Intonation and the Conventions of Free Verse

Abstract

WHAT'S FREE ABOUT FREE-VERSE CRITICISM organization of free verse poses well-known obstacles to description: unlike metrical verse, free verse lacks rhythmic patterns that can readily be notated. Nonetheless, good free verse achieves some kind of measure, by which I mean, it imparts to language an added intensity that makes statement itself more meaningful, significant, complex, or interesting. William Carlos Williams's well-known habit of revising an entire free-verse poem without changing single letter or punctuation mark is of interest here, as are proofs given by critics' relineation or conceptual reframing of well-known free-verse texts. most famous example is Hugh Kenner's proposal that we imagine an occasion for this sentence to be said (Homemade World 66). And as Kenner insists, two versions of The Red Wheelbarrow, conjectural sentence and published poem found in Spring and All, not only fail to be identical in visual appearance, spoken contour, or expressive content, but quality of two as poems is grossly unequal. Recognizing this to be true, however, is far different from explaining either this poem's prosodic organization or prosodic organization of even small percentage of good free-verse poems in evidence, since free-verse poems not only exhibit multiplicity of measures, forms, or shaping forces but also typically engage multiplicity of measures or methods within single poem. And yet I would argue that we can discern the positive features of new in some early modernist free-verse practice and that this metric is intonational (Easthope 153; Cervenka 372-74). This argument is not new. Discussions of in language and in verse date back to Joshua Steele's An Essay Towards Establishing Melody and Measure of Sounds (1775). Nonetheless, despite wealth of remarkable materials both by linguists (e.g., David Crystal, Bruce Hayes, and Miroslav Cervenka) and by literary critics (e.g., Justin Replogle, Eleanor Berry, Richard Cureton, Alan Holder, and G. Burns Cooper), remains absent from most prosodic criticism, including fourth edition of Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). When theories of are discussed, as they are in scholarship on Williams and Frost, dominant critical impulse is usually to dismiss possibility of creating prosody based on intonational contours. It is crucial to establish not only that is available as prosodic measure but also that (a) it has structure, and this structure informs and enriches our understanding of movement of free-verse line, and (b) that variable relationship to syntactic units (Fox 289). Without consideration of units, their function and structure, we cannot explain abiding effects of free verse, such as how changing only lineation or spacing of linguistic string affects both poem's prosody and its meaning in ways that are fundamentally tied to phonology of language and so are hard-wired so to speak in speakers or readers. usual conversations about unfolding relationship of syntax and line must expand to include awareness of relationship of line, syntax, and intonation, with goal of noting how it is often divergence of these three variables that leads to free verse's most memorable lines and effects. THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF INTONATION: A BRIEF OVERVIEW Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (1997) defines intonation as a distinctive pattern of tones over stretch of speech in principle longer than word. Thus there is difference in between e.g. That's 'IT ('I'm finished') and That's 'IT? ('Is that all?'). [...] example demonstrates how identical sequence of words can have two distinct meanings based on its intonation. While words do not change, intention of speaker does. …