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Tuesday, November 4, 2003

Kent Johnson, Robert Flach, Jonathan Mayhew, and Nick Piombino Nick Lolordo are discussing scansion in the comments at Kasey Mohammmad's Limetree. Kasey got things going a while ago with this post; when I replied, he, Robert, and then I each had something to say here, here, and here before the comments got going. Whew!

I guess I'm somewhere between Kent and Jonathan—that is, I think any of the mimetic effects of rhythm peculiar to metrical poetry are probably the result of the tension between the nominal meter and the actual stress pattern of the line (perhaps that's what Kent means by saying that the meter can never be objectively determined), but that most of the rhythmic mimesis in poetry comes from other factors: Pope's examples of mimetic rhythm in the Essay on Criticism are all very regular IP, and their distinguishing features could be employed nearly as well in free verse. I say "nearly as well" because that tension, that difference within sameness, helps highlight what's going on.

How much does scansion help a reader recognize rhythmic mimesis? Doesn't it depend on the reader and the reader's purpose? Poets, reading as poets, might well want to explore every technical aspect of a poem in the hopes of extending their own practice, and critics or teachers should be able to point out how the poem's effects are achieved, but is poetry diminished for ordinary readers (whatever that means) if they don't scan?

About that "objectively determined" meter—well, sure, sometimes it's impossible, especially for single lines. Take a line like this:

 /  -     /   -    /   -   /
Walking down the road one day

Headless iambic or tailless trochaic? Only the context of surrounding lines can help determine that, and the meter of a whole poem in which every line had that same stress structure would remain indeterminate. (I'd lean toward iambs, because to me endings matter more than beginnings.) But I think that despite numerous substitutions and other liberties it's safe to say that Paradise Lost is written in iambic pentameter.

I admit I'm taken aback by Nick Piombino Lolordo's comment. I haven't read the David Antin essay he mentions, and though I remember the remark by Pound, I don't remember the context. It's certainly true that "slapping an ictus on every other syllable" doesn't impose order on a poem, but that's not scansion, and it's not what scansion is intended to do. Scansion is a technical tool to help describe a particular kind of pre-existing order in certain kinds of poem: unlike Aaron Haspel, and, apparently, Kent and Nick, I think it's a mistake to apply scansion to free verse, which has its own ideas of order. Of course scansion cannot justify line breaks in free verse poetry. Even in metrical poetry, it can only describe, not justify.

Maybe there are people for whom form = meter. I'm not one of them, though I do think meter is one of the most powerful tools available to the poet. And I left the Anglican Church long ago.


Update: I assumed that "Nick" at Kasey's comments was Nick Piombino. I was wrong, as Nick Lolordo has kindly informed me. He's also added his last name in the comments there. My apologies.


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