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Friday, March 4, 2005 |
Updated 3/5/05: Changes are marked by strikethroughs and underlining.
Gary Norris asks, and in blogland I appear to be the one to answer these particular questions (in the larger world I'm virtually irrelevant), so here I go:
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What poetry isn't metrical?
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Until about 150 years ago, almost none.
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Recently, perhaps most poetry in what used to be called the Industrialized World. For an important example, William Carlos Williams's mature poetry is in no meaningful way metrical. Looking ahead to the next question, there is no countable, audible feature of the language which is used a basis for the line in Williams's poetry.
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What meter is not based on a count of recurring features of language?
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None that I know of — with
three four important caveats:
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Meter is based on counting the audible features of a language. Word counts (unless all the words of a language have the same syllable count), relative line-length given a particular typeface, sentence count, sentence length, vertical displacement on a page — these and similar features may very well be the basis of a prosody, but they cannot determine a meter.
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Metrical poetry uses countable language features as a basis for the line, not for the poem as a whole.
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Different languages have different features which may be usefully counted. For example, neither pitch nor quantity (syllable-length) vary in any systematic way in English, so English meters cannot be based on those features — Robert Bridges notwithstanding.
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The breath is not a countable feature in any language, since it is not a language feature at all but, instead, a feature of a particular person's physiology at a particular time and place.
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What purpose does it serve to call Poem A metrical and other Poems non-metrical?
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An important answer is that it serves no evaluative purpose: metrical poetry is not, by virtue of its being metrical, either better or worse than non-metrical poetry.
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Nevertheless, it is useful to understand the distinction, since metrical poems in the various meters achieve their rhythmic effects differently from each other and from non-metrical poems. Knowing the difference enables readers to experience the rhythms intended by the poet:
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Metrical poetry typically builds its rhythms out of the interaction and tension between the nominal meter on the one hand and ordinary speech rhythms and syntax on the other but, when well handled, usually does not, except for comic effect, grossly distort ordinary speech rhythms. In the context of Gary's questions, one important result of this is that, in metrical poetry, there is no necessary pause at the end of a line — enjambment quickens metrical poetry.
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Non-metrical poetry builds its rhythms in three principal ways:
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More or less extended repetitions of particular syntactical structures.
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Line breaks chosen so as to stop the line before some important idea or word is expressed, thus emphasizing that idea or word — enjambment slows non-metrical poetry.
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Deliberate rupture of ordinary syntax so as to foreground particular sounds, words, or phrases.
8:07:15 PM 
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George Wallace, who pointed me toward another rhyming translation of the Divine Comedy, also has a blog I've put in the wrong category and therefore too often miss — he'd mentioned Binyon's translation a year and a half ago. And in one week this February he made at least passing references to Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess, Hunter Thompson, Arthur Miller, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Frank Zappa, John Berryman, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Anton Checkov, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and managed a double dactyl on Vladimir Nabokov — who did a prose translation of Eugene Onegin. I've got to rearrange things.
8:54:48 AM
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
2006 Michael Snider.
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