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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000) 109-129



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Formalism and History:
Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet

J. Paul Hunter


Negotiating Plato is probably still the single highest intellectual hurdle for any attempt to study form in historicist terms. But there are other difficulties as well, some of them just as stubborn if not so ancient and venerable. And they are harder to discover and name, for they arise out of more recent critical controversies and methodological directions that are not yet fully played out, and they act more like shadows and ghosts than challenges. The legacy of the generation-old--but deep and lingering--revulsion against formalism means, for example, that the teaching of elemental prosodic skills has almost disappeared from the curriculum, leaving students with less knowledge than they need (and now want) to address basic formal questions in an informed and practiced way. Closely related is the tendency, still prevalent despite the theoretical and historical sophistication of recent versions of formalism, to regard formal work as somehow reactionary and politically or ideologically suspect.

The simplest manifestation of this tendency is relatively benign: ignoring or dismissing any kind of formal analysis as irrelevant to contextual, historical, or cultural issues. More insidious is the habitual assumption that formal strategies do have implications but that what they mean is always rigid, cumbersome, and bad--that form determines content and deters, discourages, or even prevents thinking beyond its repressive governing limits. 1 Because, according to this view, [End Page 109] we know already what formal signals imply--which is about discipline, regulation, restraint, authority, and repression--we should distrust ideas and attitudes forced into or represented in this framework. Beyond the dogmatic assumptions about the powerful, even dictatorial, nature of formal determination, the difficulty here is that conclusions about the forms themselves tend to derive from old formalist analysis carried on without historicist intervention, so that the descriptions are essentialist and based on outdated and faulty attempts to define and defend forms as holding and reinforcing traditional values. 2 Thus the methodology used to discredit formalism is itself based on the [End Page 110] premises of older analysis that is untheorized and grounded on historical views that have since been abandoned. 3 Whether the "New Formalism" is the right answer to this double legacy--a product of rightist assumptions now engaged by leftist agendas--remains to be seen, but a lot of old brush needs to be cleared away before basic formal issues can be approached afresh.

Because couplets have been seriously out of fashion for two centuries, 4 and because any kind of intensive rhyme leaves most modern readers reaching for their earplugs, the idea that carefully crafted two-line syntactic and aural units might be wrought together into long, complex, and rhetorically effective philosophical essays or argumentative poems seems utterly unlikely to the modern mind and ear: we have genuine trouble giving sustained attention to long rhymed verse. 5 And most formal analysis of couplet poetry old and new, despite good interpretive [End Page 111] work on individual poets and some brilliant, breakthrough essays, has been generally unsatisfying. 6 Perhaps no poetic form has been more systematically misunderstood and abused. The opposition began early (in the sixteenth century), growing out of distrust of the newfangledness of rhyme, its supposed Gothic origins and sympathies, and its lack of classical precedent; it turned into a persistent minority complaint during the two-century-long hegemonic rule of the couplet in England and France; 7 and in the nineteenth century it became a dismissal that has remained the dominant (if not universal) critical view ever since. Thus we are stuck with the historical oddity that the verse form regarded as indispensable for serious poems for a full third of the entire tradition of modern English poetry has come to pose a deliberately constructed hurdle for modern readers, who have been taught to view it through post-Romantic assumptions and presentist habits.

Several persistent ghosts make it difficult now to read couplets and assess what they once accomplished. One is the Teleological Ghost...

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