To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

David Antin: Notes for an Ultimate Prosody (2)

"Metrical irregularity" is more normal than exceptional throughout the history of blank verse. Shakespeare provides as good examples as Wordsworth because there is no neat single convention of syllable - stress meter in English. The reason for the very complicated set of options available to poets writing in these meters is that from the start there were two conflicting conventions, one of which was an iso-syllabic convention adapted from Romance practice and the other a quantitative convention adapted to English with the substitution of accent for quantity. This conflict is apparent in the first essay on prosody in the English language ~George Gascoigne's Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rime in English. It is clear that Gascoigne regards the number of syllables as the measure of the verse: "I say, then, remember to hold the same measure wherewith you begin, whether it be in a verse of six syllables, eight, ten, twelve, etc." At the same time he defends Chaucer's "failure" to observe the syllable count on the grounds that Chaucer's lines are isochronic: "Also our father Chaucer hath used the same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use, whosoever do peruse and well consider his works he shall find that, although his lines are not always of the selfsame number of syllables, yet, being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse and that which hath most syllables in it will fall to the ear correspondent unto that which hath fewest syllables in it; and like wise that which hath fewest syllables shall be found yet to consist of words that have such a natural sound as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents."

The earliest English blank verse was, of course, strictly decasyllabic, as was Gascoigne's own The Steel Glass. But with the adaptation of blank verse to the theater there was no possible significance in the purely page oriented, strict syllabics and the poets on grounds of expedience abandoned it and presumably justified the expedience on grounds of a "Classical" practice in which the "long" and "short" syllables of Greek and Latin were identified with the "accented" and "unaccented" syllables of English, Even Milton, whose blank verse in Paradise Lost is clearly decasyllabic, has lines which can only be resolved by some accent-counting convention.[1] The historical situation resulted in a situation of an illusory blank verse metric; whenever one convention acted as a compositional constraint the other convention provided the loophole. The situation with rhymed verse was essentially the same, except that rhyme is audible and the use of terminal rhyme made the line endings distinctly perceivable. This did not establish "the meter," but it did mark off the stretches of language separated by rhyme as equivalence units regardless of how they may have been varied in duration, accentual weight and so on. Consequently rhyme, as far as the sound structure was concerned, was of far greater importance than meter in the history of English syllable-stress poetry.

If we extend the meaning of rhyme to cover alliteration, it has been of far greater importance than meter throughout the entire history of English poetry.[2] The effect of meter seems to be either visual or moral. Either it is a page image of regularity and pattern, something like capital letters at the beginning of verse lines, or else an imaginary sense of constraint that has allowed certain poets to sleep at night. Given its largely fictitious existence one might wonder why poets felt any need to liberate themselves from it. Why free verse? The reason is more or less obvious. The image of meter invariably refers to other poetry. It is a visual framing effect and places whatever language is set within the frame in a context of "literature." It is not a musical device, it's a sentiment. "Metrical poetry" normally comes in a bundle together with syntactical and lexical habits that are much more effective in establishing the presence of the past, but this is not necessary. Whitman is able to embed the sound of a full-blown "folk song" in the free verse of Lilacs without the appearance of metric:


Sea winds blown from east and west,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls
To adorn the burial house of him I love?

And it's possible, like Auden, to come on as Noel Coward till somebody counts the long and short of the syllables and decides "My God, it's in minor Alcaics!" Which is terribly
chic. And poetry that is not at all scannable may still appear metrical if it is sufficiently conventional in its attitudes. Thus Yvor Winters decided that "Gerontion" was written in "Websterian blank verse." This isn't incorrect, it's nonsense. Neither Eliot nor Webster are scannable in any reasonable way, and to say that in Websterian blank verse "the blank verse norm is feeble" is such a grotesque understatement it sounds like a joke. Anyone who scans "Gerontion's" seventy-some lines and finds a handful scannable -- by applying conflicting analyses of the hypothetical pattern -- is not entitled to write "in defense of reason." All that Winters meant to say was that "Gerontion" sounds like Webster, which is neither accurate nor a prosodic statement. Anyone with a perverse sense of humor or a morbid interest in literary criticism can compare Winters' attack on Eliot in In Defense Of Reason with Harvey Gross's defense in Sound and Form in Modern Poetry. What emerges is the conclusion that the briefest suggestion of scannability is a gravitational center around which prosodists cluster like moths around a light. Eliot is, however, partly responsible for this sort of discussion. It is the kind of inanity he made possible by his 1917 essay on free verse: " . . . the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the freest verse." When Polonius is summoned he always appears.


1. The idea of a blind man composing poems in a purely page oriented syllabic measure is so unlikely that alternatives ought to be suggested. Either Milton’s blindness was mythical, which doesn’t seem likely, or he was not responsible for the final page arrangement of the poem he dictated, in which case the metric of Paradise Lost was largely due to the editors. This may explain why the irregular lines were never corrected.

2. I am aware that there are a number of very elaborate and ingenious theories of old English versification. but the only one that can count as reasonably "metrical" requires the hypothesis of either musical accompaniment or some special recitation technique which would allow for isochrony, and the evidence for this is slight. The more commonly accepted Five Type Foot Theory worked out by Sievers and subsequently rejected by him may describe fairly accurately the phrasal rhythms of Beowulf, but it is hard to see what that has to do with metrics. As a compositional constraint the theory supposes an immense variety of options. There are really six types of "foot" and numerous loopholes that constitute subspecies. It is not really clear what is excluded by this theory and, if significant Old English phrasal rhythms are excluded by it, and whether this is due to the rhetorical habits of the Beowulf poet or Old English poetry in general. (It is worth pointing out that an observer of chess games might wait a very long time before ever seeing White open by moving his king pawn to king three; it is nevertheless quite legal. Moreover the Sievers theory depends upon the existence of "lines," and there are no lines in Beowulf that were not established by editors. And the lines established by the editors are not satisfactory and require the assumption of numerous "hypermetric lines," which then require still more explanation. It would seem much more economical to assume that there is no "metric" and there are no "lines," that there is a continuum of language punctuated by alliteration, a habit of bipartite phrasing, and perhaps a consistency in placement of the caesura. If we accept the oral formulaic theory of composition for Beowulf there is even less reason to suppose a metric, especially a metric so laughably complicated as Sievers'. It seems extremely unlikely that the theory of Old English meter is based on anything more solid than nineteenth-century expectations.

[Originally published in Stony Brook, number one, December 1968. The first half of this essay appeared in a posting on May 28, 2009.]


Adam Katz said...

Perhaps this was written at a time when free verse needed to be defended against detractors??? But the idea today that columns of poetry of relatively equal line-weights "refer to other poetry" while the distinct varieties of free verse visual signatures do not, isn't true. Nothing looks like poetry more than a text punctuated by scattered and often mystifying indentations. Maybe now we should be calling for the return of something classical - after all, the point is, isn't it, to polemicize against whatever is most done???

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing...

Unknown said...

I'm saddened by David Antin's comment, although my sadness is nonetheless accompanied by my respect and deference for his opinions. But, his comment, I think, demonstrates the re-occurrence of orthographic mechanics as a justification or need for the receipt of printed versification to be a cognitive endeavor--which concerns me; i.e., versification moving away from the imminence of experience and the existential song that versification attempts to capture in its truthful response to the human condition. If one looks at the "mystifying indentations" not as Cartesian orthographic rigor, but as the translation of the internal vision for what it is--physical as well as emotional response to life, they are no longer mystifying, but the lyrical responsive attempt for the "doer" of the poetics to embrace the recipient in his or her virtual reality that is the artifact. Only Cartesian thinking as cognitive stepping back from the immersion of experience turns the "mystifying indentations" into orthography; hence, the true intention of the wizardry of art is defeated--i.e., transcendance. The Cartesian, tragically, removes us from imminence, and the imminence the artist struggles to resurrect in a virtual reality of trope-ic and mechanical means because the artist is so empathically compelled by the experience of life, that he or she is driven to share it with everyone as close as he or she can be true to the translation of the experience and its underlying ontological relevance. It's the experience that does the telling, not the teller. My heart breaks with the growing regularity of of "relatively equal line-weights" and regularized margins, and regularized orthography I witness more and more frequently. Just pull up the plethora of on-line poetry journals to witness the trend. Something to consider: what did Yeats really feel and mean under the regularization of rhyme and meter that obscured the true rhythm and response and significance of his voice in "Sailing To Byzantium"? We'll never know, will we, no matter how much research or historicisizing we may engage in because the natural rhythms of his voice with all their meanings appended to them were tragically obscured. We can never get so close to an artist for us to arrogantly say, "that's what the artist meant"; but, if the artist is true to his or her natural rhythm, vocal inflection, and emphasis upon morphemes with the artist's translation of that voice with honestly executed spacing for the audience to respond to, we do get a hell of a lot closer--which is what the artist craves, unless he or she is some sort of solipsist. Otherwise, what's the point of artistic communication? If one wishes to discursively communicate life's meanings orthographically committed to stringent rules of format and rhythm, then write a discursive essay. And, there's nothing wrong with that, either. Just take your pick, and don't try to rule or dominate, or coerce, or exclusivize a lyrical form true to itself. This has nothing to do with "polemicizing against whatever is most done." It has to do with being true to one's existential voice, and the desire to embrace with imminence. For some reason, I don't see the return of something "classical" just for the sake of classical accomplishing that. Please give us some classical scansion that captures a nightingale's song with directly translated honesty. Even Keats couldn't accomplish that in his regularized poetic. Maybe his Nightingale and its significance would have been even greater--if that can be imagined, if felt through the rhythm and emphases upon the morphemes of his language as he did receive and internalize it. Hell, his experience of the Nightingale as he truly felt it may even have transcended time for us to respond to as he did emotionally, as well as a cognition that would naturally follow from it. This has nothing to do with defending free verse in its time. It has everything to do with the timelessness of the natural.

Unknown said...

Please permit me a follow-up. I must convey my apologies to David Antin, to Jerome Rothenberg and his remarkably dedicated generosity for the arena of discourse he affords us, and to all the readership for the terrible error in my original posting. My posting marked 1:15 PM, April 13th, is cursed with the error of addressing it as a response to David Antin, when it was directed to comments found in Adam Katz's posting of June 17, 11:23 PM. My embarrassment on a national scale may be punitive enough, although I'll turn it into a mentor-lesson for my students, also.

Be well, all,
Chris Paris
San Antonio, Texas

Peter Greene said...

Lord, I don't have anything nearly as complicated to say about all this. I just thought poems was just supposed to just sound good (kidding - i can count an' even rhyme sometimes). A fun read - sort of like reading about software construction, but rather more intelligible.

Blank verse is only as blank as those that blunk it - and i don't warble myself
in public

later folks -