different set of tools. In looking at a larger set form-such as the fourteen-line loose sonnet stanza used by Lowell in several of his later books-we are undoubtedly looking at a rhythmic subdivision of the book, but probably traditional poetic analysis has more to say about the nature of these set forms than linguistics does. On the other hand, in looking at less obvious aspects of larger linguistic structures, we would move from the rather well-traveled ground of sentence linguistics to the explored but not fully domesticated region of discourse analysis (as, in fact, we have done in a few short excursions). The physical metaphor I have used in chapter headings implies that phonemes, syllables, and feet are like subatomic and atomic structure, lines and phrases like molecular and crystalline structure. Larger structures, then, are analogous to artifacts made from these substances and so are more infinitely variable. Is the "typical" shape of glass a wine glass, a window, a bead, a fishing float? It is, of course, of the greatest interest to see just what sort of individual artifact the poet has made. But I leave that task, for the most part, to other books. There is one more level of rhythmic structure, though, that is coterminous with phrase and line structure: intonational patterning. Where lines and, to a large extent, syntactic phrases can be read from a written text, intonational phrasing is largely an oral phenomenon. Thus the intonational structure of a written poem occupies a kind of middle ground between the poetics of writing and the poetics of speech. This area is the subject of the next chapter.

S. ..

The Literal Music of Poetry INTONATIONAL TUNES

FOR centuries, many poets and critics have written about the "musical" qualities of poetry; the best-known twentieth-century example is probably Eliot, with his published lecture "The Music of Poetry" (1942). In fact, some see musicality as the defining characteristic of poetry as a genre. However, linking poetry with music doesn't mean much unless we can be specific about how it is linked, especially since the trend in recent years in several areas of linguistics has also been to point out "musical" qualities in other types of language, such as conversation and oratory. Unfortunately, it is not always clear what a given writer means by the word music; often (as in Eliot's case)! it seems to be another word for attention to sound in general, or even more vaguely for "form" or "pattern" or "meter." Thus "the music of poetry" often has to be taken as an analogical or metaphorical concept, and pretty much every phenomenon we've looked at so far could be treated as a part of it. For at least one aspect of these putatively "musical" qualities, though, the comparison to music is not metaphorical at all, but direct. That aspect is intonation. 2

Intonational Phrases and Acoustic Performance The only grouping structures directly readable from the written page are syntactic phrasing, punctuation, and, in poetry, line division. In Modern English punctuation generally reflects syntactic phrasing, and (as I mentioned in the last chapter) line division may or may not coincide with some other type of phrasing, depending on the poet. To get at phonological and intonational phrasing-which are equally important divisions of information in speech-we have two avenues available. As sensitive readers, of course, we interpret the sounds of a poem for ourselves; we hear an internal voice giving the words a pronunciation that seems coherent and pleasing

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to us. For most modern poets, however, we also have the option of hearing an external voice: the poet's own. REASONS FOR STUDYING POETS' INTONATION

Although it is rare to find a well-known (or even slightly known) twentieth-century poet who has not made a sound recording of his or her own verse, it is equally rare to find writers on poetics who make use of these recordings. 3 Naturally, writers on poetic intonation who use these resources are a subset of even this small group. Those who do use recordings often see the goal of studying intonation as clarifying the "meaning" of the poem. This generally entails finding points of potential ambiguity and using the author's reading as a way of winnowing his or her intended meaning from other possible meanings. 4 This approach is compatible with those theories of literature that hold that recovering, as well as we can, the author's original intentions is a fundamental part of reading and interpreting (see, for example, Hirsch 1967, 1976; Knapp and Michaels 1982). This goal is not unreasonable, even though there are tricky epistemological problems involved in the search for authorial intentions. Among these problems are the fact that poets' mental soundscapes, like readers', may change from one performance to the next; and the fact that poets' actual performances may be very imperfect reflections of what they hear in their heads. As Addison remarks, "If I make an attempt to vocalize my [mental] performance ... , I am always struck by my inability to do justice to my conception" (1994, 672). And it must be admitted that none of the three poets we have focused on so far is known as a particularly exciting reader of his own work. Some poets consider themselves performers and give highly animated readings (for example, Jimmy Santiago Baca; see below), while others could not be mistaken for doing anything but merely reading aloud. Nevertheless, to emphasize the instabilities of performances without acknowledging the much greater continuities between them is misleading. Each authorial reading, even if it is flawed, is a strong clue about (but not an absolute reproduction of) authorial intention(s), just as every conversational utterance is a strong clue about its speaker's intended meaning(s). Since interpretation always involves hypothesizing a set of meanings intended by an imagined author, it does not seem unreasonable to want to make this imagined author as similar to the actual author as possible. Still, recapturing authorial intentions and meanings is not the only possible goal of studying poets' intonation. For example, one may well set

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meaning temporarily aside and study poetic intonation for its own sake, just to find out what it is-to find out, that is, which intonation patterns are characteristic of poetry. It would be interesting to know if these patterns are in any way different from those in prose or conversation,5 and also if there is such a thing as the aesthetics of intonation- do particular combinations of speech melodies strike us as more beautiful than others? This chapter will address both of these questions, though naturally neither I nor anyone else can claim to have found complete answers to either. Still another approach to poetic intonation would be to turn the question of authorial intention inward, and wonder not so much what the authors meant to project to readers, but what was in their minds that allowed them to produce these particular poems. Did they have particular linguistic melodies in mind that they were trying to fit words to? This is an alternative to the tacit model that one often finds in writings on the subject: that the poet first has (propositional) ideas, which he or she formulates as clearly as possible and then (if conscious of sound at all) puts through various metrical and euphonic filters. The much-cited notion of "organic form" (Levertov [1965] 1973) or "absolute rhythm" (Pound [1913] 1968, 9) also includes an implicit assumption that words and meaning are primary, with form (including melody) secondary, following almost automatically from the content. Although a strict belief in "absolute" or "organic" form would render form absolutely predictable and therefore uninteresting, there is certainly some evidence for the notion of content preceding form: Lowell wrote some of the material in Life Studies as prose before trying it in different poetic forms, and a look at the notebooks of other poets often shows a similar process: prose observations first, then poetic drafts. 6 However, the idea that tunes precede words is also an old one, especially among poets. Ezra Pound claimed that each of his poems began with a melody heard in his head, while Eliot was known for the "auditory imagination" ("I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words"; 1957, 32), and the idea was not new with them. Finch (1993) portrays Emily Dickinson's prosody as a kind of mental struggle between two preexisting forms: the "patriarchal" iambic pentameter and the hymn tunes she knew in more feminized contexts. For a more literal example of what we're talking about, in a draft of "A Lament" Shelley writes out a metrical tune in nonsense syllables first ("ni nal nina, na ni"), then finds words to fit them (Weaver 1932). This doesn't seem too different from what many writers of popular songs and advertising jingles do when they take an existing melody and compose new words to it.

Intonational Tunes

II9

Most contemporary poems surely do not get started with such welldefined, word-free, and literal tunes. But if poets have some sort of guiding melody in their heads-perhaps habitual intonation contours that they associate with poeticism, or patterns that have been set up by earlier lines of the poem, or even just an idea of what a poem is supposed to sound like-this should affect the linguistic forms they choose to use. This network of potential patterns will also affect how listeners perceive the poems, and how readers hear them in their minds. Also, because intonational patterns vary among different speakers, dialect, as well as idiolect, helps determine which melodies are available to a given speaker, as we will see most clearly in the cases of Jimmy Santiago Baca, Etheridge Knight, and Denise Levertov. At the same time, we can not only learn about poetry by studying intonation, but also learn about intonation by studying poetry. For example, it is well established that different dialects have different characteristic intonation patterns (Brown, Currie, and Kenworthy r98o; Cruttenden r986, r34-44; Ramsaran r990, 2r9-6o); nevertheless, there is a real shortage of good comparative descriptions of intonation in English dialects-so much so that I have found it difficult to use a single, consistent theoretical framework for the six poets discussed in this chapter. Thus the observations we can make about poetic performance can also, as a happy side-effect, help fill in some gaps in our knowledge of intonation in dialects. Similarly, the study of poetic intonation can refine existing theories of intonational meaning. Although there has been a good deal of work done in the last two or three decades on how intonation is used and what it means, no theory of which I am aware is entirely adequate for analyzing the performance of poetry. This is partly because the best-known theories are focused on more interactive discourse situations-that is, conversation-and because they are usually based on one or two standardized dialects. Also, I contend that any theory of intonational use based entirely on meaningwhether it is sentence-level meaning (as in Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg r990) or discourse-level meaning (as in Brazil r984 or McLemore r992) -is not adequate for poetry. Instead, the intonational contours are sometimes motivated by formal objectives: to highlight parallelism, to make passages more rhythmical, to emphasize particular words and phrases, or to play up dialect differences. Finally, what winds up on paper, like what winds up on tape, has its origins in the rhythms of a particular person's brain, and we can at least speculate on how one translates into the other. Laver remarks, "The preparation and articulation of a speech program is not performed on a sound-by-

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Intonational Tunes

sound, or even on a word-by-word basis. It is much more likely that neural elements corresponding to much longer stretches of speech are assembled in advance, and then allowed to be articulated as a single continuous program" (1970, 68). He speculates that this unit of neural assemblage may be the "tone group." If so, the tone group or intonational phrase should also be a basic unit of poetic assemblage. What syntactic patterns will the poet's neural rhythms produce? What morphology? How will they show up in poetic lines? We are a long way from mapping directly from neurons to intonational structures to poetic lines. Until a great deal more is known about the workings of the brain, and the mind, all we can know, as in much of linguistics, is inductive: if we can accurately describe the patterns that are produced, we can make more educated guesses regarding the biological and social structures that must have produced them. So the next step is to describe those patterns for specific poets. In order to make such a description clear, a brief overview of the phonetics, phonology, and pragmatics of intonation may be useful for readers who are not familiar with the study of intonation or who are used to handling it in a different way. Readers who prefer to see examples of poetry first and come back to the theoretical background later should skip now to the section titled "Specific Poets and Patterns." A BRIEF SKETCH OF INTONATION THEORY

The basic unit of intonation is the intonational phrase. Intonational phrases typically have several identifying features: a general decline in pitch over the course of the phrase, a recognizable phrase-ending pitch contour, a pause or lengthening at the end of the phrase, often followed by a speeding up (anacrusis) at the beginning of the next phrase. Intonational phrases may be divided into smaller units called intermediate phrases (though terminology is not consistent among different researchers). The boundaries of intonational phrases often correspond to the boundaries of syntactic phrases or clauses, but they do not have to. Many researchers (especially Firth, Halliday, and the "British" school) argue that intonational phrases or "tone units" are fundamentally information units, although there is some dispute about what kind of information they convey. In poetics, though, it is useful to see them as both information units and melodic units. Since intonation contours are patterns of pitch in time, they are quite literally the melody of language. Unfortunately, we do not have a standard musical notation with which to represent these intonational melodies. One

Intonational Tunes

121

350

N

J:

r

1~c

1ool~--~--------------------~-------------LEGUMES ARE A GOOD SOURCE OF VITAMINS

I Source: Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990, 273· FIGURE

H

*

l

H%

3· Raw fundamental-frequency contour graph

can map them fairly directly into frequency/time graphs, which is the most complete way of representing a pitch contour? The contour itself, though, does not tell us how to compare itself to other contours; for that we need a way to analyze it into more abstract, simplified, comparable units. The way these melodies are analyzed varies widely. To illustrate these differences in approach, here is a sample utterance from Pierrehumbert 1980, transcribed as she does and according to my approximation to several other basic methods. Some may disagree with particular points in my translations, but the point here is simply to give the flavors of the different methods of description. The raw fundamental-frequency (FO) contour is graphed in Figure 3, and representations of four common methods of analysis are shown in Figure 4· One approach, illustrated in Figure 4a, is to treat the whole tune as agestalt and see meaning as inhering holistically in that tune. Thus it has been said that there is a "calling" contour, a "contradiction" contour, an "incredulity" contour, and so on (see, for example, Liberman and Sag 1974; Liberman 1976; Bolinger 1986). This method, it seems to me, corresponds well to speakers' general intuitions about meaning, but it is limited in its ability to analyze tunes into smaller components or to capture generalizations among the large variety of possible tunes in English. Another way to represent the contour is in a more stylized, atomized graph (Figure 4b). Cruttenden (1984, 1986, 1990), from whose work I adapted this approach, then abstracts these graphs into descriptive cate-

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Intonational Tunes

a. Legumes are a good source of vitamins .

.

\;.

b. Legumes are a good source of vitamins.

Mid-level Rise-Fall-Rise c. Legumes are a good source of vitamins.

H*L H% d. Legumes are a good source of vitamins.

FIGURE

4· Four methods of analyzing poetic melody

gories such as "high-rise" and "low-rise" in order to discuss them. Anumber of European linguists use this kind of transcription or some fairly similar type of stylized pitch graph (for example, 't Hart, Collier, and Cohen 1990). A closely related approach skips the graphing stage and goes straight to descriptive categories (Figure 4c). Such methods (of which there are many variations) break tunes down into dynamic pitch accents, which line up with the most strongly stressed syllables in the utterance. This always includes a nuclear accent, which typically can have the most complex shape, and may also include one or more prenuclear accents. The label an accent is given is essentially a description of the direction of its pitch movement. Depending on the particular theory, the number of possible labels varies, but generally there are simple tones-rising, falling, or level-and compound tones, which are combinations of the simple ones: rise-fall, fall-rise, and so on. This is basically the approach that has been taken by Halliday (1985), Brazil (Brazil, Coulthard, and Johns 1980), and others (for example, Cauldwell and Schourup 1988; McLemore 1992), though each researcher groups these contours a little differently. Although it looks different, it is theoretically very similar to the strategy illustrated in Figure 4b, and some researchers combine both approaches.

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123

Finally, probably the most popular approach in America currently is to analyze intonation as a series of tone accents labeled with static high or low target levels (Figure 4d); this approach has its roots in the analysis of true "tone languages" in Africa and elsewhere. By "static target levels," of course, I don't mean that the tone remains static. The pitch changes continuously, but the labeling focuses on the termini (highest and lowest points) of movement rather than the movements themselves. There are also several variations on this approach; 8 I will describe the most common one, first laid out in detail by Pierrehumbert (r98o) and most fully elaborated by Beckman and Ayres (1994). Pitch accents on stressed syllables take the forms High (H), Low (L), H + L, and L+ H; in addition, the tone aligned with a stressed syllable is marked with an asterisk, so the two-tone accents actually have four forms: H'' + L, H + L", L'' + H, and L+ H''. There are also H or L tones that aren't attached to particular syllables: one after each nuclear accent, and one at the boundary of the intonational phrase. This accounts for nuclear accents being more complex than non-nuclear ones: the last accent of an intonational phrase can potentially have four target levels rather than just two: two for the nuclear accent, one for the phrase accent, and one for the boundary tone. 9 At first glance, the tone-level approach doesn't look very different from the dynamic-accent approach: a movement from high to low clearly is also a falling movement, and a rise-fall clearly has a low point followed by a high point followed by another low point. The implications, however, are somewhat different, both in terms of the phonetics (how these accents translate into specific FO contours) and in terms of the assignment of pragmatic or semantic meaning to particular tunes. The tone-level approach seems to work better for computer synthesis, for example (Hirschberg and Ward 1992). In contrast, the dynamic-accent approach may be more useful for informal description of patterns, which is why I have used a modified version of it in describing some poetic lines below. It seems plausible to me that dynamic accents are the best model of our perception of pitch (at least in English), while static accents are better models of the production of pitch. At present, though, there is not enough evidence to make these more than educated guesses. INTONATIONAL MEANING

Like the description of intonation patterns, the interpretation of intonation is also rather controversial. Certain generalizations are mostly agreed

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Intonational Tunes

upon, but specific applications are not. The meaning of intonation is usually described as pragmatic or sociolinguistic rather than semantic; it expresses attitudes about how the discourse is to be taken and about the state of shared knowledge and beliefs, rather than adding to the utterance's propositional content. Some features of intonation are not really counted as part of the "tune." For example, wider or narrower pitch range (how high the highs are and how low the lows are) can be used for emotional effect, to signal the beginning of a new topic (Brown, Currie, and Kenworthy 1980 ), or for ease of listening ("speaking up") (Hirschberg and Ward 1992), but the relationships between high and low tones are not meaningfully affected. Similarly, greater prominence can be given to a particular accented word by boosting the jump in frequency (or, to some extent, lowering the frequency of a low accent), but this is a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference in tune. Speakers who use lots of very prominent accents may be heard as emotional, emphatic, or phony, but they are using the same basic tunes as speakers who use only a fraction of their potential vocal range. Other intonational features are highly predictable and therefore not meaningful in themselves; for example, there is a widespread tendency for the base FO to get lower over the course of a phrase; this is called declination. Most languages of the world have this tendency. Partly because of declination, a frequency that counts as a low tone at the beginning of a phrase may count as high by the end. However, there are tune-specific factors that can make this drop in pitch more or less severe; some researchers say that certain types of accent can trigger downstep (a steeper, but more localized, drop than declination alone), and certain kinds of utterances (declaratives, especially) involve final lowering-a further pitch drop in the last half-second of the phrase (Liberman and Pierrehumbert 1984). Another nearly universal, but not entirely predictable, function is involved in grouping discourse units: in many languages, including English, a relatively high pitch at the end of an intonational phrase generally means that there is more to add, while a low or falling pitch means that the speaker is through with that particular section of discourse (Bolinger 1978). The more the end of the phrase is lowered, the more finality it signals, so falls to an intermediate level indicate less closure than falls to the bottom of the speaker's pitch range (Beckman and Pierrehumbert 1986; Couper-Kuhlen 1986). This fact has implications both for the interpretation of monologue and for turn taking and cooperation in dialogue. A relatively high or rising or level contour is said to signal, depending on the context:

Intonational Tunes TABLE

125

6.

Brazil's Intonational System Orientation

direct direct direct direct oblique oblique

Tone

Meaning

rise fall-rise rise-fall fall fall level

common ground; togetherness; control common ground; togetherness new; control new point of completion "these are the words I am using"

Source: Brazil 1984, as compiled by Cauldwell and Schourup 1988, 417.

a yesfno question, seeking an answer: Are you the accordion player?(H) uncertainty or dubiousness about one's assertion: He says he loves me(H) ... (but ... ) the fact that the assertion is not complete, and the next intonational phrase is to be construed with the present one: She's either an alien(H) or a very odd human. the fact that the utterance is not complete, and the hearer is to complete it (either mentally or out loud}: We could go to a movie, or a nightclub, or a sausage factory(H) ... an item that is referring to an entity already known or mentioned in the discourse: Q: Do you know any Rosicrucians? A: B) Chuck(H) is a Rosicrucian.(H) (Liberman and Sag 1974) Seeking approval from the hearer: I thought [the movie we just saw] was good(H). (Pierrehumbert 1980} Although these are rather different "meanings," they all have in common a certain lack of closure at the end. When we break tone patterns down into more categories than simply rising or falling endings, however, we find a lot of variety in the way they are described. The following are (highly condensed) synopses of three influential characterizations, those of Brazil (r984} and Cruttenden (r986} on the one hand, and those ofPierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) and the closely related one by Hobbs (1990) on the other hand. In Brazil's formulation (Table 6}, "orientation" has to do with whether the speaker's "mental set" is toward interacting with the listener (direct} or toward the language itself (oblique)-as it may be in reading aloud, for example. Cruttenden's observations (Table 7) are clearly related, but just

126

Intonational Tunes TABLE 7· Cruttenden's Tone Categories

Nuclear tone

Contextual factors

Low-fall

Abstract meaning

Finality, completeness, definiteness, separateness

Local meanings

Uninterested, unexcited, dispassionate

With high prenuclear accent

Weighty, powerful; impatient

Without high prenuclear accent

Protesting

With interrogatives and imperatives

Hostile

High-fall

Finality, completeness, definiteness, separateness

Interested, excited, involved

Rise-fall

Finality, completeness, definiteness, separateness

(a) Impressed; (b) Challenging

Low-rise (dependent clause)

Dependency or nonfinality

Oratorical; formal reading style (or British)

High-rise (dependent clause)

Dependency or nonfinality

Casual (or American/Australian)

Fall-rise (dependent clause)

Dependency or nonfinality

Contrast

Mid-level (dependent clause)

Dependency or nonfinality

Low-rise (independent clause) With high prenuclear accent

Soothing, reassuring; patronizing

Without high prenuclear accent

Noncommital; grumbling

High-rise (independent clause)

Echo or repeat question; questioning, incredulity

Fall-rise (independent clause)

(a) Reservations, contrast, contradiction (b) Self-justification, appeal, warning (c) Whining On certain tag questions

Menacing

Intonational Tunes TABLE

127

7·

(Continued) Nuclear tone

Contextual factors

With negatives

Abstract meaning

Local meanings

Limits scope of negation

Fall (on adverbial)

Reinforcing information in main clause

Rise (on adverbial)

Limiting information in main clause

Source: Cruttenden 1986; my summary.

different enough from Brazil's to be confusing. He uses a different number of categories, and unapologetically mixes different types of meanings, partly because he is trying to give a rather more detailed breakdown than some other authors. Still more different are the meanings given by Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, and by Hobbs in his comment on their paper (Table 8). Direct comparison is difficult because Brazil is more interested in discourse-level meanings, while Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg are more interested in sentence-level meanings, and Cruttenden mixes the two. The very different phonological descriptions in the different systems also make comparisons more difficult. Still, some similarities and differences should be apparent from the synopsis in Table 8. Naturally, such truncated summaries do not do full justice to these systems; still, they should give an idea of current thinking on intonational meaning. Tones, these authors agree, express things about some or all of the following: the mutual belief systems of speaker and hearer; the status of information as new, given, or false; the closure or lack of closure of an utterance with regard to subsequent utterances by either speaker; socialjpower relationships between speaker and hearer; semigrammatical relationships such as dependency of clauses and scope of negation; emotional attitudes such as excitement or hostility; and the attitude of the speaker toward the utterance as direct communication or more as a display of language. Because my research has not centered on these aspects of intonational meaning, I cannot say which system fits all the facts best; I assume that each may be appropriate for certain purposes. What's more, they may be correct simultaneously. For example, an utterance that marks one element as given (L'') and predicates another as new in contrast to that one (L+ H'' ), but ends in a non-low pitch and thus remains open (H%), may also be to some extent an oblique display of language and may indicate a certain

Intonational Tunes

128

TABLE

8.

Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg's Intonational Meanings and Hobbs's Revisions

H'' L* L+H* H+L'' L*+H H*+L

H,H% L,L%

Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg meaning

Hobbs meaning

"New" in discourse Salient but not predicated by speaker Predicated with regard to a salient scale; correction or contrast Inferrable by hearer; not predicated by speaker Uncertainty about a scale Predicated by speaker; hearer should infer mutual belief(s) Phrase forms larger unit with following phrase; "forward reference"; hierarchical Emphasizes separation of current phrase from following phrase; unspecified direction of reference

New proposition Not new: given, or false (not believed) "You might think this is not new ... but it's new" "You might think this is new ... but it's not new" Conveyed as given or false, but still open New; not open to question (because inferrable or because of authority) Open; nonfinal relationship between intentions underlying current utterance and subsequent one Does not signal openness or incompletion (but does not necessarily signal closure)

Sources: Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990 and Hobbs 1990; my summary. "H, L =high- and low-pitch accents H*, L* = pitch accent on a stressed syllable H%, L% = tone at boundary of phrase

casual attitude on the part of the speaker. At the same time, I would contend that even all of these systems together do not cover every possible motivation for particular pitch patterns. Some utterances, I would again argue, have intonational features that are there for musical reasons as much as pragmatic ones; they take the form they do not only because of what they mean but because they sound good. In performances of poetry, the poet may hear a guiding melody that is a goal in its own right, not entirely tied to the pragmatic structure of the information contained in the text.

Specific Poets and Patterns ELIOT'S INTONATION

Eliot, in his reading of Four Quartets, certainly seems to be hearing a guiding melody. His stylized performance sometimes sounds as though he is between speaking and chanting-a style likely influenced by the traditional method of chanting texts in the Church of England. 10 The repeated two-stress syntactic formulae that we saw in chapter 2 correspond to repeated phrasal pitch contours in performance. The intonation contours sometimes correspond less to propositional content than to syntactic phrasal structure and recurrent phrasal motifs (or motives, in the musical sense). The most striking aspect of this relationship is that while Eliot's

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129

most characteristic intonational tunes generally fit his most characteristic syntactic patterns, in quite a few cases the syntax-and information structure-is subordinated to the tune. What might be considered the most typical or "unmarked" contours for these sentences, such as the falling pitch that one finds at the end of many declarative sentences in English or the most noticeable pitch movement falling on the syllable that we would expect to have the strongest stress, are subordinated to Eliot's poetry contours. Half-lines and lines are grouped together into larger melodies. The repetition of one kind of tone pattern, or the alternation of two, can be a cohesive device, tying two or more phrases together (Couper-Kuhlen 1986, 196). I would argue that repetition and alternation of tunes can also be an aesthetic device. In fact, cohesion and aesthetics are closely linked: both have to do with seeing connections between things. Eliot, for example, uses several repetitive or alternating pitch contours, mostly to emphasize parallelism between lines or phrases. In "The Dry Salvages," a number of sequences of half-line intermediate phrases are bound together by Eliot's voice with the alternation of a rising first accent, then a falling second (or nuclear) accent, as well as some other musical devices. Take, for example, lines rr-14 (where R=rise, F=fall, L=leveljlengthened, rjf=secondary rise or fall): 11 R

Fr

His rhythm was present R

F

L

F

L

of the April dooryard,

F

R

In the smell of grapes R

F

R

In the rank ailanthus R

Fr

in the nursery bedroom,

F

F

on the autumn table,

Rf

R

And the evening circle

F

R

in the winter gaslight.

Or 26b-27a: R

F

R

The salt is on the briar rose, R

F

L

The fog is in the fir trees.

These are, of course, greatly simplified representations of the actual contours. I have marked only the direction of motion on accented syllables and the direction of motion between the nuclear accent and the end of the phrase. For alternate transcriptions of these contours, see note 10 and Figures 5-9, which show the full pitch (FO) contours.U Given these simplifications, we can see the nearly symmetrical sequence of accents. Look at the first quatrain above, lines rr-14. There is some variation: the first line is exceptional in having a fall on the third accent

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Intonational Tunes

185

As we waited, we wrapped ourselves in the cloak of his exploits: "Man, the last time it took eight screws to put him in the hole." "Yeah, ..."

The last syllable of "exploits" and "hole" get the full drop, and "selves" and "screws" get reduced versions of it. The drop on "hole" is about 120 Hz, one of the largest I have found in any poem. Knight tends to use the most nonstandard features in quoted speech, as in these lines, rather than in his official poet's voice. But he uses this final drop pretty consistently anyway. It is a basic rhythmic and structural marker, like rhyme, for him. Unlike rhyme, it is only available in this form because of the dialect he speaks. Having presented a number of examples of poetic intonation in different dialects, I should pause to comment on what I think it all adds up to. First of all, in presenting examples of intonation patterns that aren't explained well by current models of intonational meaning I do not mean to suggest that these authors' intonation is unaffected by factors like information status, attitude toward the text and toward the hearer, or cohesion between clauses. Rather, I am arguing that intonation reflects (in Jakobson's terms) both a communicative and a poetic function, and that a theory that leaves one of these functions out is incomplete. Similarly, that poets speaking different dialects use different intonation patterns is not news; just how they exploit the resources of their various dialects for basically musical purposes, however, is a question that I have not seen addressed. It is also worth exploring to what extent they deliberately highlight or avoid ethnically identified patterns. In fact, many MexicanAmerican and African-American poets seem to scrupulously avoid the most stigmatized features of their groups' dialects, except in very limited contexts, such as representing the speech of underclass characters. Being able to command both an ethnic or regional dialect and the national standard is a point of pride for many speakers. Even Baca, though he presents himself as a language activist, speaks more "Chicano" at some times than others. In a televised interview with Bill Moyers, with both men sitting in easy chairs and talking one-on-one, Baca reads the same poem ("Cloudy Day") that several of the examples in this chapter are taken from; the Chicano English features are still there, but much less emphasized (Moyers 1995). Knight, too, uses a subtly more standard register in introducing his poems to the audience than he does in reciting them.

186

Intonational Tunes

Speakers of more standard varieties of English, on the other hand, are less likely to think of themselves as having dialects, even in cases like Eliot, who conspicuously tried to shift from American to British pronunciations. Nevertheless, the range of possibilities for them, too, is dictated by their dialect, as we have seen. A further implication of our incomplete knowledge of dialects and intonational meaning is that we, both as scholars and simply as listeners or readers, often try to interpret intonation with inappropriate models. I started by mentioning some problems with interpreting all intonation as signaling information status. We also make mistakes that are less theoretical. For example, Penfield (1984) points out that some intonational features of Chicano English, such as extended pitch range, phrases that begin at a higher-than-average pitch, and types of pitch accents that sound emphatic to outsiders even when they're not, contribute to the stereotype of the "emotional Latin temperament." Baca clearly does intend to be emotional and dramatic-but maybe not as emotional as he sounds to some listeners. The more we know about intonational dialect differences, the better we will be able to understand the craft of writers and orators in many varieties of English. In fact, our lack of knowledge about dialectal intonation may be part of the explanation for a widely reported phenomenon: some speakers of Standard English frequently enjoy hearing so-called ethnic poets read aloud, even though the published versions of the same poems don't do much for them (Athanases 1991). One possible explanation, of course, would be that a good performer can bring even a mediocre poem to life. But an alternative view would be that if, reading silently, we mentally subvocalize a written text in a dialect other than that in which it was composed, we are simply hearing it wrong. We get the words, but not the melody. Since written texts have very limited intonational cues, we are likely to assume that the author's contours are similar to our own-an assumption which, for any reader, will work better for some poets than others. Finally, in this chapter I have emphasized the orality of these texts. Oral performances reveal things about poetic structure-phrasing, range, parallelism-that printed texts do not. I am not arguing for the primacy of oral texts, though; this is a common prejudice of linguistics that I do not share. Much of what makes these texts interesting, in fact, is their mixed status, either as writing meant to be spoken or as speech based on writing. None of these poets perform their poetry in the same tones they use for conversation. Still, the range of possibilities for unscripted speech in a given

Intonational Tunes

187

dialect helps determine the range of possibilities for reading aloud, and, by the same token, what we learn from poetry readings-as heightened, self-conscious performances-will enhance our understanding of the intonational decisions speakers make in other kinds of speech. In terms Eliot would understand, the music of poetry and the music of talking are interdependent.

Conclusions and Speculation

WE have seen that the problem of what makes free verse rhythmical andfor poetic is complex and even slippery. Not only are there many levels to look at, but every rule has exceptions, definitions of terms tend to slide, and statistics refuse to stay objective. We cannot point to any single feature as the sine qua non of free-verse rhythm. Nor is there a sharp and invariable boundary between poeticism and prosiness. Any poetic patterns we can find in free verse can also be found, at least to some extent, both in traditional accentual or accentual-syllabic verse and in other genres such as oratory, conversation, fiction, and cookbooks. From a distance, it seems that free verse is more of an intuitive, impressionistic label than a strictly defined category; language shades into poetry more or less in the same way that manufacturing shades into art. Nevertheless, our search for poetic rhythm has not been futile. As Liberman and Pierrehumbert write in a different context, "Intuitively derived descriptive categories are commonly found to be complex combinations of initially unintuitive basic entities" (r984, r63). An underlying assumption of this book has been that combinations of relatively simple, even primitive, features may produce complex effects, and that we feel some of these effects to be more poetic than others. Some of these primitives include metrical beats, linguistic stress, and intonational accent; sound and syllable structures, as in rhyme or alliteration; lexical choices among syntactic categories, registers, and meanings; morphological and phrasal structures; the placement of line breaks or pauses; pitch; and, above all, our deeply ingrained ability to recognize repetition and patterning of these elements. From combinations of these factors, we produce and perceive complex patterns, and if we start to see these patterns as part of a coherent system,

Conclusions and Speculation

189

we may call them poetic. Here is a brief recap of some of the poetic patterns we have found in the free verse examined in this book: I. There is a higher incidence of adjacent stresses in the writers' poetry than in their prose. 2. The writers use more monosyllabic nouns and adjectives in their poetry than in their prose. 3· Lowell and Eliot make significant use of iambic patterns even in verse that is not basically iambic, but Wright does not. Therefore, although iambic rhythms may be typical of much free verse, they are not required by it. 4· The characteristic rhythms of each poet at levels higher than the foot involve repeated use of a limited number of syntactic figures. Eliot makes idiosyncratic use of certain types of two-stress noun phrases; Lowell of compounds, multiply stressed noun phrases, and pre-subject participial modifiers; and Wright of certain kinds of prepositional phrases. 5. Instead of consistently using the "Generic American Poetry Contour," each of the poets we studied uses special intonational phrasing which demonstrates many of the characteristics we observed in other aspects of poetic language: rhythmic alternation, (melodic) parallelism, and increased emphasis. 6. However, the poets' performances are remarkably different from one another-reflecting both differences in their individual performance styles that probably can't be deduced from their writing, and structural differences among their written styles. A single, simple, repeated intonational contour works well only if all phrases are fairly similar in length and in stress pattern; some poets' phrasing fits this description more often than others'. The poets also take advantage of the special semantic, pragmatic, or ethnic associations evoked by particular contours, and this choice of prefabricated contours also tends to differentiate one poet's performance style from another's.

Two Principles of Poeticism The results that we've seen can be synthesized, loosely, into two basic principles: poetry is characterized by more compression and by more regular alternation than prose or other forms of discourse. Compression means that one finds more of the same prominent, salient things together: more stresses closer together, more nouns and adjectives compared to other parts of speech, the same key words repeated more

190

Conclusions and Speculation

often, more semantic arguments within a given syntactic or phonological space. Alliteration and rhyme can also mean putting similar things close together. Compounds contribute to compression, as do contractions, as do monosyllabic stressed words. Lowell's characteristic long, pauseless, multiple-stress intonation phrase, in which the many stresses do not drop in pitch, shows compression. The other basic principle, regular alternation, is easiest to see in meter. In Lowell's iambic lines, for example, stressed syllables alternate regularly with unstressed ones. There is also alternation in intonation: we have seen Eliot and Wright alternate rising pitch accents with falling ones, and Baca rhythmically alternate high pitch accents with low unaccented syllables. Less obviously, phrases can also alternate with pauses, so that lines or halflines of similar length, with equivalent pauses between them, can also constitute a kind of regular alternation. On this basis even "prose broken into lines," if it is broken into lines of similar length, can be considered somewhat rhythmic-though a poem with no more to recommend it than even line length will not strike many readers as rhythmically interesting (and that is why critics will not endear themselves to poets by describing their poetry as "chopped prose"). The principle of alternation can be expanded to include any sort of parallelism, such as Lowell's participial modifiers (modifier, main clause, modifier, main clause ... ). Many rhythmic figures fall under both headings; a simple example is Lowell's lists of triple adjectives or nouns, which establish parallel structures but also serve to press more semantic mass and more stressable words into the phrase. Some of these observations are almost echoes of familiar bromides about poetry (it is "dense"; it is "formally complex"; it is "musical"), but the point is that it is possible to make these claims more specific and more empirical than is generally done. The main contributions linguistics can make to this area of study are, first of all, methodology, and second, an empirical, rationalistic attitude toward language. In this book we have seen results from not only close literary reading, but also minimal pairings of lines, statistical studies, electronic acoustical studies, and (indirectly) experiments with human participants. Even though all of these methods still require subjective interpretation to make sense of them, they provide a firmer base for generalization than the impressionistic cliches one often finds in poetry textbooks and literary magazines. Some poets and readers doubtless achieve an understanding of poetic rhythm entirely by impression and metaphor, and it may well be sufficient for their purposes. The

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problem with this type of understanding is not that it doesn't work, but that it is essentially private-it is difficult to discuss, debate, confirm, or falsify figurative claims about figurative language, even relatively transparent ones such as "a rhythm is a form cut into time" (Pound 1934, 198). Such privacy can also be exclusionary, leaving those who do not intuitively understand descriptions of poetry feeling that they lack any key from outside the system that would help them to figure it out.

The Future As linguistic science produces advances in our understanding of how the brain encodes language, how emotions are related to intonation, how our hearing and language-processing apparatus extracts limited and coherent information from an almost infinitely complex speech signal, how reading differs cognitively from hearing, and similar questions, and as rapidly changing technology allows us to ask these questions in increasingly sophisticated ways, the field of poetics should (and almost certainly will) advance with them. In particular, it should advance our understanding of how we are able to produce and experience the specifically poetic aspects of language, how that experience is different from the experience of any other kind of language, and perhaps even why it should be personally, culturally, and biologically desirable-as it surely is-to produce and experience language this way. One promising area for future research is the intonation of poetrypromising because it is so closely tied to the attitudinal aspects that define poetry in our society, and because the theoretical and technological apparatus for describing it is relatively new. Intonation in different dialects will surely become easier to compare as the methodology of intonation studies becomes more sophisticated and more standardized. The explosive growth of computer capabilities has also made it possible to investigate large corpora of texts, and this will increase the reliability and value of studies like my very modest forays into lexical choice in poetry and other genres. Finally, one might open up another intriguing set of questions by investigating the rhythm of less canonical poetry-in particular, poetry that does not abide so faithfully by the syntactic and morphological rules of English. We saw in chapter 3 some fascinating violations of the normal rules for compound formation; there are surely analogous violations of other aspects of the grammar. The aspects of poetry performance explored in this book might well lead into another noncanonical area, the interface between

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poetry and music in "performance poetry," dub, rap, and so on. Despite the many people who have studied poetic rhythm and free verse rhythm over the years, there are still many apparently simple questions that have not yet been asked in an answerable way. Poets, linguists, critics, music theorists, and psychologists can all help each other to frame these questions and thus, eventually, to answer them. This book is meant as one step in that joint venture.

Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction r. For almost one hundred years this has been a common criticism, either of free verse as a whole or of particular poems or poets (see Finch 1993, 61, 95). It is clear enough what this means as a criticism of a genre: if you believe poetry must have rhyme and regular meter, and free verse doesn't have it, then free verse is not poetry; therefore, it is prose. Interestingly, a similar criticism was often leveled at blank verse, particularly Milton's, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: it was not really verse, but "poetical prose" (Bradford 1983). More intriguing are those critics who acknowledge, even admire, some free verse as poetry, but complain that other poems are "chopped prose" (e.g., Harriet Monroe, quoted in Finch 1993, 95). What difference are they assuming? 2. If the traditional terminology of versification, which I am forced to use in what follows (as here: "prosody"), or the linguistic terminology that I will use later is unfamiliar, please consult the glossary. Preminger and Brogan 1993 is also a very useful reference for these terms. 3· Or, more or less equivalently, if we allow for the existence of pyrrhics (xx)feet entirely lacking lexical stress. 4· See, for example, Fussell 1979; Perloff 1973; Gross 1964. Cureton 1992 is also an impressively rigorous and theoretical work. However, Cureton is not primarily interested in free verse, nor does he go into as much detail on individual poets as I do here and in what follows. 5· Cureton (1992) lists fifteen influential schools and individuals in the history of prosody. However, almost all the recent ones fall into the broad category of linguistic poetics. 6. Adrienne Rich recalls a friend having been told the latter at a literary reception; its very offensiveness underscores the distinction being made between "poetry" as an abstract, presumably feminine, quality, and poetry as something that someone writes (Kalstone 1972, 57).

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Notes to Pages r6-p Chapter r

r. Brogan (1993, ro68): "Rhythm is surely the vaguest term in criticism." De Groot (quoted in Couper-Kuhlen 1986, 51): "frequently used ... for practically anything connected with verse experience as long as it is not clearly defined." Ad infinitum. 2. More precisely, Scott's model is based on the rate and location within the syllable of an increase in the amplitude of high-sonority (i.e., vowel-like) frequencies. That means, as I understand it, that the P-center roughly corresponds to the beginning of the vowel in a given syllable. But the location of that beginning will vary, for example, if the consonant preceding the vowel is a voiceless fricative like [s] or a semivowel like [w]. 3· See Selkirk 1984 for more discussion of these issues. Readers familiar with traditional English versification will recall that promotion and demotion are especially characteristic of some poetry, such as iambic pentameter. The reader, when locating stress in such poetry, is always biased toward making the line fit an a priori abstract pattern-in this case, the regular binary alternation of the "ideal" iambic pentameter line: xfxfxfxfxf. Syllables capable of being either stressed or unstressed will be stressed when they come where we expect a stress, unstressed where we do not. The assignment of stress to discourse that does not have such a bias is more difficult, but even here rhythmic expectations have an influence. Bolinger (1986) considers rhythm an important indicator, along with pitch, duration, and so forth, to the location of stress. He points out that in a sentence like "She said she would never be happy with him," even if it is said in a monotone, there is a tendency for listeners to hear it as a regular dactylic pattern, with stress even on the (potentially enclitic) pronoun "him." That is, they hear " ... with HIM," not " ... with'm." Metrical phonologists take a very similar view of promotion and demotion. 4· Woodbury (1987, 178) points out that the label "poetic function" is a bit confusing, since Jakobson goes on to describe it purely in terms of form rather than function. 5· Although Fish is certainly right that any piece of discourse can be read as poetry, he ignores the question of whether some pieces of discourse (in particular, those composed by people known as "poets") can be read as poetry with more pleasure or more affect than others. Poets apparently choose some kinds of sound patterns, words, and phrasings more often than others. For a more detailed critique of Fish's claims, see Cooper 1996c. 6. B. Smith (r968) also elaborates the idea of rhythm as expectation, especially at more global levels (the rhythm of the work rather than of the foot or line); Cureton (1992), translating this concept into the terminology of music theory, classifies the structure of goals and their fulfillment or frustration as "prolongational structure." 7· For more on this idea, see Hollander's idea of "the metrical contract" (1975, chaps. 7 and 9).

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8. The scansion here reflects a few promotions and demotions influenced by the meter: for example, "having," as an auxiliary, would not normally bear stress, but its first syllable receives metrical stress here because of its position between even weaker syllables. Similarly, "so" could be stressed in some contexts, but in line 2 I have marked it unstressed because of the much stronger syllables next to it. 9· Traditional scansion does not ignore word and phrase structure-things like caesura, catalexis, and elision are often determined by word boundaries. Foot boundaries, however, are not very sensitive in this way; they depend almost entirely on the position of each syllable in the line. A poetic foot may often include just the end of one word and the beginning of the next; it may even cross phrase or clause boundaries. ro. La Driere's (1974) sense of the "rhythmic group" is similar. rr. "Rhetoric" is another ambiguous word. Woodbury defines a "rhetorical structure component" as "any well-defined recurrent, hierarchic organization that is present in a stretch of discourse and distinct from other such organizations" (r987b, 178). He points out that this overlaps with Jakobson's definition of the "poetic function," and we should also note that it is similar to my definition of a rhythmic component. This is a narrowly linguistic and formalistic use of the term rhetoric; it does not include many of the forms of persuasion and figures of speech dealt with by classical rhetoric, nor does it address problems of invention, audience, goals, and so on. 12. This, by the way, is a demonstration of the fact that intonation does indeed have a syntagmatic function. 13. Cureton (personal communication, 1994), however, argues that the comparison to music is not an analogy at all, but that musical rhythm and poetic rhythm are the same system. 14. Syntactic constituency, of course, is not normally one of those structures; syntactic ambiguity (as in sentences like "James choked the man with a silk tie") probably does require reanalysis, especially in a real-life situation where you're likely to narrow it down to just one meaning that was "intended": either "James choked [the man with a silk tie]" or "James choked [the man] with a silk tie." 15. Other, still less precise terms, such as cadence and formula, have been used to try to describe the rhythmic structures of prose and free verse. Brogan's explanation of these murky concepts is probably the clearest: "It is evident that the most common syntactic patterns (prepositional phrases, for example) must produce a relatively small inventory of cadences that should appear fairly often. In verse these are meshed with indifferent monosyllables and with special rhetorical emphases and then molded under the pressure of abstract line-patterns to yield regular meters, or else they are iterated systematically (via 'formulaic composition' or parallelism) to achieve other, more expansive rhythmical effects" (1993, 5). A similar conception of syntactically based rhythmic formulae or "frames" guides the explanation of Eliot's versification in the next chapter. The word formula has also been used,

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Notes to Pages 43-47

however, for example in "oral-formulaic" theory, to mean the regular repetition of specific words or groups of words, rather than syntactic categories. There is also a more gestalt sense of the "cadence," coined by Amy Lowell and used by others (Allen 1948; Malof 1970 ), to mean some vague sense of what the reader thinks goes together as a unit, whether because of length or line division or syntactic constituency or semantics or whatever. This conception probably has some psychological validity but is virtually useless for formal analysis. Because they are so confusingly ambiguous and alternative terminology exists, I will avoid the use of the terms cadence and formula except when referring to other writers who use the terms.

Chapter 2 r. Certain sections are in clearly different meters and can be left out of the discussion. Typical passages-those which I have chosen for analysis as being primarily made up of "four-stress" lines-are the following:

"Burnt Norton" I "Burnt Norton" III "Burnt Norton" V "East Coker" I "East Coker" II "The Dry Salvages" I "The Dry Salvages" II "The Dry Salvages" III "The Dry Salvages" V "Little Gidding" I "Little Gidding" V

ll. 1-46 ll. 90-!26 ll. 137-58 ll.1-50 ll. 68-100 ll. II-48 ll.49-84 ll.91-123 ll. 184-215 ll.1-53 ll. 2!4-38

These passages are the basis for nearly all the commentary in this chapter. 2. Among the "accentualists" (those who count only strongly stressed syllables) are Gardner (1949); Rees (1974); Salingar (1962); Kenner (1959); and Gross (1964). Some of those who favor an accentual-syllabic analysis (counting both stressed and unstressed syllables) are Barry (1969); Maxwell (1952); Hartman (198o); and Matthiessen (1958). A recent example of a critic of Eliot's "free verse" is Steele (1990 ). 3· Two who do try to look at the poem in light of its syntax and phonology, respectively, are Gross (1964) and Barry (1969 ). Although both are interesting, Gross's insightful analysis is anecdotal and linguistically unsophisticated, and Barry's is so idiosyncratic and inconsistent that it is difficult to interpret. Hartman (1980), too, offers interesting comments on Eliot's syntax, but sees syntactic patterns as merely ornamentation or a species of "counterpoint" to an essentially iambic line. 4· Daunt describes Old English poetry as "really the spoken language rather tidied up" (1946, 64). However, most scholars now see this statement as an oversimplification. 5· Sometimes, however, the most natural division leaves half-lines of one and

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three stresses. These are a minority, but a significant one. More than three stresses is quite rare; less than one is impossible. (See section below titled "Stress Patterns" and note 6 for more on parsing and scansion.) 6. The process of scansion, that is, of determining which syllables count as metrically "stressed" and which do not, can be ambiguous and subjective. It is based on fairly well defined linguistic principles, but the scansion of individual lines still requires the scanner to use his or her own judgment. For a detailed description of the assignment of stress to utterances in a rhythmic "grid" system, see Selkirk 1984, especially chap. 2. Hayes 1983 contains a more readable but less detailed description of a very similar grid system, and Cureton 1992 presents a detailed scansion system for poetry. However, no account that I have seen permits a totally automatic assignment of stress to syllables; although lexical and metrical phonology tell which syllables are most likely to be stressed, tempo, emphasis, and discourse meaning all interact to decide actual stress. What's more, in a "strong-stress" system, even a syllable that may be marginally stronger than the unstressed syllable next to it does not necessarily count as metrically stressed if the stress is minor. For practical purposes, "strong stresses" are more like pitch accents-only the most prosodically prominent syllables. Therefore, the following account is more a description of my scanning procedure than an algorithm that can be applied mechanistically. Any syllable aligned with a beat on the third (main word stress) level of the grid or higher (using Selkirk's terminology) is normally metrically stressed. This is usually equivalent to saying that the main word-stress on each major-category word (noun, adjective, full verb, or sometimes adverb) is a metrical stress. However, other types of syllables may occasionally be promoted to the status of metrical stress either for rhetorical reasons (e.g., contrastive stress) or rhythmic ones, where a half-line has only one third-level stress and a convenient weaker stress exists. Adverbs, pronouns, and occasionally even secondary stresses of major category words can be promoted in this way. However, the class of syllables that can be promoted is limited phonologically and perhaps semantically: the preposition "round" can be promoted in this way ("round the corner," BN r: 20 ), but the preposition "of" could get metrical stress only in unusual circumstances-perhaps in a contrast such as "in this place but not of this place." It would also be possible to include a mechanism for demotion of stressed syllables where there are more than two. We could say, for example, that only the two most strongly stressed syllables (the two aligned with beats on the highest levels of the grid) in a half-line are metrically stressed. One difficulty is that by far the most common pattern among half-lines with more than two third-level stresses is to have one nuclear stress of the fourth level or higher and a tie among two or more syllables marked only as high as the third level. Half-lines such as "The brief sun flames the ice" (LG r:s}, where "sun" and "ice" are marked on higher levels than "brief" and "flames," are rare. It also seemed more consistent, and less circular, to

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Notes to Pages 52-65

me to always count third-level stresses rather than to count only the two strongest; otherwise a phrase like "brief sun" could sometimes have one stress and sometimes two. More important, the claim I made earlier that the great majority of half-lines have exactly two stresses would be empty if it were true by definition. Finally, to describe "The brief sun flames the ice" as having the same metrical pattern as "in the heat of the day" contradicts my "ear" or intuition. The great majority of the half-lines, fortunately, present no such dilemmas; they contain two and only two good candidates for metrical stress. 7· In addition, I added an appropriate number of half-lines to the total, to rule out the possibility of getting more than Ioo percent. This simplification unfortunately gives extra statistical weight to the half-lines with more than two stresses, which tend to fall into the rarer syntactic frames. Also, it is theoretically possible to have complex frames with only two stresses or simple frames with more than two, though this rarely happens in practice. 8. Tarlinskaja (I984, 23), in a study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and prose, compares "metrical words" (groups of syllables clustered around a single stress; other theorists may call similar units "clitic phrases" or "stress groups") with "graphic words" (words as they are printed on the page) to see if metrical demands influence the authors' selection of parts of speech and syntactic structures. She concludes that the influence does exist, but that it works both ways: syntactic considerations affect the choice of metrical pattern at the same time as the metrical scheme affects the syntax. Although Eliot's syntax and meter are obviously different from Pope's and Dryden's, we can see some of the same dynamic here. The half-lines are built from syntactic units, reflected in the frames above. These in turn help to determine the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, and thus the meter. But Eliot was very likely also influenced in his syntax by his concern for meter- "No, that doesn't sound quite right; let's turn the sentence around and say it this way." 9· This tendency is skewed somewhat by the fact that a greater number of syllables also means a greater number of possible metrical patterns. Thus, even if there were an exactly equal number of lines above and below the average length, specific patterns shorter than the average would still be used more often than specific patterns longer than the average. IO. This pattern matching works best if one sticks to whole syllables of deviation. Adding the fractional differences from the exact average (1.3x / 1.54x .96/ .64x) produces false precision and makes incorrect predictions about which lines should be most common. II. Steele (I990) points out that the term vers libere actually predates vers fibre; it was used by the symbolists for a form of verse that was not free verse at all. I believe, though, that Hartman is using the term in his own personal sense, and not necessarily trying to emphasize a connection between Eliot and the French symbolists. I2. The figures discussed here actually reflect two separate studies. The first,

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reported in Cooper 1988, did not use random sampling techniques, but simply analyzed the first five hundred words of Eliot's essay "The Music of Poetry," all of "Burnt Norton" r, and the first twenty-four lines of "The Dry Salvages" II (for a total of five hundred words of poetry as well). I selected these two poetic passages because they seem to me among the most lyrical and markedly "poetic" (or nonprosaic) in Four Quartets. The second survey, included here for the first time, randomly samples 250 words from all the sections of Four Quartets that I have identified as "four-stress," and 250 from the prose of Eliot 1957. (I also went back and reanalyzed the earlier samples in light of some changed understandings of lexical categories, but these reanalyses resulted in less than one percentage point of difference.) Intriguingly, although the random and nonrandom prose samples produced very similar results, the random samples of poetry showed significant differences from the nonrandom samples. The random samples had even more nouns (28.6 percent vs. 23 percent) but fewer adjectives (7.6 percent vs. 13.2 percent). This raises an important methodological question: is a random sample in fact the most appropriate method, when we are trying to account for subjective responses to stylistic features, or should we select those parts that produce that subjective response most strongly?

Chapter 3 r. As Stillinger (1965, 530) points out, the form is rhyme royal with a Spenserian hexameter last line; Wordsworth's true antecedents in the form are Milton's "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" and Chatterton's "An Excelente Balade of Chari tie." 2. Finch, in The Ghost of Meter (1993), extensively discusses this iconic use of meter in American poetry- most interestingly in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, where, she argues, even such apparently similar forms as the iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter have distinct and oppositional meanings. This is one aspect of rhythm and meter that is absolutely dependent on readers' knowledge of the traditions of English poetry. 3· Sound symbolism or onomatopoeia surely exists in English and many other languages, but as Russell Ultan points out, it "must always be of a peripheral nature. If it were not, the extremely limited number of contrastive phonological features available in any language would hardly suffice to represent the enormous complexity of all the semantic distinctions necessary in human communication" (1978, 551). Ultan's article on universal tendencies in "size-sound symbolism" also presents excellent examples of the difficulty of analyzing such symbolism with statistics or any method meant to provide objectivity; one can count high vowels or nasal consonants, but the significance of those features- both the statistical and the semantic significance-is still highly subjective. Nevertheless, Tsur 1992 presents a plausible laboratory-based argument for the cognitive reality of sound symbolism. 4· According to one study, /h/ makes up 2.63 percent of all occurrences of phonemes in American English (Roberts 1965, 39). In the Wright poem, /h/ makes up

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5 percent of all occurrences, by my count. The phoneme fb/ makes up I.63 percent of phonemes in the language as a whole, and 5 percent in the poem. The phoneme fr/ immediately follows or precedes 2.9 percent of all occurrences of fb/ in general; in the poem this correlation happens 6o percent of the time, plus one indirect case ("before"). Thus these sounds are certainly more frequent than average here. Nevertheless, there are at least two reasons to be cautious about using such comparisons. The first is that the statistics are slippery. Deciding what constitutes "average" English or American English is exceedingly difficult, considering the complexity of all the varieties of English and all the purposes to which they are put. Getting a truly random sample, even in the huge computer corpora that are now available, is difficult for the same reasons, even if we assume that what we want is a random sample and not, for example, a sample of literary English or of mid-twentiethcentury Ohio English. I cannot vouch for the appropriateness of Roberts's sample. In any event a seven-line poem is clearly neither a random nor a very comprehensive sample; it would be amazing if it had an exactly average distribution of phonemes. The second reason for caution is the one argued in the text: again, absolute frequency of occurrence is no more than a very crude gauge of what sounds are prominent in the passage. Other formal factors influence our perception. Still, relative frequency does count for something: one reader of an early draft of this chapter asked why I had not mentioned the six [z] sounds, since they onomatopoetically imitate the buzzing of bees. My answer is that the "-s" suffix is so common in English that even the semantic context of bees was not enough to make these sounds stand out as in any way remarkable. 5· Jokes or games depending on the expectation of a rhyme are common intraditional poetry; take, for example, Byron's r82o epitaph for Lord Castlereagh:

Posterity will ne'er survey A nobler grave than this; Here lie the bones of Castlereagh: Stop, traveler, ... (Hunter 1986, 194)

6. As noted in chapter 2, stress clash can happen even when two syllables are not adjacent; for a more detailed explanation, see Hayes 1983,1984, I995· In order to streamline the counting procedure, however, the methods used in this study count only adjacent stresses. Thus I am using a slightly different, and less complex, definition of the term. I believe the figures for total stress clash (adjacent and non-adjacent) would correlate with my figures for adjacent stress clash; they would simply be a bit higher for both prose and poetry. 7· These figures and those that follow are based on small, randomly selected samples of words from each text mentioned (250-375 words per book for Wright and Lowell, 750 per book for Eliot). Although the small sample size may be considered a weakness, the consistency of the percentages across different texts supports

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the general validity of these surveys. Also, Hudson (I994, 335) suggests that at least the percentage of nominals is not greatly affected by sample size: twenty-seven rooword surveys done by his students arrived at figures not far from those calculated by Hudson for the Brown Corpus and Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus, with I million words each. 8. These findings are partly consistent, and partly not, with other research that has been done on non-poetic texts. Hudson (I994), in studying large corpora of English writings, reports a perhaps surprising consistency, in any fairly large text, in the portion of words ("word-tokens," technically) that can be classified as nominals (common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns). The proportion, about 37 percent, seems to be rather consistent across genres (± 5 percent) and across corpora (± I percent). My results are reasonably close to this finding, given some labeling differences and my smaller sample size. The distribution of common/proper nouns versus pronouns varies more significantly, both within Hudson's study and between his and mine. However, there is no way to make a meaningful comparison between them, because the Brown Corpus's category of "imaginative" texts is not the same as poetry, and in fact may not include any poetry. The imaginative genres explicitly listed in Hudson's two corpora are all different kinds of fiction; poetry is included only where it is part of a story or novel (Francis and Kucera I982, 4-5). 9· Unfused compounds, like "sailor blouse," are treated as separate words, since both parts are likely to receive at least some stress. If compounds are treated as single units, the number of monosyllables goes down in both samples, but more in Life Studies (33 percent) than in Collected Prose (39 percent). Io. Schmerling (I976) and Bolinger (I986) have both argued, in different ways, that stress is less predictable from syntactic form and more dependent on pragmatic or semantic judgments-discourse function-than Chomsky and Halle (I968) allow for. The same could be said of Halliday (I985) and other similar discourse analysts, for whom the tone group is fundamentally a unit of information. Basically, we have to know which words the speaker thinks are "important" or "unimportant," for whatever reason, in order to get all the stresses right. Schmerling argues persuasively that this sense of "importance" cannot be fully explained either by anaphoricity or by any simple text-bound sense of "old" versus "new" information; it depends on the speaker's sense of what is "newsworthy," which ultimately also depends on the speaker's beliefs about the hearer's knowledge. In contrast, Liberman and Sproat (I992) argue for the existence of underlying context-neutral stress rules, which can be modified or overridden by considerations of focus, context, and anaphoricity. These underlying rules are essentially the Compound Stress Rule (CSR) and the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR), which Liberman and Sproat argue follow in a fairly straightforward way from the fact that compounds are words (and obey lexical stress rules) while noncompounds are phrases (see note n). Cruttenden (I990) points out that several types of exceptions to the NSR are

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systematic in themselves, and thus complicate but do not contradict the idea of Sound Pattern of English (SPE)-style rules. None of these accounts fully agree with one another. The SPE account (together with later generative accounts, such as Liberman and Sproat, and the metrical grid, which also tends to be heavily syntax-influenced) has the advantage of being well known and simple to apply to written texts. Nevertheless, such text-based analyses still have to be supplemented by the reader's or the author's judgments about which words should be emphasized or destressed in variance from the predicted stress patterns. n. This difference can be explained in metrical phonology by the fact that stress is being assigned at different levels of the hierarchy: at foot level for noncompounds, at both foot level and word level for compounds. w

I

f

f

f

f

f

I \ X

w

\

I s on

w

\

I \ \ s to

lo

s s gic a!

I \ s s s pig-head ed

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

12. The range is so wide, in fact, that some writers have suggested that the only consistent rule for a major group of compounds ("argument-argument" compounds) is that the first word is "connected with" the second in some unspecified way (for example, Liberman and Sproat 1992; Dowty 1979). 13. Even so (relatively) recent and familiar a poet/critic as Arnold (1896) argues the importance of the long, slack, prosaic passages in an epic. This argument has more to do with plenitude or magnitude than with compression. But the aesthetic impulses of the epic are different from those of the free-verse lyric. 14- This type of lexical repetition may be even more conventional in other languages or other traditions-where certain repeated adverbial particles, for example, can signal new rhythmic and rhetorical units. An example is the use of tua-i ("then," "well then," "that's all") and other particles in the Yup'ik tale analyzed in Woodbury 1987b.

Chapter 4 r. Hartman (1980), like Crombie (1987), distinguishes between "verse" and "poetry," but their definitions of the two categories are strikingly dissimilar. 2. Although Carruth's view is, I suspect, a minority view these days, he is far

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205

from alone. Take, for example, this excerpt from advice in Poets' Market to contributors for the literary journal the Formalist: "Although we do publish poetry which skillfully employs enjambment, we have a marked prejudice against excessive enjambment" (Jerome 1995, 147). 3· Note for generative syntactic sticklers: I have not extensively studied the difference in poetic structure between maximal (X") and nonmaximal (X, X') projections, but intuitively when one divides a line before or after an X" one is often left with X' on the other side of the boundary-for example, where a prepositional phrase (P") is divided from the common noun phrase (N') that it modifies. Hence, both levels of phrase can apparently function as lines without being marked as unusual. 4· Both Sherzer (1982) and Woodbury (1987b) point out the possibility for enjambment, or something like it, even in oral poetry. Tension is created when different types of line-marking devices (Sherzer) or structures at different levels (Woodbury) fail to coincide. In literate cultures this may be a tension between typography and linguistic structure, but it need not be. In oral art, of course, the problem of line analysis is almost the reverse of that in written art: the acoustic sound, the phonetics, is there to be dissected, but the researcher must decide how to represent its structure on the page, how to put it into lines. 5· A similar point could actually be made about meter. Gilbert Youmans argues, in discussing Elizabethan metrics, for abandoning absolute judgments of metricality and generative rules in favor of statistical descriptions, "fuzzy sets": "Poetry composed by ear instead of by rote is likely to be governed by perceptual principles for recognizing 'family resemblances' rather than by categorial generative rules" (1986, 388). 6. Bly, in an essay on Wright's poetry, remarks, "In The Branch, there are too many 'of' phrases" (1966, 53). However, he goes on to distinguish between those that are "purely descriptive," meaning "belonging to," and those that are "not rephraseable" -the exocentric constructions we are examining. 7· Another line of "Leopardi" also shows possible influence of Spanish syntax andfor vocabulary, in this case the relativizer que: "In my left clavicle that hunches." Use of "that" for a nonrestrictive relative clause is unusual and stigmatized in formal written English, but Spanish uses que for both restrictive and unrestrictive clauses. 8. Some theories of syntax would see "as" in this line as a "clause-taking preposition" (Baker 1995, 369 ), and thus this line, too, would fit the pattern under discussion. Some also classify adverbial particles, such as on and over, as simply objectless prepositions; this, of course, would also strengthen my point. 9· W. Baker remarks that "twentieth-century poets have markedly preferred ... the use of fragments-usually noun phrases or clauses-not clearly related to any one sentence" (1967, ro). This tendency can be found in many contemporary poets (Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Charles Wright, Albert Goldbarth), and in some

206

Notes to Pages n4-23

of Lowell's later work (e.g., Notebook), but it is not characteristic of his style in Life Studies and For the Union Dead, which uses complex but complete sentences. 10. Lowell revised this poem and included it in History. Although it is not greatly changed, the revised version is a bit more clausal; it begins: "I grizzle up the embers of our onetime life ..." (1973, 126).

Chapter 5 r. At times Eliot identifies music with "metric" or "measure"; at other times, however, "music" seems to mean something even vaguer-for example, in "a musical pattern of emotional overtones" (1957, 244). In the same essay he approvingly quotes Mallarme's statement that the true source of music is not musical instruments but "the intellectual and written word in all its glory-music of perfect fullness and clarity, the totality of universal relationships" (Mallarme 1956, 42). 2. Actually, every aspect of sound structure is potentially musical in a fairly literal way: music has metrical beats, stress, overtone formants (like those by which we identify different phonemes), and so on. But intonational patterns are musical in the most basic, obvious sense: they are melodies. 3· Cauldwell and Schourup (1988, 4n-14) give a brief survey of some who have used poetic recordings; an important source they miss is Tsur 1977. 4· One of the very first articles of this type, Chatman's on recordings by Robert Frost (1956), tries to pin down ambiguities in this way. It was criticized, possibly with some justice, as achieving too little in the way of understanding to justify its complex theoretical apparatus (the Trager-Smith phonetic transcription system). A more recent effort, Cauldwell and Schourup 1988, though more sophisticated in its theoretical base-discourse intonation-is also limited to vague and inconclusive statements about meaning; we will examine this system in more detail below. 5· This is Byers's (1976) approach; she simply finds features characteristic of poetic reading, without speculating much on how sound relates to semantics. 6. This is true of Dylan Thomas's notes, for example. Yeats also supposedly "wrote his lines out as prose and counted the meters off on his fingers" (Gross 1964, 22). 7· Actually, an FO contour is itself an interpretive simplification from a set of digital frequency measurements. Different algorithms for calculating FO produce somewhat different results, and I have found that tricky parts of the signal (consonants, vocal fry, sections with background noise, etc.) sometimes have to be either filled in by hand from the spectrogram or by cutting and pasting between algorithms, or zeroed out so that they do not show up as having pitch at all. Otherwise they produce wild and misleading variations in the pitch contour. 8. Maidment (1990), for example, argues for a semicompositional approach to pitch accents, with H and L target levels but without the phrase accents and boundary tones and without the limitation to just two elements in any accent. Another noteworthy feature of his theory is that he argues that all differences in

Notes to Pages 123-42

207

the interpretation of different accents are, at their root, differences in salience, and that salience is hierarchical according to the number of movements in the accent: H < HL < HLH and so forth. 9· For a more detailed description of this approach, see Pierrehumbert 1990; and the ToBI Labeling Guide, Beckman and Ayres 1994· ro. Thanks to Edmund L. Epstein for pointing this out. rr. I represent these patterns primarily with reference to what is happening at the stressed syllable itself. A "rise" moves primarily, though not exclusively, upward from the close of the preceding syllable to the onset of the following syllable; a fall moves primarily downward. It also seems important to represent the direction of movement at the ends of intonational phrases, because these movements are often said to have important discourse meanings. Finally, in some places major movements happen on syllables following the accented/stressed syllable, so I have marked these movements with lowercase letters. Some readers may find that this simplified system does not tell them all they want to know about the contours. Those who are sophisticated in phonetics will do best, perhaps, to look directly at the FO contours in Figures 5-12. Below is a more detailed transcription in my approximation of the ToBI (Tone Breaks and Indices) system: H*

L*+H L-

His rhythm was pres ent H*

H+L*

L-

H*

In the rank ailanthus H*

H+L* H+L*

L*

L-

H%

H+L*

L-

L%

of the April dooryard, L-

In the smell of grapes H*

L*+H

in the nursery bedroom,

L+H*

H+L*

H-

L%

on the autumn table, H-

And the evening cir de

H*

H*+L

H-

H%

in the winter gaslight.

12. All pitch contours graphed in this book were drawn by digitizing tape recordings with a Data Translation (DT2821EZ) AJD board, then analyzing the resulting sound files using SIGNAL software (Engineering Design, Cambridge, Mass.). Where the recording was clean enough, I used the "pitch" function to find fundamental frequency, then edited out those parts, such as voiceless consonants, where insufficient tonality resulted in the pitch track "blowing up." Some recordings were too noisy to get a reliable pitch function using this method; in that case, I used the "peak" function to track the frequency of highest energy at each moment from the spectrogram. This method also required editing, both to eliminate blowup and to watch for jumps from FO to Fl or even F2 (presumably because of damping at the frequency of FO, andfor first formant resonance at the low harmonic frequencies). Finally, in a few cases, neither mathematical function produced plausible pitch tracking; and then I drew in part or all of the pitch line by hand from the second harmonic on the spectrogram. 13. These long, level phrases illustrate another interesting phonetic point: the base pitch level declines in a slow, linear fashion; after the initial rise, a straight line with a slight downward slope will hit or nearly hit most of the peaks (highs)

208

Notes to Pages I56-78

on the graph, and another will hit most of the dips (lows) (except where another downstep or lowering rule causes a steeper fall). Lines 2I-22 of "Quaker Graveyard" decline at about L7 Hzjsecond; line 28 of "Dunbarton" (see below) declines at about 6.o Hzjsecond. There was some debate in the I98os about whether or not declination is a phonetic principle in its own right; it was suggested that downstep and final lowering could explain the tendency for pitch to get lower across a phrase, and that the drop is exponential-toward an asymptote-rather than linear (Liberman and Pierrehumbert I984). But these arguments were based mainly on much shorter, labconstructed phrases; in Lowell's longer phrases with few step accents the slope is readily apparent. However, it is also clear that other factors can either negate or obscure declination; the first half of the passage from "Quaker Graveyard" rises overall, and line 29 of "Dunbarton" seems to change to a steeper slope in the middle of the line (possibly the result of downstep and then upstep). I4. All the examples that follow are taken from the audio recording Hard Steps (Baca I990) unless otherwise noted. I5. The difference between what we perceive as skips and glides seems to depend on two phonetic factors: how steep the pitch movement is (that is, how long a given change takes) and whether most of the movement is during the nucleus of the accented syllable or is between syllables-during the less sonorant consonant segments, or during pauses. I6. All examples in this section are taken from the audio recording The Acolyte (Levertov I985 ). I7. All spoken examples in this section are taken from the audio recording So My Soul Can Sing (Knight I986a); a written version of "Hard Rock ..." can also be found in The Essential Etheridge Knight (Knight I986b, 6-7).

Glossary

This glossary is intended as an aid to reading this book. I have both selected and defined the terms with only that goal in mind; thus they reflect my usage and are not necessarily comprehensive or universal. accent. A pitch movement associated with a prominent syllable in a phrase. Accents almost always fall on stressed syllables (except for the so-called phrase accent in generative intonation theory), but not all stresses are accents. In music, conversely, an accented note is much like a stressed syllable: made more prominent by increased force of attack, not necessarily by pitch movements (which occur independently of accents). accentual-syllabic verse. Verse in which the lines have both a predetermined number of syllables and a predetermined number of stresses, with the stressed and unstressed syllables following each other in a more or less predictable sequence. Examples of accentual-syllabic verse types in English are iambic pentameter, iambic tetrameter, ballad stanzas, limericks, and dactylic hexameter. accentual verse. See strong-stress verse. affricate. A sound that begins in the position for a stop-that is, with all air movement in the vocal tract closed off-and moves to the position for a fricative-that is, not closed, but restricted enough to produce air turbulence. The International Phonetic Alphabet transcribes affricates as stop-plus-fricative combinations, but most phonologists treat them as single sounds. [if] (also written as [c]) and [d.5] ([)]) are the affricates in English, but others exist in other languages. alexandrine. A line of iambic hexameter; important mainly for its use as the last line of the Spenserian stanza, of which the other lines are pentameter. alliteration. A figure of sound in which the beginnings (or onsets) of two or more syllables are the same. Example: "closed class." alliterative verse. Poetry, especially from the Germanic languages in the Middle Ages, in which regular alliteration plays a major structural role in versification. Old English accentual verse requires at least two stressed syllables to alliterate: one from the second half and one or two from the first half of the line. Middle

2ro

Glossary

English alliterative verse allows more variation, as do most modern imitations of it. amphibrach. A three-syllable foot or stress pattern with the middle syllable stressed. Example: "a-MAZ-ing." amplitude. Roughly equivalent to loudness, though loudness is a perceptual category, whereas amplitude is a physical one, instrumentally measurable. For a sound wave, amplitude is the amount of positive and negative pressure at the maximum and minimum points of the wave. Perceived loudness, however, may be influenced by other factors, such as pitch, timbre, relative loudness of surrounding sounds, and timing factors such as how quickly the sound reaches its full amplitude. anacrusis. Unstressed syllables at the beginning of a phrase or line, often considered premetrical. The syllables of an anacrusis tend to be faster and sometimes less distinct than even unstressed syllables within the phrase or group; this makes the anacrusis useful for locating phrase boundaries (Cruttenden r986, 24). See also meter. anapest. A three-syllable foot or stress pattern with the stressed syllable last. Example: "in a zoo." anaphora. (r) In poetics and rhetoric, the repeating of a word or group of words at the beginnings of lines (or phrases, clauses, etc.). It often goes along with some degree of syntactic parallelism. (2) In syntax and discourse analysis, words (often pronouns) whose reference depends, in a systematic way, on a previous term in the same text (an antecedent). apostrophe. A poetic device in which one pretends to turn away from one's actual audience to address an absent person, animal, plant, object, or even abstract concept. argument. A word or phrase with a specific, stereotyped relationship to a predicate. Each predicate requires a certain number of arguments in order to be complete or well formed. For example, a verb like "kiss" requires two arguments: syntactically, a subject and an object; semantically, an agent and a patient. In simplified terms, the kiss is not complete without a kisser and a kissee. association. A secondary but nevertheless important component of the overall structure of rhythm. Two items, such as words, features, or sounds, are associated if they are prominent enough and nearby enough for the second to be perceived as an echo or variation of the first. While meter and grouping organize only adjacent units into hierarchies, association applies to nonadjacent units. Each recurrence of an associated item begins a new rhythm unit in the associational structure; the intervening parts of the text do not block this relationship. assonance. A figure of sound in which words with similar vowel sounds come close together or appear in parallel positions such as line ends. Example: "Bright eyes." beat. The more or less regular rhythmic pulse by which we feel the timing of an

Glossary

2II

event. Beats are most obvious in music, but present in speech and in anything else that has rhythm. cadence. In music, a harmonic and/or melodic progression signifying a temporary relaxation at the end of a section or phrase. (Etymologically, it derives from the Italian cadenza, meaning a fall in the voice.) In common usage, cadence often means more or less the same thing as rhythm or measure. "Cadenced verse" is a way of describing free verse in which each line is thought to be one unit of time. caesura. A structural pause or break in continuity within a poetic line. A caesura almost always coincides with a word boundary, and generally coincides with a salient syntactic boundary andfor punctuation mark. The caesura is a mandatory and structurally crucial feature in some systems of versification (such as Old English); in others there are some constraints on where caesurae may or may not fall; in others it is merely another detail that adds to the complexity of the line. choriamb. A four-syllable stress pattern, with the first and last syllable stressed, as in "hullabaloo" or "body and soul." Although the choriamb is one of the classical metrical feet, it does not fit the definition of the foot given below. classical prosody. The versification rules of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, or of English poetry based on classical models. Many of our terms for different types of feet and verse forms (dactyl, iamb; sapphic) come from classical prosody. One important feature of classical prosody is that it was based on quantity (syllable length) rather than stress. Because length is not phonemic in modern English, attempts to revive quantitative verse have not been very successful. clause. In syntax, a sentence or sentencelike structure. In rhetoric, a clause or clausula is a sense-unit of speech, or the ending of such a unit. clitic phrase. A set of one or more morphological and graphical words that act as one phonological word. Typically a clitic phrase includes one fully realized word, most often a "lexical" category (noun, verb, adjective, adverb), and one or more reduced forms (such as th', for the, 'v for of or have). The sentence "I would have gone to Nenana" can be pronounced with just three phrases at this level: ['a1dv]: ['g:m] : [tn;3'nren;3]. A clitic phrase need not be a syntactic constituent: "I'd've," for example, is a combination of a noun phrase and part of a verb phrase. cluster. A sequence of consonants with no vowel intervening. coda. The final part of a syllable, after the onset and nucleus. In English, this usually means any consonants that follow the vowel. coherence, cohesion. Syntactic and semantic connections among sentences and larger units in a text. Cohesion usually refers to specific links such as pronoun reference, while coherence can refer to a more general sense of unity. combination, axis of. In Russian Formalist poetics, and especially in Roman Jakobsen's formulation, the principle by which linguistic elements are joined into larger elements. It contrasts with the axis of equivalence, along which similar elements are considered alternatives for each other. Metaphor works by equiva-

212

Glossary

lence, metonymy by combination; syntax by combination, diction by equivalence. compound. A word made up of two or more smaller words. A compound may be written as one word or more than one, but in meaning and usually in stress it acts as one word. compound stress. The stress pattern typical of compounds, as opposed to lexical stress, which attaches to single words, and phrasal stress, which operates on the lexical stresses within a phrase as a whole. Compounds generally have strongest stress on their first element (or "left branch"), with a full vowel but weaker stress on the second element; while phrases, according to most but not all theorists, usually have strongest stress on their last major element. Thus "greenhouse" (compound) has strongest stress on "green," while "green house" (phrase) has strongest stress on "house." In The Sound Pattern of English (1968), Chomsky and Halle derive the unmarked stress pattern for English phrases from two rules, the Compound Stress Rule (CSR) and the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR, which gives phrasal stress). Some phonologists, however, question whether there really is a widely applicable unmarked stress pattern, and see the NSR in particular as arbitrary. compression. Making a piece of discourse more dense, in some specified sense, than it might otherwise be, or more dense than another piece or type of discourse. Certain linguistic devices, such as compounding, metaphor, contraction, and ellipsis, lend themselves to compression. See also density. consonance (alliteration, off-rhyme). Using similar consonant sequences close together or in parallel structures, as at the ends of lines (off-rhyme) or at the beginnings of accented syllables in alliterative verse. content words. See major-category words. cursus. Based on medieval Latin rhetoric, a system of rhythmicalfmetrical patterns at the ends of oratorical units. Cursus has been applied both to oratory and to written (English) prose. dactyl. A three-syllable foot or stress pattern, with the stressed syllable first. Example: "sYL-la-ble." declination. A general tendency of intonation levels to decline in pitch during the course of an intonational phrase. Declination is gradual over time and therefore most easily seen in longish phrases. Because of downstep and declination, a high (H) tone near the end of a phrase may be lower in actual pitch (FO) than a low (L) tone nearer the beginning. demonstrative. In English, primarily the words this, that, these, and those. They may be used either as demonstrative pronouns-"Give me that"-or as determiners, traditionally called demonstrative adjectives- "Give me that gila monster." demotion. Treating a syllable as unstressed, even though in another context it would likely be stressed. The English Rhythm Rule can cause demotion (to avoid

Glossary

213

stress clash), as can a strongly regular traditional meter (if a weakly stressed syllable occurs in a typically unstressed position). density. Poetic language has often been said to be more dense than other kinds of language, though this term is seldom strictly defined. This book considers several kinds of density, but especially two: semantic density-the number of semantic concepts, or predications and arguments, in a given linguistic space; and stress density-the ratio of stressed syllables to unstressed syllables in a given string. dialect. The distinctive speech characteristics of a particular subset of the speakers of a language. The clearest examples of dialects are regional varieties, but we also speak of dialects divided along nongeographic lines: ethnic dialects, class dialects, even male or female dialects (in some languages). By definition, dialects of the same language can be understood by speakers of other dialects (they are mutually intelligible), even though one dialect may sound strange to speakers of another. dipody. Meter that is regular at two levels, hierarchically. Dipodic verse alternates strong and weak syllables at the foot level, and thus is regularly trochaic/iambic or anapestic/dactylic at the foot level; but then it also alternates strong and weak feet at the next level up. Example: "AFter HAN Gin' DANny DEEver IN the MORnin'" (Kipling [1892] 1988). downdrift. See declination. downstep. Shifting of the reference pitch level downward after certain types of pitch accents. Whereas declination is a gradual and continuous drop in pitch levels, downstep is much steeper but may be triggered only by certain types of pitch accents (according to the generative intonationists). duple/disyllabic. See meter. elision. The process by which what look like two syllables in writing count as only one for versification purposes. Processes of elision are widespread in everyday speech: weak vowels are left out, syllabic consonants are made consonantal and attached to an adjacent syllable, adjacent vowels are blended together across word boundaries (as in French liaison, Sanskrit sandhi). However, some schools of English poetic practice have developed rather artificial rules to regularize poetic elision, often on classical models, without reference to any particular spoken performance. Elision is sometimes marked with an apostrophe, but does not have to be: if the word even counts as only one syllable (occupies only one metrical position) in a line of iambic pentameter, then the second syllable has been elided whether it is spelled "even" or "e'en" or "ev'n" -as in "This, even Belinda may vouchsafe to view" (Pope, "The Rape of the Lock," 4 [(1714) 1969]). end-stopped. Lines of poetry that end at major syntactic and intonational boundaries, so that there is a natural pause at the end of each line and each line makes one logical unit. An end-stopped line in writing typically ends with a punctuation mark, but the punctuation is neither necessary nor sufficient to make it end-stopped. Compare with enjambment.

214

Glossary

enjambment. Occurs when a line end comes in the middle of a phrase, so that the stream of language most naturally flows on into the next line without a pause. This traditional sense of enjambment is extended by analogy to various kinds of mismatch, anywhere a significant boundary at one linguistic level fails to coincide with a boundary at another level. Compare with end-stopped. equivalence, axis of. See combination, axis of. FO. See fundamental frequency; pitch. feature. Generally, any identifiable characteristic of a word, sound, or other linguistic entity; technically, one of a set of minimal distinctions needed to distinguish one significant sound (segment) from another. For example, the sounds Jf/ and /v/ are distinguished by the feature [+/-voice], because the vocal cords vibrate on Jv/ but not Jfj; Jnf and Jd/ by the feature[+/- nasal], because the nasal passages are open on /n/ but not Jdf. filled pause. A vocalized break in the flow of speech. Each language has its characteristic filler syllables: "uh," "urn," "er," even pseudo-lexical ones like Spanish "este ... este ...." Exaggerated lengthening of a syllable while searching for the next word might also be considered a filled pause, as in "Soooo ...." foot. A sequence of one or more syllables, one and only one of which is stressed or heavy. See chapter r for a fuller discussion. formula. A ready-made phrase or type of phrase that can be conveniently plugged into a particular verse form over and over again. Lord (1960) and Parry (1953, 1971) suggested that certain types of formulae are particularly characteristic of orally composed metrical poetry, such as the ancient Greek epics. free verse (vers libre). Poetry with no obviously regular metrical pattern or rhyme scheme. freed verse (vers libere). A term originating with either the nineteenth-century French symbolists or seventeenth-century French poet La Fontaine and his followers, depending on which of two entries ("vers libere" or "free verse") in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics you believe. Vers libere, unlike vers libre (see free verse), has regular meter, but the number of syllables per line varies. The use of the term in its English version dates from the 1970s. The usage in this book, though, follows Charles Hartman (r98o), who defines freed verse as verse made up of recognizable fragments of the iambic pentameter line. frequency. See fundamental frequency. function words. Words with a primarily grammatical, as opposed to semantic, function, such as conjunctions, prepositions, personal pronouns, and articles. Function-word categories are closed classes, meaning that a language has a finite number at any one time and adopts new ones at a much slower rate than that for content words, also called major-category words, such as nouns, adjectives, and main verbs. fundamental frequency (FO). The number of cycles per second (hertz, Hz) of a waveform; in sound, the number of times per second that air pressure within

Glossary

215

the wave goes from positive to negative and back, relative to the starting pressure. This turns out to be roughly the same thing as pitch, except that FO labels physical characteristics, while pitch labels perceptual ones. The same FO may be perceived as a different pitch if other variables are changed. A given sound will also include energy at whole-number multiples of the fundamental frequency: for example, if the fundamental frequency is 200 Hz, there will also be bands of sound at 400 Hz, 6oo Hz, 8oo Hz, etc. These multiples of the fundamental are called harmonics. Speech is not a simple waveform; it has noise at nonharmonic frequencies and also amplifies some frequencies while damping (muffiing) others. The bands of amplified or nondamped frequencies, called formants, and the high-frequency noise are crucial for distinguishing different speech sounds. Still, the vibration of the vocal cords generally produces one fundamental frequency that is dominant at any given time in voiced sounds, especially vowels. generative linguistics. That school of linguistics dedicated to formulating rules that would generate all the well-formed linguistic structures (sentences, sound patterns, etc.) of a language and rule out all the ill-formed structures. Generative linguistics in recent decades has come to focus more on formulating rules that are consistent with linguistic universals, or features and parameters thought to be present in all languages. Although generative linguistics is especially linked to Noam Chomsky and MIT, generative approaches, with some variations, now dominate the fields of syntax, phonology, and morphology in the United States generally. generative metrics. An approach to versification and metrics based on generative methodology and, later, on metrical phonology. Two identifying characteristics are (I) that it is written by generative linguists and (2) that it generally depends on binary judgments (usually corpus-based) of potential poetic lines as either metrical or unmetrical (well formed or ill formed) for a given poet, although the early version (before metrical phonology) also incorporated an index of complexity, with each deviation from the ideal metrical line raising the level of complexity. Generative metrics, not surprisingly, seldom deals with free verse. glide. (I) A class of sounds pronounced similarly to vowels but with less rhythmic weight and, typically, more constriction of the vocal tract; also called semivowels. In English, these are /j/ (the "y" sound), fwf, and, by some definitions, fhf. (2) A type of pitch accent, referring to a rise or fall in pitch that is gradual, rather than a discrete jump in levels. The term is used most often where this gliding motion takes place on one lengthened syllable. Glissando might be the nearest musical approximation. Greek prosody. See classical prosody. grouping. One basic aspect of rhythm, according to generative music theory and the prosodic theory based on it. Grouping has to do with deciding the boundaries of rhythmic units and the relationships between units. Other aspects of

216

Glossary

rhythm in this theory include meter, which in this view deals solely with regular timing pulses, and prolongation, which has to do with expectations and goals for larger "regions" of the text. half-line. A poetic unit consisting of roughly half of a poetic line, but also motivated by other structural criteria such as meter, syntactic boundaries, or alliteration patterns. Of course, all lines of poetry can be divided in half, but this is a useful concept only in poetry where the half-line is a basic structural unit, as it is in Old English verse. half-rhyme. See near-rhyme. hendecasyllabic. A classical Greek verse form, or a modern imitation of it. The line consists of a trochee followed by a dactyl followed by three trochees; the first and last trochees may be replaced by spondees (cf. Turco 1986, 74). iambic pentameter. The most prestigious, and possibly the most widely used, of the English accentual-syllabic verse forms. It is defined as a line of five iambic feet, with or without a "feminine ending." This translates to ten or eleven syllables, alternately unstressed and then stressed: xfxfxfxfxf(x). However, in practice there are several conventional variations that allow the line to deviate from this model, and some poets use a "looser" form that deviates rather freely. ictus. A "prominent" position in the abstract metrical line (Preminger and Brogan 1993, 554); or the "strong" member of a metrical foot, pair, or group. Roughly equivalent to stress. See also meter. intermediate phrase. An intonational unit smaller than the intonational phrase. The intermediate phrase has one and only one nuclear accent and a phrase accent after the nuclear accent. There is a great deal of confusion in terminology about intonational units; the term intonational phrase sometimes refers to what the generativefautosegmental phonologists call intermediate phrase; tone unit and intonation group seem to overlap both terms, but correspond more closely to the intermediate phrase (in that they can have only one nucleus). intonation. The pattern of pitch in language. In English, intonation is very flexible, and mainly expresses attitudinal or pragmatic information. In tone languages such as Chinese or Akan, though, each word may have a certain pitch (or pitch accent) lexically assigned to it. intonational phrase. "Stretches of speech terminated by characteristic pitch sequences and followed usually, but not always, by pauses" (Woodbury 1987b, 182). A level of phrasing larger than the intermediate phrase, it may have several nuclear stresses and slight pauses in it, but has some intonational continuity. Declination (or downdrift) and downstep of pitch continue throughout the intonational phrase, rather than returning to the original reference level after each intermediate phrase. Also called major phrase. intonation group (paratone). A division of spontaneous, oral speech, analogous to the paragraph in writing. In most languages there are typical beginning and end-

Glossary

217

ing intonational contours for a paratone: usually high at the beginning and low at the end, jumping back to a higher level to begin the next paratone. Utterances within a paratone are mostly on the same topic. inversion or inverted foot. A pattern in which the actual syllable weight (stress, quantity, or tone) is the reverse of that predicted by the verse paradigm, such as fx where xf would be expected in an iambic line. See also substitution. loudness. See amplitude. major-category words. Words, such as nouns (not pronouns), adjectives, main verbs (not auxiliaries), and some adverbs, considered to have a higher degree of semantic content than the function words. The major categories are "open classes," meaning we freely derive and borrow new ones. (Any attempt to list all the nouns in the English language, for example, not only would be very long but also would become incomplete in a short time.) Major-category words are more likely to receive strong stress than function words are. markedness. Degree to which a term applies to a relatively open or closed set of referents, or is relatively more or less expected in an utterance. In linguistics, the unmarked case is the one of two or more alternatives that is most expected, basic, or broadly applicable. Marked cases are any alternatives other than the unmarked one; in other words, if it is marked, it is unexpected or restricted in use, to some degree. Common examples are gender terms such as lion (unmarked: all lions) vs. lioness (marked: only adult females) and grammatical "case" such as nominative she (marked: subject only) vs. accusative/dative/genitive her (unmarked: all other uses). meter. Musically, the basic pulsing rhythmic level of beats and off-beats (known in poetry as ictus and anacrusis). Between each two strong pulses are normally one or two weaker pulses; this gives the meter its characteristic duple or triple pattern. As Cureton (1992) argues, the poetic tradition pervasively mixes this primitive notion of meter with other types of grouping, phrasing, and sound patterning. Thus the word meter is frequently used to refer to any kind of versifying principle, or used interchangeably with the word rhythm, but in this book it is limited, wherever possible, to the structure of basic beats. Because the word has become so ambiguous, I often prefer to avoid it and name the pattern I am describing more explicitly: "stress pattern," "syllable count," "pause phrase," etc. Particular conventional patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are traditionally given their own names. Many of these are named after ancient Greek and Latin patterns, but with some loss of precision, since those were based on patterns of long and short syllables rather than stress. Some of these are here listed separately: alexandrine, amphibrach, anapest, dactyl, hendecasyllabic, hexameter, paeon, pentameter, pyrrhic, spondee, tetrameter, trimeter, trochee. Two broad descriptive categories for metrical patterns are triple or trisyllabic meters and duple or disyllabic meters. Triple meters consist mostly of three-

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syllable feet; that is, there are normally two unstressed syllables between every two stressed syllables. Duple meters, then, consist mostly of two-syllable feet, or one unstressed syllable between every two stressed ones. monosyllabic. Having only one syllable. The opposite is polysyllabic or multisyllabic. nasal. A speech sound, such as [m], [n], or [IJ], in which the velum is lowered in order to allow air to pass through the nose. near-rhyme. A sound pattern approximating rhyme but (usually) using different vowels. In near-rhyme (also called half-rhyme or slant rhyme), ordinarily, the codas (that is, all consonants after the vowel) of the syllables in question match, as in "mace" and "pass." Sometimes both onset and coda (that is, all consonants) match, as in "puss" and "pass." However, near-rhyme and the other terms are sometimes used for other types of phonetic similarities, especially if they occur in the typical rhyme position at the ends of lines. nominal. A word in the same general functional category as nouns, including common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. (Pronouns are syntactically and morphologically different from nouns, but have a close functional relationship with them.) nuclear stress, nuclear accent. The most prominent stress or pitch accent in a phrase. The British school of intonation studies considers the nuclear pitch accent to be the chief meaningful intonation category. Chomsky and Halle's Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) predicts that the normal or unmarked stress pattern of a phrase will put the strongest stress on the last lexical stress of the phrase. The NSR has been widely influential, but not everyone accepts that there even is a normal pattern, and certainly there are major exceptions to the NSR. See also compound stress nucleus. See syllable. onset. See syllable; alliteration. parallelism. Repetition of similar structures or patterns. Generally we don't speak of repeating a single word or sound as parallelism, but repeating a type of clause, a set of related images, or other such patterns may be considered parallelism. The most commonly mentioned type is syntactic parallelism: repeating similar syntactic structures. parataxis. A style in which sentences have few subordinate clauses but instead are linked with coordinating conjunctions or with no connectives at all. paratone. See intonation group. pause. A break or hesitation in the flow of speech. See also filled pause. pause phrase. A unit of speech marked off by pauses before and after. phoneme, phone. A speech sound. Whereas a phone is defined as any identifiable difference in sound, phonemes can be distinguished only if the difference between two similar sounds is meaningful-that is, if it can be used to distinguish between different words. For example, adding voicing to the first sound

Glossary

219

of "cherry" makes it "Jerry," a different word; therefore fcf (unvoiced) and /J/ (voiced) are different phonemes. phrase. A group of words that function as a syntactic, phonological, or prosodic unit. The term is also used in music for a group of notes or measures that form a melodic and rhythmic unit; a wind player, for example, normally tries to breathe between phrases rather than in the middle of one. See also pause phrase; syntactic phrase; intonational phrase. pitch. The perceived highness or lowness of sound. Although the perception of pitch can be slightly influenced by other factors, such as amplitude and vowel quality, for our purposes pitch will be identified with fundamental frequency, or FO. (This is common practice, and commonly defended, in the literature on intonation.) The rises and falls we hear are close enough to the FO contour as to make this a reasonable shortcut, even though some of the small variations in FO are almost certainly not perceptible to ordinary listeners. One difficulty is that some consonants, especially voiceless ones, create radical jumps in the pitch contour; for example, sibilants make a lot of high-frequency noise. We interpret these not as large rises or falls, but rather as short interruptions in the melody. pitch accent. A jump or fall in pitch, or a combination of these, used to focus attention on a given word, to provide pragmatic information about the speaker's attitude, and/or to express emotional content. A pitch accent is often described as a tone or group of tones aligned with a particular syllable. pitch obtrusion. A noticeable movement in pitch, often seen as an identifying feature of an accent. Pitch obtrusion also signals stress, but stress may occur without pitch obtrusion. The amount of pitch variance required to be recognized as an accent is very context-dependent. polysyllabic. Having many syllables. Polysyllabic words tend to reduce stress density because they always contain unstressed syllables. promotion. Increasing the amount of stress or emphasis on a given syllable, for contextual reasons, beyond the level that would be considered normal for that syllable in other contexts. Three reasons for promotion are poetic line structure, where a syllable can be promoted to meet the requirements of an alreadyestablished pattern; the English Rhythm Rule, where one syllable may be promoted and another demoted in order to avoid stress clash; and contrastive or emphatic stress, where a syllable receives extra weight for purely local reasons, such as to distinguish it from a similar one nearby. prosody. Those aspects of the pronunciation of speech having to do with rhythm and melody: syllable length, loudness, stress, pause, and intonation. Prosody is sometimes used to mean versification, but it is useful to keep the two concepts separate. register. A style of speech, or range of vocabulary, tied to a particular type of social situation. Almost everyone uses a more formal register in some situations, a more informal or even vulgar one at other times. Professionals use a more techni-

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cal register with colleagues, a less specialized register with laypeople. Registers differ from dialects in that, while both are socially determined varieties of alanguage, dialects are associated with demographically identifiable groups, such as residents of a certain region or members of a certain ethnic group or social class. rhetoric, rhetorical structure. Eloquent, expressive, or persuasive language, or (more often) techniques to make it so. Rhetoric, in classical and medieval education, was the art and science of oratory; now it often means the study of written composition. (Because rhetorically skillful language can persuade even when it isn't true, "rhetoric" is also used to mean deceptive or empty language.) Rhetorical structure is the way an oral or written text is put together to achieve rhetorical goals. In some contemporary works (such as Woodbury 1987b), rhetorical structure is analyzed in terms of very specific, technical linguistic categories. rhyme. A figure of sound in which the rimes of the last syllables of two words are the same. Usually rhyming syllables are both stressed, but not always. In true rhyme the onsets of the syllables are different; thus repeating the same syllable (as in "rage"f"outrage") is not true rhyme. Many variations exist: two-syllable rhyme, near-rhyme, near-two-syllable rhyme ("fishes"f"vicious"), etc. rhythm. "A figure of periodicity, any sequence of events or objects perceptible as a distinct pattern capable of repetition and variation .... Rhythmic patterns characteristically display four features: regularity, variation, grouping, and hierarchy" (Brogan 1993, ro67). See chapter r for a longer discussion. rhythm rule. See stress clash. rime. See syllable. scansion. The process of scanning a piece of poetry, that is, determining its underlying metrical pattern and comparing its actual stress pattern with that. Scansion often involves marking feet and/or stresses with some kind of conventional notation system (such as the x and fused in this book), but the scansion itself is not the marking but the analysis. segment. In phonology, a single speech sound, that is, a consonant or a vowel. The word also has a much broader and more familiar meaning: a natural division of any larger entity. selection, axis of. See combination, axis of; and chapter 3· slant-rhyme. See near-rhyme. sonority. The loudness of a sound for a given pitch, force, and duration. Some types of speech sounds are perceptually louder than others even when both are made with the same energy. In general, the more vowel-like a sound, the more sonority it has: vowels have more than glides, glides more than liquids, and so on. Even within the same class, though, there can be differences; [s] is generally considered more sonorous than [J]. spondee. A traditional foot consisting of two stressed syllables. The definition of the foot used in this book, which allows for only one stress per foot, makes spondees pairs of feet rather than single feet.

Glossary

221

stanza. A grouping of lines within a poem; a verse paragraph. stress. Prominence (or salience) of a given syllable. Stressed syllables are perceptually stronger, fuller, more noticeable than unstressed ones. The phonetic makeup of stress is complex: it involves some combination of pitch movement, length, loudness, and unreduced vowel quality. In much modern metrical phonology, stress is specifically an attribute of syllable rimes, and feet are composed of rimes; the onsets are not important. stress clash. Two stressed syllables coming close enough together that they disrupt the easy alternating rhythm of speech. Speakers generally handle stress clash in one of two ways: they lengthen the time between the stressed syllables by pausing or by extending the rime of the first one, or they shift one of the stresses to a syllable where it would not occur in other environments. Example: TennesSEE LEGislature-+ TENnessee LEGislature (Hayes 1983). strong-stress verse. Poetry such as the Old English and Middle English alliterative forms, usually having four stresses per line. Called "strong-stress" because some lightly stressed syllables do not count as metrically strong. Not all Old English scholars agree anymore that strong-stress is the basis of this form, but it is still a common term. substitution. In traditional English versification, a stress sequence that does not perfectly fit the verse paradigm. There are several standard substitutions in the iambic pentameter line, and others less universally accepted; probably the most common is the "inverted first foot." The idea is that instead of the expected iambic foot (x/) another foot is substituted (in this case, fx). Example: I

/X

1 X

I

/'X

I

I

I'X/'X/

Evil : and love : both dark : exot- : ic foes syllable. A basic division of the stream of speech into smaller units. Each syllable is one peak of sonority. Typically a syllable is a vowel sound or diphthong which may be preceded by one or more consonant sounds and followed by one or more consonant sounds. Certain consonants, such as /r/, /1/, fmf, and /n/ can also be syllabic or vocalic; that is, they may form a syllable without any other vowel sound. The parts of a syllable are technically labeled onset (beginning), nucleus (center-the vowel part), coda (end), and rime (nucleus plus coda). People who have not been taught to write an alphabet tend to think of speech as made up of syllables rather than phonemes. syntactic phrase. A word or group of words that functions as a grammatical unit. Examples: noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP), prepositional phrase (PP), relative clause (RelC). The syntactic phrase is roughly equivalent, for our purposes, to syntactic constituent or X'/ X" in generative theory. tactus. The level of rhythmic pulses to which one responds most immediately. The level that we perceive as the tactus will be different depending on tempo and possibly other factors. This mutability has implications for many rhythmic phenomena in language and poetry: depending on the speed with which

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one reads, beats, pitch accents, pauses, and so on will occur in more or fewer places. Read slowly (as in an iambic pentameter line), for example, a phrase like "icoNoCLAStic ARchiTECture" has four evenly spaced beats. At a different speed or different level of abstraction, it has two unevenly spaced beats that will likely force a pause between words or a shift of stress to the first syllable of the first word: iconocLAStic ARchitecture or Iconoclastic ARchitecture. See also stress clash. tempo. The overall speed at which someone speaks, just as musical tempo is the overall speed at which a passage is played. Tempo affects many other aspects of speech; for example, many sounds that may be present in the slow, careful pronunciation of words are not pronounced at all in rapid speech; others, though not lost, are altered. More syllables may be stressed in slow speech than in rapid speech. Tempo does not technically exist in written language, but we often infer tempo to some extent from punctuation, line structure, word choice, and so on. See also tactus. tension. A disjunction produced when different organizing principles of a poem do not coincide. For example, if the most important syntactic phrase boundaries occur at places other than at line ends, or if stresses occur in positions in a line that are labeled as weak in the verse pattern, a mismatch between expectation and realization creates a mental unsettlement. This unsettlement is analogous to physical potential energy, as when elastic cords such as the vocal folds are tightened or stretched. tone. An abstract pitch level, the most basic unit of intonation. Although the nature of tone in English is disputed, the most widely held theory in the United States now holds that there are two basic tones in English, High (H) and Low (L). These have no absolute frequency value, but are defined relative to each other and to the speaker's overall pitch range. More complEx pitch patterns are combinations of H and L tones; they can form six or more pitch accents (H + L, L+H, etc.), with variation not only in the order of tones but also in the timing of their alignment with syllables in the text. Tones play a rather different role in what are known as "tone languages," in which tone is lexically determined; that is, a given word always has high tone, low tone, or mid-tone, and cannot be pronounced with a different tone without changing it to a different word. In English, stress is lexical but tone is relatively free to be used for emphasis or expressive purposes; in Japanese, tone is lexical but stress relatively free; in Swedish, both stress and tone are lexical; in French neither is lexical (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, 238-39 ). tone unit. The basic unit of analysis in the British discourse analysis/information structure tradition, generally synonymous with intermediate phrase; that is, having only one nuclear accent. trochee. A two-syllable foot, with the first syllable long or stressed and the second short or unstressed. Example: "PREsent."

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223

triple/trisyllabic. See meter. unmarked. See markedness. versification. The principles according to which verses are formed, or the study of those principles. Versification and prosody are sometimes used interchangeably, but this usage loses a useful distinction. Versification is restricted to the field of poetic composition, and usually refers to fairly explicit, identifiable rules for what makes a well-formed line in a given type of poem, such as the number of syllables each line of a haiku must have. Prosody is a general linguistic term referring to the structure of rhythm, stress, and intonation in any kind of language. vowel harmony. Technically, a system for neutralizing the differences between vowels within a word or other phonological unit. Turkish is an example of alanguage with systematic vowel harmony. English has no such system, but people sometimes use the term in English simply to mean a pattern of identical or similar vowels within a poem or passage-that is, as a synonym for assonance. vowel quality. The phonetic and perceptual character of a given vowel. Acoustically, vowel quality is a product of the first three formant frequencies (see fundamental frequency). In articulation, vowel quality is a product of such factors as jaw height, tongue position, and lip rounding. The sounds are typically described spatially, based mainly on tongue position in the mouth: from high front (/if, the sound in "keen") to low front (/ref, the sound in "track") to high back (/uf, the sound in "flute") to low back (/a/, the sound in American English "God"), and several points in between. "Vowel harmony" and assonance are based on similarities of vowel quality from one syllable or word to the next. word. A set of one or more morphemes forming a semantic and syntactic unit below phrase level. Although the definition can be complicated by words with more than one root, such as "weathervane," and by sets of words pronounced together (see clitic phrase), this book uses the term to refer to a typographical word-letters preceded and followed by spaces or punctuation-unless otherwise noted.

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Index In this index an "f" after a number indicates a separate reference on the next page, and an "ff" indicates separate references on the next two pages. A continuous discussion over two or more pages is indicated by a span of page numbers, e.g., "57-59." Passim is used for a cluster of references in close but not consecutive sequence. African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), I77f "After the SUiprising Conversions" (Robert Lowell), n3f Alliteration, 34, 45, 73£ Alternation, 2, I2, 23f, 79, I 50, I 56, I 59, I89f Ambiguity, I, IO, 36-4I passim, 95ff, I04, II7, I37

Coherence, I9, I29, I5I, I 59 Compounds, 29f, 84-90, I37-40, 203 Compound stress, 84ff, 203£ Compression in poetry, 2, I2, 77ff, 83f, 87, III, I89f Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, 2If, 34 Cruttenden, Alan, 33, I2I, I25ff, 203f CUieton, Richard, 28, 37, 40, 6o, 92, 96 Cutler, Ann, 20, 24

Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 8, I5, n7, I42, I56-66, I85 Beats (rhythmic), 28f, 92, I56 Beckman,~ary,23, 26,I23 "Bells" (Jimmy Santiago Baca), 8 "Best Days, The" (James Wright), mof Black English, see African-American Vernacular English Blank verse, 43, 45 Boase-Beier, Joan, 29f, 87f Brazil, David, I22, I25, I35f Breslin, James E. B., I2, 9I Brogan,T.V.F.B,27,3I Browning, Robert, 4f Byers, Prudence P., 63f

Derivation (morphological), 83f Diction, 6s, n-83, I89 "Dunbarton" (Robert Lowell), I4of, I45-50 Duncan, Robert, 69

Cadence, 99, I97 CaesUia, 4, 45-48 Cassidy, Frederic, 49 Chicano English, I 56, I 59 "Christmas I944" (Denise Levertov), I66, I70-76 passim "Cloudy Day" (Jimmy Santiago Baca), I85

Edwards, Jonathan, n3f "Eisenhower's Visit to Franco ... " (James Wright), 8, I07f Eliot, T. S., 6, I3f, 34, 42-66, n8, I27-40 Enjambment, 33£, 4of, 47£, 93-97 Euphony and eUihythmy, 60-63 Expectation, 30-35, 72-76 FigUies of sound, I2, I9, 72, 90 FigUies of syntax, I02f Finch, Annie, 34, nSf, 20I Fish, Stanley, n, 30, 73, I96 Foot, 36f "For the Union Dead" (Robert Lowell), 7 Four Quartets (T. S. Eliot), 6, I4, 42-66 Free verse (defined), 3, n Frost, Robert, 3I Functional shift, 83f

240

Index

Gardner, Helen, 44£ "Generic American Poetry Contour," 137, 189 Ginsberg, Allen, 90, 103 "Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium" (James Wright), 75£, 104 "Grandparents" (Robert Lowell), 7, 7of Gross, Harvey, 44 Grouping, rhythmic, 52, IOI, II5 Half-line, 45-57,129 "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane" (Etheridge Knight), 178, 182-85 Hartman, Charles, II, 34, 43, 63, 93, 204 Hass, Robert, 90,154 Hernandez, Miguel, 106£ Hirschberg, Julia, 125, 127£, 136, 140 Hobbs, Jerry R., 125, 127£, 136 "Home After Three Months Away" (Robert Lowell), II2 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, sf, 12, 19 Iambic meter, 3-7, 30-33 passim, 43, 45, 68-72,142,189 "Idea of the Good, The" (James Wright), 81 Idioms, 109ff Information structure, 120, 155 "In Memory of Leopardi" (James Wright), 107 Interpretation, II6f, 123 Intonation, 26, 39, II6-87; and ethnicity, 128, 156, 159, 185£; and gender, 172, 177; meaning of, 123-28, 172, 151 Isochrony, 16-22 passim, 150,159

Line length, 57£, 97ff "Long Summer" (Robert Lowell), II4 Lord, Albert B., 48 "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The" (T. S. Eliot), 43 Lowell, Robert, 6£, 14, 68-71, 74£, 83-87 passim, 95£, I09-15, 140-50 "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" (James Wright), 108 Magoun, Francis P., 48£ Matthiessen, F. 0., 43 McPherson, Sandra, 97£ "Memories of West Street and Lepke" (Robert Lowell), IIIf Metaphor, I, 23, 87, 105 Middle English alliterative verse, 45 Modifiers of nouns, 83£, 109£ Monosyllables, 65, 77, 8off, 154 Music theory, 32ff, 40 "My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereaux Winslow" (Robert Lowell), 71 Narmour, Eugene, 32 Neruda, Pablo, 106, 144 Nonstandard (vs. standard) dialects, 156, 159, 166, 177£, 185£ Noun phrases, 50f, 109, I89, 205f Nuclear stress, 23, 85, 159£, 178 Old English verse, 49, 74, 85, 93 "On a Phrase from Southern Ohio" (James Wright), 98 "Our Father" (Etheridge Knight), 178-81 Oral-formulaic theory, 48£ Overlapping, see Enjambment

Jakobsen, Roman, 29, 104, 135, 185 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 19 Kipling, Rudyard, 61 Knight, Etheridge, 15,177-85 Laver, J. D. M., 120 Lehiste, lise, 18, 95 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 40 Levertov, Denise, 15,166-77 Lexica-syntactic frames, 49-54 Line, 67,92-Ioi,I50 Line breaks, II, 47£, 94-97, IOof

Parallelism, 99£, II9, 190; melodic, 12935, 151, 159ff, 172, 189; semantic, 46; syntactic, 24, 103ff, 189 Parry, Milman, 48 Pause/pause phrase, 39, 94 Penfield, Joyce, 156 Perception, 24, 34-37 passim, 6o, 73,123 Perceptual centers, 21f, 196 Performance of poetry, II6f, 128, 136£, 15of Perloff, Marjorie, 93, III-I4 Phonemes, 72ff, 201£

Index Phrase, 38ff, 92-IIS, 142, 145, 150f Pierrehumbert, Janet, 125, 127f, 136,140 Pitch accents, 123, 159, 166, 2o6ff Pitch range, 124,135,142,145,177 Pitch tracking, 207 Plath, Sylvia, 75 Poetic function, 29, 88,104,135,185 Poetic language, 29, 63ff, 77-83, 88f, 189f Pope, Alexander, 3f, 34 Prenucleai stress, 23, 159 Prepositional phrases, 103-9, 205 Prominence, see Salience Prose (vs. poetry), 27, 63ff, 77-83, 189f "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, The" (Robert Lowell), 142ff "Randall Jarrell" (Robert Lowell), II4 "Recurrent figures of sound," 12, 19, 72, 90 Repetition, 19, 34, 72-76, 9of, 155 Rhyme, 10, 24, 27, 34, 73-75, 95,178 Rhythm rule (English), 25, 85 Russian Formalists, 30 Salience, 16ff, 23, 27,155, 202 Scansion, 55, 196f, 199f "Scenes from the Life of the Pepper Trees" (Denise Levertov), 166,170-73

passim Semantic density, 2, 10, 84-88 passim Sentence premodifiers, 24, n1-14 Sherzer, Joel, 93, 203 Sound patterning, 72-75 Southern British English, 166 Spoken (vs. written) language, 24, 101f, 155, 186f "Spring Images" (James Wright), 104f Sprung rhythm, sf

241

Standaid (vs. nonstandard) dialects, n9, 177f Steele, Timothy, 10f Storm, Theodor, 99 Stress, 20-26, 65, 84f, 196,199, 203f Stress clash, 6of, 73, 77, 189 Stress pattern, 28f, 34f, 53-57, 75-79 Stress-timed language, 20 Strings, 37 Sundberg,Johan, 32 "Sun Tan at Dusk" (James Wright), 81 "Sweeney Agonistes" (T. S. Eliot), 45 Syllables per line, 27, 34, 58. See also Line length Syntactic phrasing, 39f, 49f, 92-n5 Template, metrical, 56ff Tempo, 64-65, 89, 98f, 150 Tension, s, 34, 62, 93, 96 Timers and stressers, 17f "To a Blossoming Peai Tree" (James Wright), 99f "To Delmore Schwa~tz" (Robert Lowell), 68ff Tones, see Pitch accents Transcription of pitch, 121ff Tsur, Reuven, 73, 201 Turner, Frederick, 10f, 18 Versification, 27f Vers libere, 63, 68-71

Waste Land, The (T. S. Eliot), 47 Woodbury, Anthony, 38f Word choice, see Diction Wordsworth, William, 69f Wright, James, r, 7f, r5, 33, 41, 72-76 passim, 89ff, 94-109 Written (vs. spoken) language, 24, 10rf

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cooper, G. Burns (Gordon Burns). Mysterious music: rhythm and free verse/ G. Burns Cooper. p. em. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN o-8047-2938-7 (cloth : alk. paper) r. American poetry-2oth century-History and criticism. 2. English language- 2oth centuryVersification. 3· English language-:z.oth centuryRhythm. 4· Free verse-History and criticism. 5· Musical meter and rhythm. I. Title. PS309.F7C66 1998 8n'.5o9-dc21 97-49161 CJP

Original printing 1998 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98