“Is There A Measure On Earth?”

Abstract

The concept of measure embraces music and mathematics, law and jurisprudence, and such moral and ethical ideals as moderation and temperance. The word, in both its noun and verb forms, encompasses a wide range of meanings. Among the various definitions that the dictionary provides for the noun, some deal with proportionality and limits (an adequate or due portion; a moderate degree; a fixed or suitable limit; the dimensions of something being measured; an instrument for measuring; and a system for standard units of meaning), some with music and poetry (a melody, tune, or dance; rhythmic structure or movement; a metrical unit, foot; a grouping of a specified number of musical beats located between two vertical lines on a staff), and some with actions or legislative acts (a step planned or taken as a mean to an end; a proposed legislative act). The latent connection, implicit in the various meanings of the word, between poetry and legislation or government recalls Shelley's maxim in A Defence of Poetry that [p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World. (1) Poetry employs measure, but its relationship to the concept of measure differs from that of other disciplines and other forms of discourse. Like those other forms of discourse, poetry can be seen as a way of approaching, grasping, and communicating experience, truth, or knowledge; and though to the popular imagination poetry is sometimes thought of as vague, to the extent that it employs measure with precision it is at least potentially more rather than less precise than other forms of discourse. Not only does poetry employ measure, it is wholly taken up with measuring, and, in a sense, nothing more than a measuring process of a certain kind. The eighteenth century referred to verses as numbers and considered music and poetry to be a kind of counting without being aware that one was counting. This is as much to say that, in addition to presenting and representing the world, the task of the poet involves measuring one thing against another, putting things in proportion, judging, evaluating, and criticizing. It is not, of course, that the world is merely given to the poet: poetry invention; but this too involves measuring and cannot be separated from measuring. Ultimately, poetry employs measure in order to measure. The same, of course, could be said of the sciences, but poetry is obviously distinct from the sciences in a number of ways. For one thing, the measure it employs is musical and affective, not merely mathematical (if poetry involves counting without being aware that one is counting, it also, of course, involves feeling); and for another, in contrast to the sciences, poetry has no positive knowledge to impart and no content distinct from its form. Form can never be separated from content in poetry because what poetry measures, in addition to a content of some kind, is its own form--or in other words, itself. By giving measure to language, poetry turns the instrument of discourse into something musical, something that measures itself as well as the world, and it is this double capacity for measuring that distinguishes the poem from all other modes or forms of discourse. Nevertheless, although form can never be separated from content--which means that poetic form and poetic measure do not exist prior to content or to the poet's engagement with whatever it is that will become the poem's content (for poetic measure and what is being measured are in reciprocal relations to one another and come into existence dialectically)--the question remains whether the distinctiveness of poetry consists not only in its form but also in its content (even in the abstract). In one sense, the answer is clearly, No. Poetry is entitled to take the world as its purview, and it is just as appropriate for a poet to write about (a word that can only be used heuristically in connection with poetry) a steam engine or someone dying of cancer as for an engineer to explain the engine's mechanism or for a physician to find ways to combat the disease. …