Jagger, Jasmine. Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

Abstract

At the heart of this book are a very alert, informed listening to the music of poetry and a focus on how it communicates and contains emotion. Attentive to various kinds of worry and intense anxiety – Edward Lear’s ‘morbids’, T. S. Eliot’s ‘nerves’ and Stevie Smith’s ‘scratches’ – Jasmine Jagger examines how each of these three poets draws on imagery and acoustic devices that might appear ridiculous, but in fact serve to communicate emotional disturbance beyond the bounds of what is considered ‘normal’. In particular, Jagger shows that an edgy interplay between the often unsettling rhythms of speech and the measured predictability of metre allows poets to hear and feel in their work emotions that they are impelled to communicate, and lets readers hear and feel these too. This is an unusually writerly book, and, in its nuanced sense of verse, an outstanding study. While not engaging with the work of Rita Felski and a number of other American-influenced writers on ‘affect’, Jagger takes some of her theoretical bearings from Isobel Armstrong, Derek Attridge, Christopher Ricks, Ann Stillman and other (mainly British) critics alert to the fusion of emotion and word-music. Jagger is not afraid to draw on biographical, anthropological and psychological material as she articulates her close readings and close listenings to poems as apparently different as ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Not Waving But Drowning’. Without in any way reducing her chosen poets to one template, she shows how, by exploring ‘individual tendernesses as dramatized by poetic rhythm’, these poets demonstrate the ways in which ‘poetic composition can also indicate an attempt to translate affect into a bodily state. In so doing, affective poetics becomes a way for poets to plumb their own depths, reconnecting with, and becoming tender to, their emotional complexity’ (p. 202).