Rhythm: Form and DispossessionModernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

Abstract

The entrenched divide between meter and rhythm persists despite its unsatisfactory nature—or more accurately, perhaps, because of its unsatisfactory nature. Vincent Barletta's Rhythm: Form and Dispossession and Ben Glaser's Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics demonstrate the enduring and novel uses to which a preference for either of the two terms may be put. They richly embody a more general trend within criticism, where treatments of rhythm have tended to be wide reaching and subjective, and considerations of meter rather more narrowly focused and historicizing. At the same time, they avoid some of the more reductive binaries into which these cognates have historically fallen: meter as skeleton, rhythm as body, meter as law, rhythm as variation, and so on. Both represent required reading to anyone interested in how such formal questions might relate to the most pressing questions of our contemporary situation: race, sociality, and the (generative) limits of individual agency.Barletta's monograph opts, as its title suggests, for rhythm. At its heart is a striking contention: generations of critics, emboldened by the disputed Greek derivation of the substantive ruthmós to the verb rheo (to flow), have conceptualized the notion as a temporal phenomenon. But what if we returned to the earlier scattered and fragmentary presocratic formulations of the term, according to which it seemed to mean something more akin to static or frozen or bound shape? When Democritus speaks of the rhythm of the atom, or Aeschylus informs us that Prometheus is enrhythmed to the rock, such usages jar on a modern ear. Yet Form and Dispossession contends that this superseded speculative Greek ruthmós holds significance both for objects in general (which are fixed at a moment of flux), and for subjects in particular (who find themselves bound to a dominating pattern).There is much appeal to such an approach. Barletta offers us an account of rhythm that is formative and primordial, yet which steers clear of the dangerous nativism that has characterized innatist approaches from Nietzsche's Gay Science all the way through to Aviram Attirai's Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994). Rhythm, on this more humble and privative account, is not the moment at which self, body, or Volk channels itself, but rather a periodic interruption or relinquishment of self—“dispossession,” as the book has it. In order to establish the theoretical basis for this orientation, Barletta depends on a multitudinous (if rather established) cast of European high theorists, who cumulatively grope toward an understanding of rhythmical surrender: Blanchot, Levinas, Merleau-Pointy, Heidegger, Serres. These in turn enable a remarkably broad treatment of poetry from across time and space: three compressed chapters range from ancient Greece to the early modern Iberian Peninsula to twentieth-century African verse. Enrhythment ties together the Aeschylean chorus's lamentation for unburied Persian souls; Luís Vaz de Camões's erotic self-relinquishment to a colonized Black woman in “Aquela cativa”; and Alice Oswald's pointedly nonheroic rendering of the Iliad in Memorial, where even a strangely inactive Poseidon is bound by the “ruthmós that holds us all” (157).Barletta powerfully evokes the humbling and poignant nature of these existential moments. Yet for all the book's ethical modesty, linguistic virtuosity, and theoretical acumen, “rhythmical dispossession” never quite advances beyond a generic description of those limit points of human experience for which the venerable tradition of European existentialism has already furnished several terms (contingency, le néant, Geworfenheit, etc.). The problem is to my mind both analytical and ethical. To address the first item: it is never quite clear why poetry as a particular medium offers a privileged view on “form, space, and ontology” (xvi). One obvious answer would be that it consists of (what we normally call) rhythms, that is, repeated patterns of sound (assonance, prosody, anaphora, etc.). Yet Barletta's stern turn against “temporal” models of rhythm rules out this approach. As a result, the summary description of, say, the Mozambican poet José Craveirinha's “Chigubo” has curiously little to say about the emphatic accents (“Dum-dum! / Tantā” [124]) and assonances that characterize the work. Such phonemic features depend on repetition for their detection, and hence are ruled out of court. What remains, then, are a series of descriptions of human situations (of loss)—a focus that seems to militate against the book's overriding insistence on the nonreferential.Form and Dispossession is committed to an account of its central concept that resists not only temporality, but also, and far more counterintuitively, experience itself. An early iteration of this view arrives in the preface, where Barletta distinguishes between the “temporal and experiential” Platonic conception of rhythm, from which he is at pains to separate himself, and the “formative, intimate, and precognitive” conception that it superseded. This passing phrasing contains the book's central misprision: why should we—or how can we—ever separate “experiential” and “precognitive”? Time and time again, however, Form and Dispossession carves both apart. Reading from Levinas's cue, Barletta insists that a poem exists “before experience and thus, in a strict (if seemingly paradoxical) sense, also before temporality: . . . at the very moment that I begin to experience a song, poem, or sculpture, I have always already been enrhythmed by it” (145).I can make neither head nor tail of this assertion. Barletta can only separate the precognitive from experience by hewing to an unduly reductive conception of the latter, which in his hands means something like, “that of which I am expressly conscious and can designate as such.” “I can only point to its effect (its hold on me) after the event” (145), Barletta declares, speaking of verse in general. But experience, luckily for us, is far richer than intentional consciousness or referential content. The newly born infant most certainly is having experiences, however little she can write a book about it. That infant grows up: now she is reading a poem. The poem arrests her; it suspends what she had thought she was, binds her, enrhythms her, if you will. Is this an experience? The inadequacy of our descriptive words surely does not detract from the fact that it is.This strange and unconvincing insistence on the “nonexperiential” nature of poetic rhythm entails ethical questions. Barletta's Blanchotian insistence on self-negation repeatedly risks abstracting the subject's existential drama, or metaphysical condition of being, from the broader social contexts and political practices in which it is embedded, which are themselves all the more powerful for being non- or paracognitive. As Barletta notes, the erotic subject of “Aquela captiva” may very well be fictive; yet to grant the amorous conquistador access to “a kind of abyssal blackness” (80), which in the process turns the apostrophized and literally Black beloved into a mere figure, feels somewhat jarring. (This act of “dispossession” is also an act of colonial and erotic possession: an uneasy truth.) If a recuperated presocratic conception of rhythm is both nonexperiential and nonreferential, a “pure” interruption of flow, how can it enable, as in Craveirinha's rhapsodic verse, “a performative entailment of a new order, built upon the dark soil of the past” (124)? (In such phrases, a repressed nativism returns.) Barletta's neologism enrhythment essentially boils down to entrainment, the tendency for individual subjects to synchronize to external phases. (Literary criticism has tended to overlook the rich ethnomusicological and biological literature on this phenomenon.) External rhythm constrains and abolishes a subject's selfhood, whose positive ethical consequences—humility, acceptance—I have already evoked. Yet these evacuated subjects are also, through the self-same rhythm, often set in ideological service: think of the baying mobs that within Dickens's Tale of Two Cities riot to the pounding drum of the Carmagnole. Rhythm and Dispossession remains deaf to these ethical complications of its central theoretical postulate.Ben Glaser's Modernism's Metronome supplies much of the analytical precision and ethical circumspection that Rhythm as Dispossession wants. It does so to a large extent through its preferment of meter over rhythm, even in a modernist period that, as Glaser notes, increasingly uses and values the latter. The remit of Modernism's Metronome proves narrow in comparison to Barletta's crosshistorical and multilingual investigation: yet its delimited focus on the “vestigial” power of conventional accentual-syllabic meter in modernist Anglophone verse enables a range of subtle discriminations and critical revisions. Glaser treats in turn the often-overlooked metrical verse of Frost, Pound, and Eliot, which was revised into something putatively “freer” without ever quite renouncing its claim on modern audial consciousness; the poetry of Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise Bogan, unfairly derided as merely “conventional” in comparison to the imagism or rougher metrics of H. D. or Mina Loy; and the residual focus upon foot-based prosody and the practice of scansion in Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, and other authors of what Glaser—following several of those authors—insists on calling the New Negro Renaissance.This brief sketch indicates Glaser's ambition to traverse the stubborn borders that demarcate canonical and marginal poetry as “conventional” and “experimental” repertoires, respectively. His unerring prosodic ear facilitates this enterprise: throughout, Modernism's Metronome is meticulous without being pedantic, alive not only to the intonational contours of a line of verse but also to the way in which single phonemes prove sounding boards for history. Glaser avails himself pragmatically of several prosodic approaches (counting beats, syllables, or some combination of the two) without needing to enlist his subsequent readings in age-old and ultimately irresolvable disputes regarding “correct” scansion. (I particularly admire his knack for reformulating a line with minor variations, so as to show the concomitant shifting of stress profiles.) The reading of Sterling Brown's “When de Saints go Ma'aching Home” (198–201) proves exemplary in the manner in which it pushes back against Derek Attridge's “beat” prosody: the established and apparently obsolete language of foot-based prosody—pentameters, tetramers, fourteeners, and the rest—offers a better traction on the historical force of genre than does the four-beat approach, however analytically suited to the expressive contours of English verse the latter proves to be.Modernism's Metronome offers more, however, than a virtuosic demonstration of why we may wish to retain metrical nomenclature and practice for an age that volubly claimed to have rejected both. Following on from much recent work in the North American mode of historical poetics, it also involves these enduring prosodies within broader dramas of gender and race. The formative chapters on Eliot and Pound pave the way for the first of these concerns, bringing together two well-established facts about both poets—their misogyny and their ambivalent self-suppression of conventional meters—to striking and often convincing effect. The dismal fresca couplets that Pound famously and fortuitously expurgated from earlier drafts of The Waste Land (“Odours, confected by the cunning French, / Disguise the good old hearty female stench”) represent but one obvious case in point. It is fascinating to read Pound's “Portrait d'une femme” (1912) in this connection, although Glaser is surely overingenious in parsing Robert Frost's marginal comment “Nothing!” as an obscure reference to Macbeth rather than a simpler dismissal of redundancy (95).Here as elsewhere, there is some slight ambiguity as to whether the modernist conception of meter as a metronome represents mere myth or a genuine fact that—whatever Pound and Eliot may have thought—could be turned to positive effect. While the former approach might seem the easier to prove, Glaser often claims that metronomic poetry did exist, in both “Portrait d'une femme” and elsewhere. The surprising gains to be made from this approach emerge with his excellent reading of Louise Bogan, where metrical regularity achieves an effect very far removed from the juvenile pastiches of the experimental male modernists. As Glaser quite brilliantly puts it, “[her] metrical form defers the combative wit and prosodic play of Millay, Elinor Wylie, or Dorothy Parker . . . for an ideal of precision and statuary that inclines to rigor mortis” (124). The subsequent reading of a flurry of Bogan's lyrics, sonnets, and epigrams movingly reveal metrical regularity to be both shelter and mausoleum for the self. The individual, here, is bound in a comparable yet distinct manner to Rhythm and Dispossession: “enrhythment” is less a general existential condition than it is marker of a very specific condition: the unfree female author who suffers from and turns against itself the saleable commodity of prosodic convention.Elsewhere, however, the claim for metronomic meter is harder to support. Above I stated that the coupling of Eliot's and Pound's undeniable misogyny with “rigid” meter is “often” convincing. There are moments, however, when the relevant texts appear cherry-picked, or shoehorned into a reductive conception of prosodic regularity that the immediate or proximate textual context belies. We read, for example, that the shockingly beautiful two tercets that conclude “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” represent “not merely a passage of iambic pentameter but a lesson in metrical flexibility absent from the rest of the poem. Only the final line winds the metronome” (60). But what is the metronome? Iambic meter? The iambic pentameter? Glaser's comment here suggests the latter: the concluding line “Till human voices wake us, and we drown” is a perfect iambic pentameter, give or take the stress demotion of the “and” conjunction. But is the tercet in which it is embedded really “flexible” in a way that the poem to date has not been? Glaser wants to say so, in part because the refrain “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” clinches the link between prosodic rigidity and silly or hysterical effeminacy. But “Prufrock” never settles down into any rhythm for long. Even were we to ignore the incessant rhythmical variations and agree that this tetrameter couplet refrain is “metronomic” (61) just as the concluding iambic pentameter is “metronomic,” there is an obvious problem. If I set an actual metronome to 4/4 and then to 3/4, is the cumulative experience or these two regular moments itself regular? Glaser is brilliant at reading single lines (few are better), but less good at joining them up into cumulative rhythmical experience.Modernism's Metronome requires these overstark contrasts between “flexibility” and “rigidity,” in part because it hangs so much of its broader claims regarding gender and race on them. We are told that in The Waste Land Eliot (at Pound's bidding) increasingly excised a “feminine” metrical regularity with which he had complex sympathies, as evidenced by the early stretches of what is euphemistically called “the typist's sexual misadventure with the clerk” (73). I agree that the poem here roughens up its quatrains somewhat; yet Glaser's argument is undermined by the fact that, barely a few lines on in the published version of The Waste Land, Eliot writes lines that are as regular as anything that Pound emended: The time is now propitious, as he guesses,The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,Endeavours to engage her in caressesWhich still are unreproved, if undesired.Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;Exploring hands encounter no defence;His vanity requires no response,And makes a welcome of indifference.It is strange that an account of vestigial meter should have nothing to say about these lines, more “rigid” than anything in the draft or final stages of Eliot's poem (note how each couplet line is solidly end-stopped, bar the appropriately dangling “caresses”). But perhaps there is a reason for the omission: the above passage (unlike that where Tiresias talks dismissively of the female typist) is from the lascivious male's position. Given such, it becomes harder to justify the binary association of metrical rigidity with silly effeminacy, and rhythmical variability with male agency. Eliot was indeed a misogynist. Yet we can surely infer from the above passages that prosodic regularity was (among other things) a means of skewering human mediocrity in general, from the air-headed gallery goer to the male rapist. Prufrock, after all, goes bald in “heroic” couplets.I press so hard on this point because this overdiligent separation of flexibility and rigidity, coupled with an overdiligent lining-up of gender and race with the binary distinction, similarly undermines Glaser's otherwise insightful and generous readings of the New Negro Renaissance. Here, once again, we have hard-and-fast distinctions that may justify themselves within the individual line or lines, but which are harder to maintain over longer temporal spans. I am just about willing to credit the distinction between George Cuvier's “manic” trochees (“Science, science, science”) and the Venus Hottentot's iambic reserve (“In my silence I possess”), which Glaser finds within Elizabeth Alexander's “The Venus Hottentot,” even though I believe that a rhythmical gestalt needs more than a single line or clause to establish itself. But the account of James Weldon Johnson's “Saint Peter” proves altogether too schematic in its identification of “strict” lines with the Ku Klux Klan, and irregularity with Blackness. Glaser's scansion is as follows: They clamoured, they railed, some roared, some bleated: [extra syllables]All of them felt that somehow they'd been cheated. [strict]The question rose: What to do with them, then? [mismatches of stress]The Klan was all for burying him then [strict]I do not follow this binary of regularity and noncompliance. The odd lines could to my mind just as readily be termed “strict” if the model to which they are conforming is the iambic pentameter: they actually have ten syllables, for a start, unlike the even lines, both of which are hypercatalectic (provided that we do not elide “burying,” which would be a stretch of the tongue; if we do not, then it is no longer iambic). The second line certainly obeys no regular iambic patterning. (It is abidingly unclear whether syllable count, stress pattern, rhyme scheme, or some combination of the three, produce the metronome.) Yet these local quibbles prove small in relation to a broader point: within “Saint Peter” as a whole, these four lines each appear (relatively) regular, in comparison to a poem whose couplets—despite Sterling Brown's efforts to perceive within the lineage of Dryden and Pope—“freely” vary syllables, stresses, and rhyme.Modernism's Metronome extends Meredith Martin's The Rise and Fall of Metre (2012) in two fundamental ways: it continues the story of the “prosody wars” into the modernist period, while also regarding metrical regularity not only or primarily as a vehicle of ideological control, but also as a productive means by which subjects and communities can work both with and against confinement. As I have suggested, this intimation ultimately requires a phenomenological apprehension that proceeds beyond the experience and decryption of the individual line or small poetic unit. I do not believe that a metrical metronome ever existed, much less that it can be identified—whether positively or negatively—with any subject position. Yet in his readings of Louise Brogan or Sterling Brown, Glaser demonstrates what both these searching books attempt in their differing ways to educe: a sense of how submission to an extant pattern can satisfy human needs far beyond passive suffering or hidebound tradition.