The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

Metrical Diversity

Metrical Diversity When I began work on a critical study of the changing connotations of iambic pentameter in American poetry, I didn’t expect that I would devote so much attention to dactyls. In free verse from Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Eliot through Anne Sexton and Audre Lorde, I noticed the consistent presence of triple rhythms, usually falling triple rhythms. Studying these poets’ prosodic practice, I found that for each of them the triple rhythm presented an aesthetic, emotional, and ideological alternative to the iambic pentameter—the standard meter for centuries by the mid–nineteenth century. Because I enjoyed the noniambic passages I was analyzing, I began to experiment with noniambic meters in my own poetry. At Arst I found it extraordinarily difAcult to conceive of a poem of indeterminate shape in a noniambic meter (though I had written some sapphics), much less to sustain the rhythm; the poems would transform themselves into iambic pentameter or die on the page. I spent several years in the process of training my poetic ear (which had originally been trained in free verse and then in iambs) in meters other than iambic. Recently, I was asked to produce a series of poems for use in celebrations of the seasons. The project required me to produce eight poems, conveying very different moods, for the same audience at six-week intervals. I wrote each poem in a different noniambic meter: trochees, alternating dactylic and anapestic stanzas, dipodic meter, cretics, and so on. In writing these poems, I found myself challenged and inspired by my rhythmical raw material, and the supposedly arcane meters provided pleasure to the audience as well. Robert Wallace, who has recently proposed that all meter in 4 Originally appeared in Meter in English: A Symposium, ed. David Baker (University of Arkansas Press, 1996). English be deAned as iambic, might argue that, rather than bringing noniambic meters into the discussion, I could just as easily refer to this series of poems as using a variety of “rhythms” overlaid on the basic iambic meter of English. The use of the single label “iambic” to include lines in other meters, however —long a common practice in the case of trochaic lines within iambic poems—may prove to erase what it assumes to include , just as the generic use of the pronoun “he” said to include females arguably erases female presence. John Thompson establishes in The Founding of English Meter that the early history of the iambic pentameter in English was characterized by no substitution at all, clumsy substitution, and “forcing” the meter. These phrases may sound familiar to those who have read similar descriptions of the “clumsiness” of anapestic and dactylic meters. As I discuss in The Ghost of Meter, only during the past two centuries have noniambic meters become a barely accepted presence in English-language written poetry. Perhaps the early history of noniambic meters in English is now developing analogously with the early history of the iambic pentameter. Although all but a tiny portion of poetry in English has been written so far in iambic pentameter, it is important to recognize that the iambic pentameter is not a neutral or essentially “natural ” meter. Its connotations are distinct and culturally deAned. Each of the noniambic meters, also, has its own character, music, and history, however subtle or intermittent. As I notice throughout The Ghost of Meter, the dactylic rhythm carries connotations of irrationality, violent or beautiful. Trochaic poems, from Macbeth’s witches to “The Tyger” to “The Raven” and even “Hiawatha,” have a history of supernatural and exotic subject matter. If it is true that, as Martin Halpern posits, the noniambic meters are a more direct legacy of Anglo-Saxon poetic rhythms than the iambic, it will be valuable to see what kind of energy a new connection with that legacy might bring into our metrical poetry and how the connotations of noniambic meters will play out in the imagery, the mood, and the cultural role of future poems. Though many of our poetic ears have lost touch with the sounds of noniambic meters—and, in many cases, even with the sounds of iambic meter—there is no reason to expect or to 5 wish the noniambic meters to atrophy entirely. When the audience , reading my poems aloud, was able to predict which syllables to stress in spite of variations in the noniambic meter, a “metrical contract,” to use John Hollander’s term, was certainly in evidence, albeit a noniambic one. The prosodic situation...