Quote:
Originally posted by Alan Sullivan:
Guess I'm getting in a little trouble with Webster here, but I wasn't even thinking about Webster when I insisted on the secondary stress. I was thinking about meter. In a time when the very survival of metrical speech is in jeopardy, I am rather fundamentalist about formalism. (Duh! But it needed saying.) I think we had altogether enough of the "conversational voice" in the last century, and of the egalitarianism that inspires it. If putative formalists promote this notion, they help to seal the extinction of metrical practice per se.
That said, there are ambiguities aplenty. When there is ambiguity, I go, on principle, in the direction of a metrical pattern to resolve it. A system as definite as musical notation would be a boon, but we are not dealing in definite values. We do not sing our speech on particular notes. So any such system would do violence to the phenomenon it describes. As I hear it, metrical speech occupies a zone partway between song and conversational speech. Chop up the rhythm, and you break that all-important connection with music.
I'm glad the Frost recordings are out there. Alas, my rural connection is not up to the task.
[This message has been edited by Alan Sullivan (edited 09-05-2000).]
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Alan, I tend to agree with you. As I see it, meter went underground at the time of the great modernists. However one scans Frost's poetry--and to me, a metrical poem must work and be read *by the book*, subject of course to the intrinsic ambiguities of natural pronunciation--it's clear that he intended it and read it as structured verse. He just used a relatively complex structure that more closely approximates the rhythmic variety of everyday speech than, say, simple IP.
At some point in the progression, those complex rhythms--and they are found everywhere in the works of Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and others--were supplanted by more chaotic rhythms that no longer had the rhetorical force that brings poetry to life. And so we have what I like to think of as the tired camel effect, poetry that plods along in a caravan, carrying its burden from oasis to oasis through the formless sands of the desert. Only poetry is a high-sprung racehorse that was swapped at birth. Its stepbrothers teased it so over its funny mane and humpless back that it's embarrassed that it's not a camel, and it gets really uptight when its path takes it past the racetrack and it hears the snorts, the whinnies, and the pounding hooves.
And that's my ridiculously overextended metaphor for the day. (g)
Josh
Linear Mode
