Poetic Language by Jones Tom

Author:Jones, Tom.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

CHAPTER EIGHT

Measure: Robert Creeley

In the twentieth century, American poets, whether ‘formalist’ or ‘experimental’ are found relating poetic measure to the rhythmic structure of life. Howard Nemerov thinks that patterns in verse ‘seem to represent the world itself in its either pious or stupid comings and goings, its regular recurrences and rhythmical repetitions, cosmic in the heavens, terrene in the tides, physiological in the beating of the heart’.1 And William Carlos Williams urges poets to make experiments that ‘will be directed toward the discovery of a new measure, I repeat, a new measure by which may be ordered our poems as well as our lives’.2 Poetic measure, then, is believed to be related to the practical structures of daily life, and is a way in which humans can understand their relationship to larger structures of organisation that present themselves in the world. Thinking about measure in poetry therefore need not restrict itself to identifying the units in which lines of poetry are made, and cataloguing the rules for their combination.3 This discussion of measure will move away from the understanding of metre that led Wimsatt and Beardsley in the late 1950s to attempt to refute new linguistic investigations into the nature of emphasis in English verse, noting disapprovingly that these new ways of describing metre encourage students to talk ‘as if the meter itself could be the interaction between itself and something else’.4 I hope also to avoid the tendency in thinking about metre that accords it a purely repressive function when seen in tension with other systems, such as speech intonation.5 The chapter will instead move towards a conception of metre as one means by which poetic utterances mark themselves out, measure themselves in and against broader rhythmic patterns, and contrast these perhaps rather modest claims with the more dedicatedly political claims for poetic rhythm of Julia Kristeva.

Poetic measure is made up of relationships that are dynamic, and depends on sensitivity to other aspects of verse utterance in order to be described fully and convincingly. Formalist and structuralist poetics of the early twentieth century took a great interest in the question of rhythm understood in this dynamic fashion. In his essay ‘Intonation as the Basic Factor of Poetic Rhythm’, Jan Mukarovský, a member of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, argues against the idea that ‘isochronism’ (the repetition of identical units) should provide the basis for the study of poetic rhythm. He is not interested in breaking rhythm down into its smallest units, and using them to calculate the essential rhythmical character of any poem. He is interested instead in the inter-relation of different systems that make up the complex phenomenon of language use, and in this essay he focuses on the inter-relation of metre and syntax. Metre and syntax can at times suggest different intonations for a line of poetry. The effect that one system has on another gives the line its characteristic rhythm:

the intonation of verse is always carried by a dual, virtual intonational scheme, and therefore it is

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