Rhythm In Poetry Research Articles

A Discussion of the Principles for the Combination of “Feet” In the Pentasyllabic Shi Genre

Abstract China's earliest poetic genres formed in direct relationship with music, and pentasyllabic shi poetry is no exception. This was a new poetic genre that formed after tetrasyllabic poetry and the sao style associated with the Chuci 楚辭 (Lyrics of Chu), and it represented a breakthrough in the formal development of Chinese poetic genres. The lines of shi poetry are made up of a “balanced foot” and an “unbalanced foot,” with the balanced foot in the front and the unbalanced foot following behind. Pentasyllabic shi poetry flourished during the Han dynasty, and its development was driven forward by the exploration of the musical and rhythmic properties of the Chinese language in poetic form. Given that Chinese classical poetry was born from music, the sound and rhythm of poetry are of great importance. Chinese is a monosyllabic language in which each graph has just one syllable. Ideally, a line of poetry must maintain two properties: first, to express the semantic meaning of each single monosyllabic word and, second, to allow for the free combination of monosyllabic words. Pentasyllabic shi poetry is a form precisely suited to fulfill these two conditions. In the initial stage of its development, poets focused primarily on the balance in the foot of each line and the balance within poetic lines. Later they focused increasingly on balance in the combination of monosyllabic words and in the parallel arrangement of lines in couplets. The fact that pentasyllabic shi poetry ultimately moved toward greater tonal regulation similarly is due in large part to greater attention to the role of musical rhythm.

The Case for Pace

I wish to suggest category that can be helpful in focusing our attention on rhythm of free verse, that is similarly applicable to metrical verse. The category of pace, which I am offering here, has advantage of operating across several levels of a given text and its perception. In linguistics, finds that (often termed tempo, and at times inaccurately meshed with duration) is a suprasegmental parameter that sometimes appears as a component of rhythm in ordinary language. (1) As a crude working definition, can begin to think of as speed of a stretch of language. Changes in can explain some of flexibility in metered verse (two iambic pentameter lines can have differing dynamics), and can also operate in free verse regardless of metrical element. In context of traditional distinction between meter and rhythm, can be found on side of rhythm: is not metrical, and it operates both inside and outside of a metrical context. Furthermore, does not necessarily rely on a regularity or recurrence of numerical elements in any strict sense. It is rhythmical by virtue of engaging reader in an experience of speed, and therefore temporality. Researchers in linguistics or psycholinguistics classify pace, which they call into two or three components. The first is the tempo of articulating an utterance, excluding any silent pauses, but including non-linguistic speech material such as filled pauses [=any gap in verbal structure of a speaking-turn filled by non-linguistic material] and prolongations of (Laver 539). This is measured in number of syllables or words per time units, for example, number of syllables per millisecond. The other two variables, embedded under term pause have to do with number and duration of pauses in examined utterance. In a stretch of speech, overall impression of tempo has to do both with speed/pace/rate of words uttered and (sometimes independently) with frequency and duration of pauses interspersed between syllables or words uttered. John Laver points out that there are different relationships possible. For example, a stretch of speech can be characterized by a fast articulation rate, but could still exhibit a relatively slow speaking rate, if speech has frequent or long silent pauses (541). Empirical research on speaking rate has produced a myriad of results, which hint at significance of in poetry, though area of investigation is not poetic. (2) John Ciardi, American poet and critic, stands out as giving most attention to as key to illuminating effects of poetry. In his book, How Does a Poem Mean?, Ciardi states plainly that [a] poem, by very fact of its existence in time rather than in space, has duration and pace (994, emphasis in original). Earlier Ciardi argues that one poem obviously urge voice at a faster than does another. Within same poem, moreover, part urge itself much more rapidly than another. Even within an individual line, phrase clearly be indicated as moving more rapidly or more slowly than another (920). In fact, it seems that for Ciardi, is definitive element of rhythm in poetry, and he makes an effort to systematically account for devices that affect a poem's pace. When Ciardi claims that part of poem may urge itself much more rapidly or more slowly than another, he is suggesting not just that changes throughout poem, and is therefore relative, but also that poem itself indicates its pacing. Although becomes physically manifested when poem is read out loud (and echoes of can be heard by an attentive silent reader in proverbial mind's ear), there are cues or indicators of within written text, and we are not solely in realm of subjective performance whereby any string of words can be performed at various speeds at will. …

Charts, Graphs, and Meaning: Kiril Taranovsky and the Study of Russian Versification

The present paper reviews a classic work of scholarship on Russian verse, Kiril Taranovsky’s Russian Binary Meters. The analysis demonstrates that the two sections of the book are tacitly at odds with each other, and that the more famous second part (on “regressive accentual dissimilation,” and more generally the evolution of rhythmic patterning in various meters) does not fully take into account the observations of the first part (on accentuation in Russian verse). In particular, two elements are missing from the second part: the role of hypermetrical stress and the relative strength of stresses on strong syllables. Taranovsky recognized these phenomena, but they are nowhere reflected in his statistical data and conclusions, presumably because to take them into account would require an element of subjectivity. Taranovsky and his followers were proud that they could produce verifiable (repeatable) results. However, these results can only be repeated by scholars who agree on the same strict set of rhythmic conventions. The author of this essay argues that these conventions are oversimplifications. By omitting the question of hypermetrical stress, Taranovsky ignores some of the most important and memorable lines of Russian poetry. And by disregarding the question of relative stress, he creates an “acoustical” model of poetry that in no way corresponds to how it is actually recited. The paper ultimately suggests that scholars of verse should be more concerned with poetry as performance and less with the attempts to turn verse rhythm into an exact science.

English rhythms in Russian verse: On the experiment of Joseph Brodsky by Nila Friedberg

Reviewed by: English rhythms in Russian verse: On the experiment of Joseph Brodsky by Nila Friedberg Elise Thorsen and David J. Birnbaum English rhythms in Russian verse: On the experiment of Joseph Brodsky. By Nila Friedberg. (Trends in linguistics, studies and monographs 232.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Pp. xii, 209. ISBN 9783110238082. $140 (Hb). Nila Friedberg’s English rhythms in Russian verse: On the experiment of Joseph Brodsky emerges from the synthesis of two research methods with long histories. The first is quantitative poetics or quantitative versification, which seeks to explore poetic trends and individual practice through formal description (as employed by the Russian Symbolist poet Andrej Belyj at the beginning of the twentieth century) and through chronologically organized, corpus-level descriptive statistics (as in the work of Kiril Taranovski, beginning in the 1950s). In this respect, quantitative poetics as a research method precedes by almost a century the distant reading that emerged from the Literature Lab established by Franco Moretti and Matthew Jockers at Stanford University in the twenty-first century. The second methodological anchor for F’s book is generative metrics, a rule-based and constraint-based approach to the analysis of poetic practice in the context of generative phonology, popularized in the second half of the twentieth century by such scholars as Morris Halle and Samuel J. Keyser, Paul Kiparsky, and Bruce Hayes, with F following the versions of the latter two scholars. F’s study can be understood as having two principal research questions. The first, which informs the title of the volume, is: When Brodsky writes innovative Russian verse, can the deviations be understood as being associated specifically with the English verse tradition? The second, which intersects in some ways with the first, is: Should Brodsky’s innovative rhythms be regarded as rule-making or rule-breaking? F’s answers to these questions are formal and statistical claims (or they at least can properly and profitably be understood as such), and for that reason they are amenable to exploration and testing specifically through formal mechanisms of the sort employed in generative poetics and the statistical corpus-based modeling pioneered in the Russian quantitative tradition. F identifies regularities in the rhythm of English and Russian verse, with the goal of determining whether Brodsky’s deviations from the rules and conventions of Russian meter and rhythm are specifically ‘English’. The canonical metrical systems of Russian and English are fundamentally the same: both are (or, at least, are often) syllabotonic in orientation, with a preference for binary and ternary meters, so that it is meaningful in both traditions to speak of, for example, iambic tetrameter. Using the term stressed to refer to a linguistically stressed syllable and strong to a syllable where stress is anticipated according to the ambient meter of the poem, either long words or sequences of stressed monosyllables can produce discrepancies between the meter of a poem and the distribution of actual stresses in a specific line. This situation is exacerbated in Russian because Russian has more long words than English and, except in the case of compound words, does not permit secondary stress. [End Page 765] Poetry would be tedious if the distribution of stress in every line corresponded exactly to the idealized underlying strong ~ weak metrical structure, and both English and Russian verse allow certain types of deviations as variation, rather than violation. As F, citing Roman Jakobson, puts it, one may examine poetic practice ‘in terms of rhythmical constants, i.e., conditions that poets do not violate, and rhythmical tendencies, i.e., statistical frequencies’ (4). F describes systematically the English and Russian norms, only some of which are common to the two poetic traditions, which means that Brodsky’s deviation from a Russian norm might or might not constitute deviation from the corresponding English norm. For example, the English and Russian monosyllable rules (12) are not identical, but they hold in common a provision that a stressed monosyllabic word may occur in weak position, which means that such practice in Brodsky’s poetry, while representing a local deviation from the ambient meter of the poem, could not constitute evidence specifically of a ‘foreign’ or ‘English’ rhythm. Much of the...

Body of Art and Love

Body of Art and Love

Lawrence's Sense-Words

IN HIS BEST-KNOWN POEM, written in Sicily in 1920, Lawrence's lord of life – his ‘Snake’ – softly slips into our view: We read again, to be freshly startled. The strangeness of this single sentence lies only partly in the celebrated kinaesthetic shiver it sends across its own slack long body, with the free verse rhythms lengthening and tightening over the seven lines. More intimate, almost prehensile, is the way individual words are felt round, slightly shifted. ‘Slack’ is not just introduced as a noun (‘slackness’), but syntactically couched in such a way that an attribute becomes a visual shape and an object, lending body to the burst of colour and touch in the second line. Aurally, the word palpitates with its linguistic neighbours as Lawrence delves into the organic heart of prosody, the relation between sound and sense. Equally delicate is his handling of the word ‘soft’. In a narrative drama between reptilian softness and stony hardness, ‘soft’ in its passage from adjective to adverb moves within the field of haptic vision, from body texture (‘soft-bellied’) to physical action (‘Softly drank’). Lawrence uses repetition to play on both sameness and difference. ‘Soft’ is a word that he, like Keats, would turn to and turn round repeatedly, from the opening word of ‘Piano’ to describe his mother singing, to its incantatory use to evoke touch in the short story ‘The Blind Man’, to the ‘softness of deep shadows’ (‘Shadows’, p. 727) that he feels envelop him as he lies dying in 1929. The word does not just cut across the five senses in Lawrence. It reveals his peculiar talent for articulating the submerged world of emotion that clings around colour, shape, and movement. ‘Softly drank’: is ‘softly’ the imagined sound of the snake drinking or a glimpsed movement of its forked tongue or the tenderness of the observer's mood? ‘It is the hidden emotional pattern’, he wrote in a letter to Edward Marsh, ‘that makes poetry, not the obvious form’.2 The word also vibrates internally. ‘Softly’ is the opening trochee but it weaves itself with the labials and sibilants: it lingers on our tongue between the hard, monosyllabic spondees (‘straight mouth’, ‘straight gums’) before we understand its meanings in the world.

3. Esser, Jürgen. 2011. Rhythm in speech, prose and verse: a linguistic description

Article 3. Esser, Jürgen. 2011. Rhythm in speech, prose and verse: a linguistic description was published on December 1, 2011 in the journal English and American Studies in German (volume 2011, issue 1).

Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied (review)

Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in German Lied. By Yonatan Malin. (Oxford Studies in Music Theory.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [xx, 236 p. ISBN 9780195340051. $49.95.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, index. In 1817 article in Allgemeine Musika lische Zeitung, composer, critic, and publisher Hans Georg Nageli predicted new era of lied composition that would be characterized by an as of yet unrecognized polyrhythm, so that rhythm of speech, singing, and playing will be subsumed into higher artistic whole (Hans Georg Nageli, Die Liederkunst, Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 45 [1817]: 765-66). often overlooked relations between these rhythms of poetry and music lie at heart of Yonatan Malin's valuable contribution to study of German art song. In Songs in Motion Malin draws on wealth of past and present approaches to song analysis and metric theory (including his dissertation, Metric Dissonance and Music- Text Relations in German Lied [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003]) to critically examine songs by Fanny Hensel nee Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. Whereas recent studies of rhythm and meter have largely focused on specific songs or collections, Songs in Motion presents broad picture of genre and changing approaches to lied composition in nineteenth century. Malin's stated aim of book is a deepened awareness of temporal flow in song and union of musical and poetic rhythms (p. vii), and his readily comprehensible analytical methods and straightforward prose help realize goal. Perhaps counterintuitively, in order to understand how song is set in motion, it must first be suspended in time; each layer of song-text, vocal line, and accompaniment-is studied independently, then joined together to observe resultant polyrhythm that propels song forward. opening two chapters (Part One: Rhythm and Meter in German Lied) provide number of tools to do so by introducing methodologies and providing background on analysis of poetic and musical rhythms of lieder. In first chapter, The Rhythms of Poetry and Song, Malin offers concise overview of poetic rhythms and meters before turning to discussion of musical rhythm, in which he identifies number of declamatory schemas commonly used by nineteenthcentury composers to translate trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter poetic lines into given musical meter. These declamatory schemas, which outline declamatory rhythms and indicate patterns of text setting, provide simple yet effective method for comparing different composers' approaches to combining poetic and musical rhythms, and Malin utilizes this particular approach repeatedly throughout Songs in Motion. Chapter 2, Theories of Musical Rhythm and Meter, introduces number of recent developments in metric theory, using distinction between meter and rhythm as point of both departure and conclusion. Meter is defined not as static temporal frame, but as an infinitely variable structuring of periodic motion formed by recurring accents and parallel structures, while rhythm is understood as the changing pattern of durations (pp. 64-65). This more flexible conception of meter underlies many of recent development in metric theory. Malin offers succinct explanations of these theories (including those of periodicity, hypermeter, metric perception and entrainment, phrase rhythm, shadow meter, and metric conflict), taking care to apply these concepts to short examples within lied genre in preparation for more extended analyses of part 2. Chapters 3 through 6 (Part Two: Songs in Motion) turn to closer readings of specific songs that represent in some way aforementioned composers' approaches to rhythm and meter. Although these two musical elements provide entry points into various songs, Malin neglects neither cultural contexts in which songs were written (he provides brief background information pertinent to understanding each song) nor other musical and poetic aspects of songs, including poetic meaning, harmony, form, musical texture, and dynamics. …

Stress Weight: Unwilled Order, Clothes Lines & Crowned Teeth

There are many ways of describing rhythm in poetry, all of them to some extent artificial and none of them giving the absolutely true picture of what is happening. What follows is another such; it is one poet's way of hearing how language interacts in the tradition and the dialect out of which that poet works. At best, it describes a different way of hearing the rhythm; at worst it is the nearest this poet can get to describing how he hears language interact. In the paper that follows I intend to present and explain the interaction of words across the poetic line in a number of examples chosen from the work of poets with a Hiberno-English or Irish Language background and attempt to find reasons for those interactions in terms of their linguistic heritage. The paper will discuss how the line functions within this system as both the basic musical unit and the base unit of sense in a poem, exploring how tensions between the two can be exploited. Starting from two basic premises: that poetry is an aural art; and that part of the idea behind the art form is to reflect and imitate in an artful way the natural modulations of speech, the paper investigates one way of describing metrics which avoids rendering metre in a mechanical fashion but recognises the complexity of the living breathing language.

Rule‐Makers and Rule‐Breakers: Joseph Brodsky and Boris Slutsky as Reformers of Russian Rhythm

In his book Symbolism (1910), Andrei Belyi classifies Russian poets into and followers, deriving this distinction from the properties of verse rhythm. Followers, Belyi argues, echo the rhythmic trends set by others in a given period, while reformers deviate from these norms. Belyi believed that his contribution to poetics would render aesthetics an exact science. To contemporary poststructuralist literary critics, this contribution may seem naive: Belyi's linguistic analysis, they might protest, merely formalizes our intuitions. However, linguistic analysis of verse ranges far beyond formalizing what we already know, often revealing surprising and counterintuitive facts about style. For example, according to Belyi's theory, we find Aleksander Pushkin, the creator of the Russian literary language, not in the reformer category, but among the followers of Vasilii Zhukovskii. Though posed almost a hundred years ago, some of the questions raised by Belyi's classification remain unanswered today. While many researchers have discussed specific reforms, no general principle has been formulated to explain what reformer really means.1

Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory

AbstractThis article is part of a cluster that draws material from the recent conference Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780–1914. It comprises an introduction by Jason David Hall and six articles presented at the conference, whose aim was to address renewed scholarly interest in versification and form across the long nineteenth century, as well as some of the methodologies underpinning it. The papers included in the cluster look both to the minutiae of Romantic and Victorian metres and to their cultural intertexts. The conference, hosted by the University of Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies, was held 3–5 July 2008.The cluster is made up of the following articles: Jason David Hall, ‘Metre, History, Context: Introduction to the Metre Matters Cluster’.Emma Mason and Rhian Williams, ‘Reciprocal Scansion in Wordsworth's “There Was a Boy” ’.Ross Wilson, ‘Robert Browning's Compounds’.Margaret A. Loose, ‘The Internationalism of Ernest Jones's Dialectical Prosody’.Nancy Jiwon Cho, ‘Gender and Authority in British Women Hymn‐Writers’ Use of Metre, 1760–1900’.Ashley Miller, ‘Involuntary Metrics and the Physiology of Memory’.Summer Star, ‘ “For the Inscape's Sake”: Sounding the Self in the Metres of Gerard Manley Hopkins’.***Metre has played a prominent role in the recent turn towards embodiment in criticism of nineteenth‐century poetry. The regular rhythms of poetry have an effect on the reader's body, both echoing the rhythms of the heart and assisting in the process of memorization. But what happens when metre is missing or disrupted? This paper examines the relationship between poetry and physiological memory, extending our understanding of poetry's impact on the body. In theories of the physiology of memory and hallucination, poetry becomes irregular but autonomous, subsuming the reader's body to its own textuality. Similarly, irregular metre (as in Coleridge's Christabel) promotes a kind of involuntary repetition – which is tied, in these studies, to the materiality of print.

Making sense of words

The rhymes and rhythms of poetry, whether nonsense verse, nursery rhyme or more adult-oriented varieties, provide an excellent way for young children to access the often complex world of language.

Ellen Margaret (Nelle) Scanlan, 1882–1968

Nelle Scanlan was the most popular New Zealand novelist of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly important for her pivotal role in creating a New Zealand market and readership for New Zealand fiction. Her Pencarrow novels were the first bestsellers written by a New Zealander, with a New Zealand setting, and appealing to the local market. However, the success of these, and Scanlan’s other novels, is also an indication of their limitations. Scanlan’s fiction appealed to readers precisely because it held up a comfortable picture of New Zealand as a prosperous, thriving nation of hard working individuals with close ties to their British roots. Her novels speak of the desirability of the traditional ideals of family loyalty, individual responsibility and hard work and are grounded in a conservative political outlook distinguished by laissez faire non-interventionism and free trade. These were the values of her middle class, pakeha readership and inevitably her fiction had wide popular appeal. Within the confines of her chosen genres, the family saga and romance, Scanlan was capable of insight into the tensions and triumphs of human relationships. However, her recurring character types — the serene wife and mother, the demanding husband, the rebellious adolescent and the patient lover — at times lack individuality and her plots are constrained by their moral framework and romantic formula. Only in Ambition’s Harvest does Scanlan depart from her successful pattern in a bleak expose of the predicament of the New Zealand artist abroad. This is the most autobiographical of Scanlan’s novels and reflects her independent outlook and adventurous spirit. Scanlan’s life as a journalist and writer has all the hallmarks of a feminist crusader, but, in keeping with her conservative politics, she vociferously rejected the feminist label and in her fiction lauded the influence of strong, domestic women. Ellen Margaret Scanlan, always known as Nelle, was born in Picton on 15 January 1882. She came from Irish Catholic heritage. Her father, Michael Scanlan, was born in Country Kerry, Ireland. He had an adventurous disposition and had travelled to the Australian goldfields before settling in New Zealand, where he worked as a police sergeant. His wife, Ellen Kiely, was 20 years his junior and came from a farming and seafaring County Cork family. Nelle Scanlan had an older sister, Mary, and an older brother, Dan. Scanlan had an awareness and appreciation of language from a young age. When she was four she was attracted by the word ‘Pickwick’ when her father read aloud Charles Dicken’s Pickwick Papers. The rhythms of poetry

The temporal dimension of epic songs

Since research into south-Slav epic songs began, finding its place within philological sciences, the musical component has been marginalized. In extreme cases the correlation between poetry and music was even denied. In the relatively few (ethno)musicological works dealing with the epic songs that correlation was observed mainly on the macro-formal level. The author maintains that any systematic research of the functional melopoetic structure of Serbian epic songs should include the temporal features of music. The article is an essay on the methodology in which the poetry?music relationship is investigated from the point of view of their temporal dimension. The flow of music?poetry content is observed from the perspectives of tempo and rhythm, primarily as relations between durations on different structural levels. The chosen examples consist of two variants of an epic song, typical of their kind, which have the same subject and structural bases. The performers were two gusle-players, so that the performing bodies were the same. In the course of analysis, focus was directed on the musical equivalents of elements of poetic structure considered to be constant, or at least showing strong tendencies towards expression in verse forms. The analysis demonstrated that the musical component was the critical value needed to differentiate the systems of relations between the poetic and musical components, i.e. styles of interpretation. The chosen individual styles represent contrasting approaches to the organization of the poetic content in time. Although the temporal dimension in both examples is semanticised, its values in those styles are diametrically different. At one extreme a construction is found in which the relation of morphological unit values on poetical and musical levels demonstrates a specific interaction on the structural level. The symmetry on the macro plan depends on the constancy of the verse length, but it cannot be maintained that music is fully in the service of poetry. The reason for that is to be found mainly in the (isochrone) basis of the melopoetic, i.e. musical rhythm that, contrary to expectation (in view of the primary function of epic songs), is not achieved according to the dynamics of speech. The causes of such non-correspondence could be detected in the archaic links of epic songs with genres possessing characteristic rhythms of movement, first of all with rituals belonging to the death cycle, and/or changes in the prosody of the Serbian language. The other extreme is to be found in a style that represents, in a certain way, a quality development in the process of transferring the structural center of gravity from poetry to music. It should be added that in the course of that process the semantics of that style?s temporal dimension on the macro-plan stays in closest relation with the structure of verse and syntax. The key no correspondence of durations of spoken and sung syllables demands wider elaboration of the relation between the rhythm of poetry and music. While not denying the importance of regional differences, the author finds more probable the hypothesis that the key differences between the researched styles are linked to their development, from sin practical to sin logical "from representation to understanding", i.e. the hypothesis of the polystadiality of Serbian epic tradition. The application of the results of this research on a wider historical/stylistic scale should be approached cautiously, not only because of the scope of the given examples, but primarily because of links with the problematic chronology of the musical-aesthetic phenomena of symmetry and asymmetry, the "evolutive" and "architectonic" principles of structural construction.

Review: Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry

Review: Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry

Mètre et rythmes du vers classique: Corneille et Racine by Valérie Beaudouin (review)

MLRy 99.2, 2004 489 The whole enterprise is characterized by the thoroughness of its scholarship. The texts are meticulously edited with close reproduction ofseventeenth-century spellings and punctuation. Unfamiliar words and obscure references are explained in footnotes, always well judged in their scope. A detailed account ofthe royal tours ofthe provinces between the years 1615 and 1660, a chronological classification of all the entries inventoried , and a comprehensive bibliography complete this well-illustrated volume. Notwithstanding the decision only to reproduce extracts, this is a useful book which offersvaluable insights into political ritual in the Ancien Regime, and should provide the stimulus for furtherresearch in the field. Goldsmiths, University of London Marie-Claude Canova-Green Metre et rythmes du vers classique: Corneille et Racine. By Valerie Beaudouin. (LettresNumeriques, ii) Paris: Champion. 2002. 620pp. ?80. ISBN 2-74530509 -3. As Valerie Beaudouin observes in her introduction, previous formal studies ofthe clas? sical alexandrine have been limited to corpora of no more than 1,000 lines. With this, the published version of her doctoral thesis (2000), supervised by Jacques Roubaud, Beaudouin studies the complete dramatic works of Corneille and Racine, a corpus of 77,000 lines. An empirical study of such unprecedented magnitude is possible thanks to the metrometre,a computer program which is as much Beaudouin's focus as le vers itself. Following a useful overview of differentrhythmic theories and analytical approaches to the alexandrine (Chapter 1), Chapters 4-6 deal at considerable length with the 'mecanisation des regles', the painstaking task of creating the metrometre itself. Although this concentration on technical matters teaches the informed reader little new about fundamental versificatory rules, the results explored elsewhere give many fresh insights into the alexandrine's essential rhythmic characteristics. Beaudouin effectivelyproves that the alexandrine represents the concatenation of two hexasyllabic metrical segments, almost identical on many vocalic, syntactic, and prosodic levels. Chapter 7 provides extensive evidence ofthe similarities between each hemistich, clearly presented in numerous graphs charting accurately and exhaustively the most subtle rhythmic details. For example, Beaudouin demonstrates that certain vowel combinations are more 'rhythmic' than others, with noyaux vocaliques of sev? eral graphemes often closing the hemistich. Giving the dominant accentual patterns 001001 and 010101 as the two most regular structures, she also highlights a tendency to make the second hemistich more regular than the first. This is particularly in? teresting when Racine and Corneille are compared with nineteenth-century poets, confirming many of our suspicions with empirical evidence, such as Baudelaire's fondness for a 3/3 structure, and Rimbaud's sustained accentuation of syllables 1,5, 7, and 11. Chapter 3 argues that there can be no absolute definition of rhyme quality, suggesting instead a contextual, relative nomenclature according to the frequency of a rhyme unit (rimeme) in the corpus. Thus, for Beaudouin, the rime suffisante'desir/ soupir' is merely pauvre, and although such a system raises questions as to its practical implementation, or its relevance in terms of aural rhyme harmony, the 170-page ap? pendix catalogues all rimemessystematically in order to allow useful future research. For readers with only a passing interest in versificatoryminutiae, Chapter 8 demon? strates the value of the metrometrebeyond the prosodic. Beaudouin investigates the relationship between verse rhythm and semantic content, and highlights two princi? pal semantic fields: love and death. Within these, eight subcategories are charted to provide a precise overview of each play's thematic texture, and several close read? ings explore the relationship between the rhythm and content of individual lines. 49? Reviews Furthermore, the 'love' field is characterized by a greater frequency of irregular lines, with the 'death' field, more regular, representing the calm anticipated afterthe turbulent passions of tragedy. Occasionally, Beaudouin's thematic interpretations are unconvincing, with only perfunctory comment on some surprising examples of trans? gressive versification, and a rather simplistic view ofthe characteristics of tragedy and comedy. On the whole, however, this clearly presented work paves the way forsimilar statistical analyses, allowing us both to chart the history of alexandrine rhythm and to compare in exhaustive detail the works of other poets and playwrights on formal and thematic levels. University of Edinburgh David Evans Le Comte d'Essex. By Thomas Corneille. Ed. by Wendy Gibson...

Shakespearean Prosody Unbound

tent. This view is far from my sense of poetry. is distinguishable from content.1 My own sense of poetry accords with Steele's, but many critics take a diametrically opposed view. Mary Kinzie, for example, confidently declares that Form should follow theme and enshrines the Follows Theme doctrine as a key concept in her analysis of poetry.2 It may, however, be possible to analyze a formal element like meter without always turning it into a species of rhythmical onomatopoeia. This essay attempts to demonstrate that the idea of meter as slave to meaning is untenable and that recognizing how meter can be and usually is unbound from content can facilitate a much richer appreciation of the contribution meter makes to our experience of verse. After addressing the general issue of meter's relationship to meaning, I will focus on an analysis of Shakespeare's blank verse rhythms and explore how they make the experience of his plays more complex and more engaging. Jurij Lotman states emphatically that all the systems of sound patterning in poetic language are too inextricably linked to the content of a poem to have any independent function. Thus, he says, such sound patterns should always be treated as semiotic, as message-bearing signs. According to Lotman:

The Poets of the Nineties

Ninties' concerns are hot topics again in this year, and, as is so much the case with primary materials from that era, current scholarship appears chiefly in brief individual forms. Although the contents of the Review special issue on Victorian Disability do not center wholly on Nineties writers or issues, Nadja Durbach's Baby Incubators and the Prosthetic Womb (35, no. 2 [2009]: 23-27) commences with remarks concerning the first of this type of prosthetic, produced in 1897, though Durbach's coverage extends beyond that year--demonstrating yet again how the 1890s is a broad ranging term, not an era that strictly began on January 1, 1890 and concluded on December 31, 1899. Other essays include information that is relevant to the Nineties, especially to the more grotesque renderings of the human condition created during the era, for example, some of Richard Marsh's writings, the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, which, because of Conan Doyle's own training, often touch on medical issues, and many of Beardsley's graphics, which frequently depict less inviting aspects of the body. The Nineties would not be the Nineties without Wilde, a man and writer with many inconsistencies in his nature and in reactions to him. Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture, ed. Joseph Bristow (Ohio Univ. Press, 2008), contains twelve essays, from a 2004 conference on Wilde at the William Andrews Clark Library. These essays range over topics associated with Wilde and his reputation, from the dance through biographical considerations and his sexuality, to his affinities with work by Pound or T. S. Eliot or other later writers, to the mythos stemming from his life, court trials, and the writings--altogether a panorama of critiques, and a book not to be missed by Wilde aficionados or Modernists. Erin Williams Hyman's essay on Wilde, the dance, and painting reminds us of affinities among or blendings of varied arts during the Nineties, as does Lizzie Thynne in treating Wilde's influence on Claude Cahun, a French avant-garde photographer. Other Nineties figures are viewed from varied perspectives. Unsurprisingly, in Iron Maids and Stone Satyrs: The Incoherent Nightmares of Brain Stoker and Arthur Machen (Faunus 19: 33-57) Gwilym Games perceives many links between these writers--for example, similar creations of devouring females in their works. Reactions to H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (another work that mingles supernaturalism with realism), principally from its serialization in Boston and New York City newspapers, produced interesting journalism that focused on technology, notably that involving electricity as related to this novel--so we might perceive affinities between these end-of-the-century sensationalisms and that caused by an equal fascination with electricity in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The interchanges, perhaps akin to the ancient Greek term, metempsychosis, of the arts during the Nineties are the mainstay of Cheryl Wilson's Politicizing Dance in Late-Victorian Women's Poetry (VP 46, no. 2 [2008]: 191-206], an item noticed in last year's survey, but worth mention here as companion reading for Hyman's in the Wilde volume, mentioned above. Noting how poetry by women in this era has long taken a back seat to fiction by female authors, Wilson distinguishes dance in ballroom situations from the less formal, perhaps more instinctual, dance. Briefly commenting on how Wilde's Salome established the importance of dance as a poetic theme, and on Symons's Javanese Dancers, wherein the verse rhythms mime the titillating undulations of the dancers, as well as some of his theoretical writing in which dance figures, Wilson also highlights poems by Tynan, Levy, and Robinson. The dance in their verse encompasses themes of sexuality, marriage, and spinsterdom. The question of a woman's minimizing domestic life for professions like authorship is important in such poetry. A poet who has been a fringe figure in academic publications concerning the Nineties receives just dues in an overview of her poetry, her possible legacies from a great-great-uncle, S. …

Body Music by Dennis Lee

ESC 27, 2001 Dennis Lee. Body Music. Toronto: Anansi, 1998. ix, 230. $19.95 paper. Dennis Lee, whose Nightwatch: New & Selected Poems 19681996 appeared in 1996, has in Body Music given us an equiva­ lent selection of his prose. It is a collection of eleven essays that (diverging a little from Lee’s own tripartite chronology) one can place in three groups: four meditations— his Four Quartets — on the kinetic numinous; two personal essays on his own poetry, “Roots and Play” on children’s verse and “The Luminous Tu­ mult” on Riffs; and five appreciative essays on individuals who in their lives or writings bore witness to the presence of cadence. Lee’s meditative essays, “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writ­ ing in Colonial Space” and “Polyphony: Enacting a Meditation” from the 1970s, “Poetry and Unknowing” and “Body Music: Notes on Rhythm in Poetry” from the 1990s, describe his in­ tuitive belief in free-flowing but coherent energies that, above the velocities and gravitational forces that govern matter in space, roll through all things—and what this means for a prac­ tising poet. Such pantheistic mysticism has not been uncom­ mon from William Wordsworth on. Earlier romantic writers, however, recorded their intimations in lyric stasis, the infinite incarnated in the finite, received in a condition of passive recep­ tivity. As Wordsworth wrote in “Tintern Abbey,” “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul.” Lee’s epiphanies are raucous narrative and include the body. As a poet his mode of expression is language, but the imaginative apprehensions of his mindset are closer to the musician’s than to the painter’s. Thus his discourse on his craft focuses on rhythms and voices, not on images. “Voice” is content-in-consciousness, lived thought, and by tracking in sequence the voices unique to each transitory mood and recognition, Lee strives to make his poetry polyvo­ cal. Polyphony is as central to Dennis Lee’s definition of poetry as dialogic is to Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition. Dennis Lee’s self-referential meditations on the holy, his transcriptions of the cadence of the waltz of Being, provide an invaluable setting for reading his poetry, particularly Civil Elegies, The Death of Harold Ladoo, the odes, and the lyric sequence Riffs. In themselves they are almost a miscellany con­ taining personal reminiscences, didactic expositions, and reli­ 518 REVIEWS gious reflections presented in well-crafted aphoristic sentences — the model could be S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. As Lee himself admits, however, an inability to relate cadence to the private, civil, and religious issues that are part of our daily existence, his Heideggerian Pentecostalism does not mount any immediate challenge to the New Testament as a guide for living. Of Dennis Lee’s five biographical essays, three discuss fel­ low poets. A colleague from Rochdale days, Judy Merril, is af­ fectionately honoured in a brief piece, and a study of George Grant concludes the mid-section of Body Music. “The Poetry of A1 Purdy” was originally published as an afterword to The Collected Poems of Al Purdy (1986) and has been slightly re­ vised for this collection. In this essay Lee first relates something of Al Purdy’s long solitary struggle to find his own voice as a poet and then analyses his mature poetry as a single body of work. Lee’s conceptual tools serve excellently in this case: he is able to illuminate Purdy’s easy flow from the jocular every­ day to the sublime, to link this with Purdy’s uncanny ability to combine a strong sense of place with the acceptance of all time and space as simultaneous, and to hear Purdy’s articulation in a rhythm and idiom native to Canada. One could argue that more attention should be given to Purdy’s self-depreciation and gentle irony— “the cynicism of / the defeated majority that / wickedly survives / virtue-” (Collected Poems 32) —and to his stubbornly lower-class perspective —Ameliasburg is separated from Jalna by more than distance —but this is only to ask that a fine essay might be longer. The shorter essays on Bronwen Wallace and Gaston Miron were written as tributes to poetic acquaintances who had recently died of cancer...

Mysterious Music: Rhythm in Free Verse (review)

Mysterious Music: Rhythm in Free Verse (review)