Poetic History between Reference and Materiality

Richard Bradford, A Linguistic History of English Poetry. The Interface Series. London: Routledge, 1993. xiv + 225 pp.

In this book, Richard Bradford explores the uniqueness of poetry as a linguistic structure by focusing on what he calls “the double pattern”—that is, the interaction between two kinds of patterns, or systems, of rules and conventions: one is the signifying or referential, which poetry shares with other kinds of linguistic discourse and whose structural keystone is the sentence; the other, which organizes the structure of the poetic line, draws on the material (or nonsignifying) level of language and is unique to poetry. This distinction between two kinds of elements in the poetic text roughly parallels Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s (1968) distinction between “thematic” and “formal” elements, as well as Samuel Levin’s (1971) distinction between “cognitive” and “conventional” elements (a distinction to which Bradford himself explicitly refers).

Throughout his book Bradford examines the changes in the relations between those two kinds of elements or codes in the history of English poetry, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. The historical and the theoretical dimensions are meant to interact: the historical survey serves to illuminate the theoretical issue from various points of view, and the theoretical angle is meant to serve as a basis for the description of historical developments.

In order to focus the discussion, Bradford make use of the concept of the “sliding scale” as a means of measuring the relationship between the two elements of the double pattern. The cognitive-referential dimension is placed at one end of the scale, and the conventional dimension at the other; each text discussed by Bradford is “measured” by the degree to which it foregrounds each of these two elements, and its position on the scale (and its proximity to—or distance from—nonpoetic discourse) is determined accordingly.

The historical survey begins with a discussion of metaphysical poetry, which is characterized, according to Bradford, by its emphasis on the position of poetry as caught uneasily between the referential purposes of nonpoetic discourse and the enclosed and uncertain functions of the purely poetic. This effect is the result of a simultaneous foregrounding of elements pertaining to the opposite poles of the sliding scale: on the one hand, the “speaking presence,” namely, the apparently spontaneous and improvisational nature of the utterance; on the other hand, the “controlling [artistic] hand,” namely, the complex structures of rhyme and meter, which indicate preplanning and precision of design.

According to Bradford, Augustan poetry, as opposed to metaphysical poetry, is characterized by a “stabilization” of the double pattern and by a distinct inclination toward the cognitive-referential pole of the sliding scale. The Augustan poets, Bradford claims, move poetry toward the discursive, functional purpose of the essay and other nonpoetic discourses. He relates this shift to the consolidation of the heroic couplet as a dominant verse idiom, and the development of a style that preserves a very high degree of congruence between the formal-prosodic units and the syntactic and semantic units of meaning, in a manner contributing to a relative “transparency” of the signifier and a foregrounding of the signified.

However, Bradford also refers to another poetic tradition that emerged alongside the development of the Augustan style, beginning with Miltonic blank verse. In Paradise Lost, Milton radically challenged the traditional limits of the double pattern in English poetry, proving that meter without rhyme could endow the poetic line with sufficient palpability as a formal unit that it could function in nondramatic verse. The poetic revolution introduced in Paradise Lost in this context is, in Bradford’s opinion, not less radical than that of free verse in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, in the course of the hundred years following Milton, although blank verse became a legitimate verse idiom, there developed a tendency to marginalize or “domesticate” Milton’s most radical formal innovations. Whereas Miltonic blank verse tends to destabilize both components of the double pattern by creating a sharp contrapuntal tension between the line and...