Verse E-Book

Charles O. Hartman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 533

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Verse is a seminal introduction to prosody for any student learning to read or write poetry, from secondary to graduate school.

• Discusses  iambic pentameter and other kinds of metrical verse, scansion, rhythm and rhyme, free verse, song, and advanced topics such as poetic meter, linguistic approaches to verse, and the computer scansion of metrical poetry
• Written in a clear, engaging style by a poet and teacher with more than 30 years of experience teaching the subject
• Supplemented by a user-friendly website with student exercises and additional resources

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Sidebars

Introduction

1 The Iambic Pentameter Line

Rhythm and Meter

Stress

Feet

Promoted Stresses

Scansion

An Example

2 Other Meters

Other Iambics

Other Feet as the Basis of Meter

Anapestics

Trochaics

Accentual Meter

Accidental Species

Syllabics

Classical Imitations

3 Beyond the Line

Rhyme

Rhymed Stanzas: The Quatrain

Other Stanza Types

A Stanza at Work

Whole-Poem Forms

Whole-Poem Forms: The Sonnet

Lines and Sentences

4 Free Verse

Lines Are Still Lines

Types of Free Verse

Free Verse, Prose, and Syntax

How Free Is Free Verse?

5 Song

Words and Notes

Song Forms

Example: Stichic

Example: Stanzaic

Example: Whole-Song

6 Advanced Topics

Generative Metrics

The Native Sound of English

Scansion by Computer

Glossary

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Verse

An Introduction to Prosody

Charles O. Hartman

This edition first published 2015© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hartman, Charles O., 1949– author. Verse : an introduction to prosody / Charles O. Hartman.  pages cm Includes index.

 ISBN 978-0-470-65600-6 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-65601-3 (pbk.) 1. Versification. 2. Poetics. I. Title. P311.H28 2015 808.1–dc23    2014017660

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Serge Gladky, design from Nouvelles Compositions Decoratives, pochoir print, late 1920s. Private Collection/The Stapleton Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Sidebars

Syllables

Marks

Hearing Stresses

The Names of Meters

A Twist on the Double Iamb

Lines that End with x

Elision

The Persistence of Line Length

Caesura

Steps in Scanning a Line

Substitutions for the Iamb

Starting at the End of the Line

Stanzas

The Kinesthetics of Poems

Stress-Timing and Syllable-Timing

The

Meter in English

Debate

Meter as Numerical Prosody

Stanza: The Name

Rhyme as Sound

Rhyme as Abstract Formula

Internal Rhyme

The Pentameter as Replete

Kinesthetics Revisited

Rhymes in Different Languages

Sonnet Variants

Comprehensive English Grammars

Adelaide Crapsey

Terms of Enjambment

“Free Verse” as a Name

Bad Verse and Prose Cut into Lines

Poetic versus Printed Lines

Prose and Speech

Vers Libéré

Which Songs?

Origin of “Mondegreen”

Lines in Transcriptions

Songs and Scansion

Poetry and Music

Words and Notes: Melisma

Why “Stichic”?

The “Verse-Chorus” Alternative

“Verse-Chorus” Revisited

Poetry, Song, and Stress

Temporal and Spatial Arts

AABA as Fundamental

Final ‘g’ in Transcriptions

Scansion Rules of Thumb: Recap

The Syllables of “Hierarchy”

Trochees in Second Foot

Labeling and Bracketing Mismatches

Attridge’s Variants

“Foot” in English

The “Rhythm Rule”

Trimeter versus Waltz

Phrases and Compounds Revisited

“Primitive” Operations

Step Zero and Computers

Input to the Scandroid

Promotions in the Scandroid

Beyond the Scandroid

Introduction

This book explores what seems like a simple question: why are poems usually written in lines? This small puzzle turns out to be connected to larger mysteries. When we read a poem, more of our being is engaged than when we read an instruction manual or an editorial. We feel that poems are a use of language distinct from other uses of it – that in poems words work on us in uncanny ways. How might the power of poems’ language be linked to the custom of printing them in lines, that is, as verse?

Suppose for a moment that you had never learned to read silently. (Nobody did until the Middle Ages, thousands of years after writing was invented.) Every word on the page would pass not only before your eyes but through your mouth and ears. Poetry remembers the time when reading always meant reading aloud. Most of the writing that deluges us every day – newspapers, business letters, emails, tweets – can be read silently with no great loss and with a gain in speed. But in ways we’ll examine throughout this book, the meaning of a poem depends on its sound at least as much as on ideas that it may convey. A poem needs the time to be heard.

If you’re reading aloud, what happens when the text is divided into units that are (usually) larger than a word and smaller than a sentence – that is, into lines? Isolated this way, a short stretch of language is easier to hear. The visual fact of lines paradoxically encourages us to listen to the sounds of the words. Whether or not we can specify exactly what you do at the boundary between lines, and whether or not we can be sure that every reader will do the same thing, you’re bound to take the line breaks as signals for some kind of shift in your almost-internal performance of reading. They’re cues in a script.

One name for all the aspects of language that silent reading jettisons for the sake of speed, a name that emphasizes how the complex auditory action of words distributes itself through time, is rhythm. All language performances – conversation, singing, recitation – have some kind of rhythmic character, but in poems there is a tendency for rhythm to be noticeably organized in various ways. (Lines are most often the basic units of organization.) Some of these rhythmic arrangements are based on counting, and we call them meters. Others are not. A term that covers all these kinds of rhythmic organizations and focuses on the ways they’re shared by poet and reader and therefore become available for the making of meaning is prosody. (Linguists use “prosody” in a different though related way. See the Glossary at the end of this book.) All poetry makes use of some kind of prosody, some means by which the poet controls the reader’s experience of rhythm. These chapters examine the kinds that poets in English have used.

Formal arrangements of language such as meter and rhyme aren’t merely devices or decorative patterns. Like all prosodic controls, they help us hear the poem as a speaking voice. Considered from one odd angle, a poem is a miracle of bandwidth. The poet imagines a whole speaking, gesticulating person, complete with a tone of voice and a situation, and compresses that living being into a stream of data only a few bits wide: a few dozen letters and punctuation marks. This stream (after traveling for a day or for hundreds of years, a mile or thousands of miles) reaches a reader who, perhaps without being aware of the process, from this impoverished text imaginatively reconstitutes the voice and the speaker, as alive again as at creation. What we call poetic techniques are methods of supporting this marvel of recovery. They often work subliminally on us while we think we’re paying attention to what’s merely being said by the poem.

If the reader doesn’t need to be aware of the details behind the work of reading, what use is a book like this? Even as children, after all (or especially as children), we respond to language arranged for the sake of its sounds. Yet the image of transmission I just gave – a poem-channel with a writer and reader at the two ends – is incomplete. There is not one reader but many, perhaps widely distributed in space and time, who read not one but many poems. These expansions change the process. We read as communities and these communities evolve elaborately over time. Just as native speakers of English don’t confine themselves to the few hundred words required for a barter language, so readers and writers of poetry in English have built up rich and varied frameworks of assumption and reference. This book introduces and explains the core elements of those traditions of reading that have to do with rhythm. Rather than cataloguing formal devices as an encyclopedia would, it aims to connect the forms with the meaning and movement of the poetry at as many points as possible.

For a long time – at least from the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth – poets, critics, and teachers assumed that readers shared knowledge of the traditional poetic norms and terms. Now, for a variety of reasons, people who want to discuss how poems work can no longer count on that widespread, more or less unified understanding. Though this doesn’t render all poetry alien, it makes a great deal of English poetry from the past millennium only half-audible to many readers. At the same time, the many school and college courses that introduce students to poetry have too much material to cover – history, biography, cultural background, interpretive techniques, and so on – to give the study of verse as verse the class hours it requires. This book tries to fill that gap in as self-contained a way as possible. I’ve tried to make the book readable for advanced secondary-school students but accurate and detailed enough for a graduate student brushing up on the fundamentals. There’s no reason why combining these goals should be especially difficult. After all, my premise is that meter and other formal properties of poems operate as common ground among poets and readers. They aren’t in the poem so much as in the context we bring to the reading of the poem. It should be possible to explain them in terms available to everyone. There’s nothing in this territory so abstruse as to prevent a motivated person from learning it even without classroom help.

I also mean the book both for people who want to learn more about reading poems and for those learning to write them. Again, I can’t think of this as a difficult combination. Poetry is a reciprocal act. As poets we read other people’s poems as well as our own – otherwise the communities of reading would disintegrate. As readers we’re continually recapitulating the poet’s act of speaking and hearing the poem as its sound unfurls in time. Reading poems and writing them are, on the most fundamental level, impossible to distinguish.

Though the six chapters in this book sometimes refer to each other, to some extent you can pick and choose. Everyone will want to read the first chapter, “The Iambic Pentameter Line,” because it introduces the process of scanning a metrical line and the terminology necessary to talk about this process. We start with the iambic pentameter not because it’s the simplest metrical line, but rather because it’s the most dominant historically and the most fully elaborated over time. Even if you’ve already learned about scansion, you’ll want to skim this chapter to see how its approach may differ from those you’ve encountered before. While introducing metrical reading, the chapter fills in some theoretical and historical background as needed.

The next chapter, “Other Meters,” extends the methods of Chapter 1 to lines of different lengths and with different metrical bases. These first two chapters concentrate almost exclusively on what happens within a line of verse, the basic unit that poems are usually made of. Chapter 3, “Beyond the Line,” examines the ways in which lines are combined – by rhyme, by the groups of lines called stanzas, and by sentences – into larger structures and ultimately into poems.

Chapter 4 deals with what has become a dominant mode in poetry in the past hundred years, nonmetrical or “Free Verse.” It asks how this modern mode resembles the metrical verse that predates it and continues alongside it, as well as how the two modes differ. Chapter 5 is devoted to a topic not as commonly included in discussions of poetic form: “Songs.” In our experience of poetically formed language, songs may be even more prevalent than free verse, and their prominence goes back much farther.

Chapter 6, “Advanced Topics,” will interest a different group of readers. The approach to poetic meter that this book takes as its foundation and develops is not the only one available. The first two sections of this chapter compare it to a couple of the systems developed by linguists and by other literary critics. Different approaches to meter embody different assumptions about how poetic language works rhythmically, and those assumptions suggest different ways of reading. The chapter ends by describing a computer program that can perform a certain kind of metrical scansion and asking what its limitations say about the nature of meter.

Technical terms are printed in bold face at a principal point of explanation; this may occur more than once for some terms. These terms are all collected in the Glossary at the end, which lists the page on which the term is introduced as well as page numbers for any extended discussion of the term. In this way the Glossary serves also as the most useful kind of subject index for this book. There is also an index of poets and poem titles.

A website to accompany this book is at charlesohartman.com/verse. At least two programs can be found there: a downloadable version of the Scandroid, described in Chapter 6, and a web-based tutorial on scansion.

* * * * *

Though this book distills my own experience as a teacher, critic, and poet, I could not have written it without a world of help. We write in communities too. I thank Natalie Gerber for her generosity and informed intelligence as correspondent and foil, and for enlisting her own classes to locate soft patches in the ice. Tom Cable and other members of the West Chester University Poetry Conference provided useful responses and pushed me in unexpected directions. Wendy Battin, Martha Collins, Mary Kinzie, and other poet friends have given me the benefit of their compatible but distinct views on the intricacies of the art. Davis Oldham and Geoffrey Babbitt not only gave close scrutiny to particular chapters, but tried them out on their own students; many tactics adopted in Chapters 1 and 4 have changed as a result. Julia Proft and Jim O’Connor have provided the expertise I lacked to make the Scandroid (see Chapter 6) into a program someone besides its author might be willing to use.

I’m grateful to Janet Gezari for lending me her faultless editorial eye, her astute sense of what an actual reader might see and want to see, and her encyclopedic delight in English poetry. Alan Bradford provided some crucial historical details. My own students, not only during the several years when I tested parts of this book’s method on them, but for the several decades when they helped goad me into formulating it, deserve my cumulative thanks. Looking farther back, I see how indebted I am to my teachers, especially Howard Nemerov, Donald Finkel, Naomi Lebowitz, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, who gave me help I can no longer extricate from my own thought. The same is true of my father, Carl Frederick Hartman, who (I think I remember) paid me twenty-five cents an hour in junior high school to read Robert Frost’s “The Most of It” and write down what I thought it meant; told me to type out some poems by Yeats as prose to see how they changed; and suggested by his example that music and poetry might live together in one person.

1The Iambic Pentameter Line

This book is about verse: the form of written language most often used for poems.

“Verse” refers to a channel, a medium, not to the content or value of the writing it carries. “Poetry” is a different kind of term, more fluid and value-laden – “sheer poetry,” “poetry in motion.” “Poetry” has no opposite. But verse is so clearly opposed to prose that you can see the difference from across the room:

some verse

some prose

For centuries there has been a close association between verse and poetry. Though prose-poems exist and though some print forms like advertisements show the kind of attention to line breaks that poets pay to them, generally when we see a page like the one on the left we’re sure that a poem waits to be read.

The polarity between verse and prose looks so simple as to be bald and bland. But it turns out to be freighted with meaning for poems. Poems use verse because verse is language in lines. Prose is in lines too, of course (unless it’s printed sideways on a very long tape), but the breaks between lines don’t mean anything. They’re just the places where the text is cut up to fit into the page-box. Verse is verse because every line and line break represents a decision by the writer. Poems use verse because poetry, whatever else it may be, does its work by being a tissue of decisions about language. When we read a poem we retrace the poet’s path (often without thinking about it) and mimic those decisions within ourselves. Grouping words into lines and dividing the lines carefully turn out to be powerful ways to focus the reader’s attention. They contribute to the reader’s understanding whether the understanding happens consciously or not.