Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (review)

Michael Golston's Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science is a welcome addition to a recently burgeoning field of modernism and science, itself a product of the growing acceptance of cultural and materialist approaches to the study of literary modernism. In this extraordinarily interesting and very readable book, Golston draws from the work of scientists in the varied fields of biology, sociology, political science, and psychology, concluding that "theories of poetic rhythm during the Modernist period paralleled and in some cases were informed by contemporary theoretical and experimental work done on the rhythms of the human body" (1). Further, he contends that connections alleged by these so-called Rhythmists between the racialized body and the rhythms that both constitute and penetrate it are echoed in the poetic theories of rhythm initiated and promulgated by Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. "[F]or the artists, philosophers, and scientists of the period," Golston contends, "the subject of rhythm remained inextricably bound to issues of body, nation, and race and never drifted far from political subtexts" (10).

Golston dubs this phenomenon "Phonoscopic Modernism," a reference to the fin-de-siècle mechanical contraption invented to record human rhythm, a torturous-looking device beautifully and disturbingly depicted on the book cover. His well-researched, fifty-eight-page introduction creates a fascinating portrait of this long-neglected interdisciplinary field of research, quoting liberally from the quasi-scientific output of Rhythmists and demonstrating persuasively their complicity with the eugenicist and racist ideologies that underlay such popular movements as Dalcroze's "eurythmics" and culminated in Nazi and Fascist politics. Superior bodies, in these formulations, are in harmony, their internal, organic rhythms matching the external rhythms that circulate around them; the innate rhythms of inferior bodies—such as those of children, the laboring classes, the "barbarous" nations—exist, by contrast, in a dissonant relationship to external rhythms, rendering them more vulnerable, more permeable. Moreover, Golston points out, many theorized that rhythm could induce ecstatic spiritual experiences—or could even further the evolution of the human mind. Citing the modernist-era claim that racial "amalgamation" drives the tendency toward vers libre, Golston situates the most intense speculations about race and rhythm within the borders of the United States, whose legacy of African slavery and European and Asian immigration made it a heterogeneous "melting pot" of ethnic identity, a nation seething with diverse, competing, conflicting rhythms.

Two lengthy chapters on Pound document his periodic but lifelong interest in rhythm as the basis of modernist poetics, aligning his notions with those of Rhythmists he read and cited. Pound's dabbling in the language of science for poetic metaphors is well-known, and Golston builds on this with an impressively thorough comparison of Pound and his Rhythmist sources, particularly Jean Pierre Rousselot, the French inventor of the phonoscope who postulated that "rhythm is an 'image' of the 'body and soul, muscles and spirit'" (70). Convinced that the human body possesses a concealed internal rhythm commensurate with its racial identity, "Pound develops a prosody of 'hidden' rhythms, that is, rhythms that must be inaudible and invisible," but can nonetheless have a profound effect on those exposed to them (63). In other words, poetry contains a kind of subliminal rhythm that marks unmistakably and indelibly the race of its author and intervenes in the body of its reader with "a 'magical' effect on volition" (109). Golston notes that Pound's "A Retrospect" juxtaposes Rousselot's phonoscope with lines from "The Return," a poem widely thought to be a turning point in terms of the way Pound thought about poetic rhythm, remarking that "the 'birth' of Modernism as Pound presents it is attended by a mechanical apparatus for measuring the inaudible rhythms of a speaking body as its language begins a trajectory of decay" (96). Focusing on the Noh dancer—both the figure featured in the Cantos and the real-life dancer Miscio Ito, an acquaintance of Pound's who trained with Dalcroze—Golston also elaborates...