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Free Verse and the Constraints of Metre in English Poetry

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Free Verse and the Constraints of Metre in English Poetry FACULTY OF HUMANITIE S UNIVERSITY OF COPENH AGEN PhD thesis Jesper Kruse Free Verse and the Constraints of Metre in English Poetry Name of department: Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies Author: Jesper Kruse Title: Free Verse and the Constraints of Metre in English Poetry Supervisor: Professor Charles Lock Submitted: 31 January 2012 Acknowledgements The faults of this study would have been greater than they are and its merits smaller without the kindness and help from a large number of friends and colleagues. I wish to thank: Jonas Holm Aagaard, Dorte Albrechtsen, Susan Ang, Søren Staal Balslev, Martyn Bone, Clare Brant, Dorrit Einersen, Anastasia Gremm, Greg Hewett, Adam Hyllested, Annemarie Jensen, Line B. Kristensen, Josephine Lehaff, Arianna Maiorani, Winfried Menninghaus, Andrew Miller, Jens Erik Mogensen, Jimmi Nielsen, Toke Nordbo, Dennis Omø, Rajeev S. Patke, Siff Pors, Robert Rix, Ruben Schachtenhaufen, Karsten Schou, Steen Schousboe, Inge Birgitte Siegumfeldt, Annelise Siversen, Jørgen Staun, Anna Wegener and Elzbieta Jolanta Wójcik-Leese. I am particularly indebted to Henrik Gottlieb, Jessica Ortner and Bill Overton for their generosity and hospitality. Furthermore, for their enduring patience and encouragement, I am grateful to my parents as well as to my friends, Christel and Lars. Most of all, however, I am grateful to Cindy for, well, everything: this dissertation is dedicated to her. Finally, I wish to thank my supervisor, Professor Charles Lock, who also supervised my BA on exclamation marks in English verse and my MA on the relationship between phonotactics and metre. Both of these projects owed their conception to an informal reading group headed by Charles Lock, and of which I was fortunate enough to be a member. This reading group provided the setting for my first serious introduction to the intricacies and joys of poetry: how does one acknowledge such a debt? In his capacity as supervisor on this dissertation, Charles Lock has been an inexhaustible well of fiercely erudite inspiration, as well as a good friend: walking in his company to Steep Church on a splendid June day in 2010 (in commemoration of Edward Thomas) easily stands out as the single most memorable experience during the process of which this dissertation is the result. 2 Contents Introductory Remarks 3 Chapter 1. Beginnings 10 Chapter 2. The Thawing of an Icicle: Metre and Theory 32 Chapter 3. Unseen Roots in Tongue-Tied Springs: The English Pentameter 64 Chapter 4. The Chinese Wall of Milton: Towards Blank Verse 95 Chapter 5. On Golden Hinges Turning: Enjambment in Blank Verse 131 Chapter 6. To that Sweet Yoke Where Lasting Freedoms Be: Free Verse in English 167 Chapter 7. To Enumerate the Muses: The Territory of Neither-Prose-Nor-Verse 203 Concluding Remarks 232 Appendices 234 Bibliography 247 3 Introductory Remarks This dissertation was supposed to be about free verse, and in a sense it still is. Accordingly, it assumes (against the explicit admonition of T.S. Eliot) that free verse exists and that it evolved in response to a mode of versification from which it is itself distinguishable, namely metrical versification. In the context of English literature, the metrical tradition that free verse reacted against goes back to the late fourteenth century when Geoffrey Chaucer abandoned alliterative verse and introduced the iambic pentameter. Over the following centuries, this particular form of accentual-syllabic verse became established as the norm for serious English poetry to such an extent that, by the early twentieth century, the iambic pentameter had come to be viewed as an intolerable constraint by a large number of poets. As a result, English poetry in the early decades of the twentieth century underwent a remarkable formal transition, the most conspicuous result of which was the introduction of verse that was self-consciously free of metrical structure. Therefore, this dissertation is also about metrical structure and about the ways in which metre affects language. The advent of free verse coincides with the advent of modernism, and there has been a strong tendency to use the willingness with which poets of the early twentieth century broke away from traditional metrics as a criterion for inclusion in the modernist canon. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, all of whom employed free verse for their most important work, are by common consent regarded as central figures of modernism, whereas the position of poets who did not abandon traditional metre, say Robert Frost or Edward Thomas, is more ambiguous. The most notable exception to this general tendency is W.B. Yeats, whose mature work is usually considered part of the modernist canon, in spite of Yeats’s staunch retention of traditional metrics in his own work. However, when Yeats in 1936 undertook the editorship of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, he included as its opening text a lengthy sentence from Walter Pater’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci, arranged as a poem in free verse: She is older than the rocks among which she sits; Like the Vampire, She has been dead many times, And learned the secrets of the grave; And has been a diver in deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her; 4 And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; And, as Leda, Was the mother of Helen of Troy, And, as St Anne, Was the mother of Mary; And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, And lives Only in the delicacy With which it has moulded the changing lineaments, And tinged the eyelids and the hands.1 This rather remarkable editorial choice on the part of Yeats is a testimony of (and suggests Yeats’s position on) the most immediate critical issue that the emergence of free verse raised: is free verse really verse, or is it merely prose chopped into lines? This question has not yet been satisfactorily answered, in spite of the fact that free verse went on to become the dominant compositional mode of English poetry in the course of the twentieth century. Some early commentators on free verse – e.g. Ford Madox Ford, F.S. Flint and Llewellyn Jones – were content to accept free verse as occupying a borderland between prose and verse. However, with the rise of structuralism, the question of free verse was brought to the fore again. Benjamin Hrushovski’s paper ‘On Free Rhythms in Modern Poetry’ marks in many respects the beginning of modern scholarship devoted to the problems of free verse. Hrushovski begins by declaring: There are two possible ways of facing the fact of the existence of free verse: one is to exclude free rhythms from poetry ... the alternative, if we cannot afford simply to dismiss important parts of modern poetry ... is to revise thoroughly our old notions of poetic rhythm ... and then to come back to a structural and meaningful description of free-rhythmic 2 phenomena. 1 W.B. Yeats (ed.), The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1936): 1. 2 Benjamin Hrushovski, ‘On Free Rhythms in Modern Poetry’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960), 173-190: 173. 5 Hrushovski’s own solution to the vexed problem of herding together both free and metrical verse under the same poetic umbrella is both simple and radical. Having discarded the notion that free verse represents a ‘border area between prose and poetry’ as a ‘misunderstanding ... going back to the Greeks’,3 Hrushovski posits that numerical metricality is both insufficient and unnecessary as a criterion for defining poetry and that the only meaningful differentia of poetry therefore is the verse line. To bestow upon the line the honour of being the defining constituent of verse has become so commonplace in modern poetics that one can easily forget just how far removed from earlier conceptions of verse such a definition is. However, the idea that lineation rather than metre is what distinguishes verse from prose did not originate with Hrushovski. One could indeed argue that it is implicit already in the whimsical distinction between prose and poetry that Jeremy Bentham draws in a letter to Lord Holland as early as 1808: ‘But, sir, oh, yes, my Lord I know the difference. Prose is where all the lines but the last go on to the margin—poetry is where some of them fall short of it.’4 However, the roots of the constitutive status accorded to lineation in modern poetics – and the roots of Hrushovski’s use of the concept – should not be sought after in nineteenth-century letter exchanges, but rather in the groundbreaking work performed by the Russian Formalists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Boris Tomashevsky’s contention, dating back to 1925, that the ‘breaking up of poetic language into lines, into sound units of similar and possibly equal force, is clearly the distinctive feature of poetic language’5 is generally accepted, with very few modifications, by most metrists today.6 Hrushovski’s challenge was taken up by Donald Wesling in his 1971 article ‘The Prosodies of Free Verse’.7 Drawing on Michael Halliday’s grammatical theories, Wesling proposes a rank scale of interconnected poetic elements consisting of poem, stanza, line, word and syllable, each of which influences our conception of the others. Of these elements Wesling singles out the line as the most crucial, but at the same time also most volatile, element of poetry in that it is ‘equally liable to 3 Hrushovski (1960): 185. 4 Cited in Stephen Adams, Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms and Figures of Speech (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997): 152, n. 5. 5 Cited in Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983): 51.
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