Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse (review)

After claiming in his introduction that “some of the tools we have inherited from formalist criticism should not be thrown out yet” and narrowing the definition of “rhythm” to suit his purposes, G. Burns Cooper provides a linguistically based analysis and comparison of rhythms that he sees as inherent in the free verse of three American poets who have wielded considerable literary influence: T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and James Wright. In an attempt to qualify the assertion of Stanley Fish and other postmodern theorists that the distinctions between prose and poetry as texts consist merely of different ways of reading, Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse carefully delineates some strategies by which prosodists might locate specific, language-based differences between the two genres. Classic poetic forms embody predictable patterns that vividly establish the division between poetry and prose, thereby enabling poets both to gratify and to thwart readers’ expectations; the “music” of free verse, according to Cooper, creates similar aesthetic effects that will someday be fully chartable as objectively different from the “music” of prose, apart from the ways the lines are set up on the page and despite the absence of rhyme and metric “rules.” Part music theory, part structural linguistics, Cooper’s method begins by documenting similarities between musical and linguistic rhythms (“intonational tunes”), and then goes on to apply music theory in demonstrating that as poets read their work aloud they infuse their free verse with rhythmic choices that are markedly separate from those they employ in creating prose. “In performances of poetry,” says Cooper, “the poet may hear a guiding melody that is a goal in its own right, not entirely tied to the pragmatic structure of the information contained in the text.” With his use of measurable phenomena such as the level and duration of frequencies, this critic not only provides charts persuasively illustrating some free-verse rhythms of Eliot, Lowell, and Wright but also suggests the influence of these rhythms upon, and the differences among, the rhythms of a few later poets: Denise Levertov, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Etheridge Knight. And for those whose poetic or linguistic terminology is rusty, the author has considerately provided a hefty glossary. Although Cooper’s findings are not sweeping, they do suggest a predictability in free-verse patterning that should please those who find comfort in nudging the “fuzzy studies” of poetry, and of free verse in particular, toward the realm of scientific investigation.