Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (review)

Early in the twentieth century a new science sprang up, an objective, bodily-based exploration of rhythm and its measurable, physical manifestations. This new science invented machines for measuring rhythm (consisting of a variety of devices inserted into or strapped to the human body, and capable of graphically measuring sound), and it used its discoveries to make larger claims not just about the human body, but about culture and race. Rhythm studies and its relation to modern poetry form the subject of Michael Golston's Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science. Golston's study posits a relationship between this new field and how modern poets understood rhythm, arguing that modernist formal and metrical innovations "are based on a now forgotten set of ideas about rhythm" (4). (Golston is self-admittedly a little slippery about the exact relationship between the science and poetry, arguing at another point that the relationship is less about "direct influence" than "confluence" (9).) The science of Rhythmics and understandings of rhythm in modern poetry have a similar reach. Like the science itself, ideas about poetic rhythm stretched to culture, national identities, and race. Rhythm, to the likes of Pound and Yeats, "bore ideological significance" (4). Understanding this relationship did not end at the diagnosis that modernity had damaged "organic human senses of rhythm" (10); modern poetry's necessary project was to restore this organic rhythm, and in so doing restore health to civilization. These are large claims, and defending this thesis with an adequately comprehensive scope (it is an argument about modernism, after all) is tricky, because once he gets to the poetry Golston sets himself a necessarily detailed standard for evidence. As a result, when the argument turns from science to modernist poetry the range narrows. After its initial chapter the book is really about Pound (two chapters), Yeats (another two) and Williams (a conclusion), with other poets briefly referred to. As a result, the book has trouble proving its claims about "modernist poetry." But such proof would require a larger sample, which in turn wouldn't allow for what is a clearly necessary close attention to detail.

Golston begins with a wonderful exposition of the rise of the science of Rhythmics, and explores its ability to transfer easily from one context to another: by the late 1930s rhythmic science had "linked the human pulse, genetic difference, racial metabolism, the unconscious, machine-age work, and the geophysical environment" (47). Given that rhythmists argued that the rhythms of different races would vary from each other, it is not surprising that at this historical moment some of those paying attention to Rhythmics turned their attention to Jewish culture and, some argued, its corresponding lack of an organic rhythm. Citing Wagner, Spengler, and Jung, Golston then traces this idea through the inevitable trajectory to Nazi Germany. In this correspondence between rhythm and race, the linkages with poetry become clear: Yeats's and Pound's comments on rhythm cite the same connections among the body, rhythm, and race.

Pound's thinking on rhythm, Golston argues, parallels the work done by Rhythmists, creating a poetry whose purpose was to recover "'organic' bodily and sociopolitical rhythms through the agency of poetic rhythms" (70). Golston then settles down to some serious prosodic work, using a version of chiastic structure to explain Pound's structural rhythms, which consist of "a series of frames nested around the center" of individual cantos (75). Finding these rhythms is tricky; as it is with the Rhythmists' machines, in the Cantos "rhythm is situated as hidden, forgotten, discoverable only by technical apparatus" (90). "Rhythm" also comes to have a large scope; Pound applies the term to a wide range of organized behaviors. And it has a large function; with rhythm's purpose being to act as a "suture" between the "opposing forces" of "rational volition and irrational emotion" (109), it has a particular social function, diagnosing health across different aspects of culture, and—properly employed—moving people to...