Mysterious Music: Rhythm in Free Verse (review)

Mysterious Music: Rhythm in Free Verse. By G. Burns Cooper. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. 241 pp. $51.00.

Mysterious Music ambitiously seeks to integrate linguistics and poetics in order to elucidate rhythm in free verse in a theoretically informed way. Such rhythm, like melody in musicology, is still mainly obscured by mystery and ignorance. The author's overall design is suggestive, moving from a general introduction ("What is rhythm?), to a brilliant analysis of Eliot's Four Quartets, to "particles and atoms" (phonological and morphological "figures of sound"), to "molecules and crystals" (lines and phrases), to the "literal music of poetry" or "intonational tunes," to an incisive conclusion about alternation and compression in "poetism." En route he coins or mints much that is profound and discriminating about, not just rhythm in free verse, but more generally, lyric poetry, poetry, and language.

Many generalizations govern Mysterious Music, some subtextual, others explicit, even stressed, and most of them powerful. Perhaps the most powerful is that poetic language is uniquely multilayered. The line, for example, to which much effort is devoted, has been defined in terms of breath group, surrounding silence, visual break, syntax (e.g., of the clause), semantic coherence , and intonation in both musical and informational senses; much of the tension in (lyric) poetry comes from the shifting lacks of congruity between these defining factors (e.g., between line break and syntactic structure). And rhythm can involve any level. Take the fascinating example of James Wright's "prepositional rhythm" of the preposition "of " (modeled on Neruda's Algunas bestias): "poetry of calcium/mother of roots/ the tall ashes of loneliness" and on for nine more lines of such phrases. The poem reminds one of Tsvetaeva's prefixal rhythm in "To Boris Pasternak," based on 17 occurrences of ras/raz (roughly English "de-, un-"), and the lexical rhythm of Khlebnikov's "Laughter," based on 30 occurrences of the Russian root for "laugh" in 11 lines. To put this more generally, if perhaps cryptically, from Burns Cooper's repeated citation of Hopkins' "recurrent figure of sound" to the many types of rhythm to the frequent allusion to Roman Jakobson's position, it would seem that the artful repetition of any unit, especially when it is otherwise linguistically marked, is arguably a case rhythm--or is it?

Multilayerdness holds for "tunes." While primarily a pitch phenomenon in English and probably all languages, intonation also involves quantity and stress as dependent variables--and even semantics in the pragmatic and sociolinguistic meanings of intonation contours. As Burns Cooper puts it, intonational tunes communicate about some or all of the following: "the mutual belief systems of the speaker and hearer; the status of the information as new, given, or false; the closure or lack of closure of an utterance with regard to subsequent utterances by either speaker; social/power relations between speaker and hearer; emotional attitudes such as excitement or hostility; and the attitude of the speaker towards the utterance as direct communication or more as a display of language" (127). These sociocultural dimensions interacting with syntactic and musical ones, make for extreme multilayerdness.

Multilayerdness is yet more interestingly displayed by the complex objects that the poet deliberately constructs. A good but not exceptional example is Eliot's Four Quartets, which combines an Old English line (hemistichal organization, three or four stresses per line, etc.) with an iambic beat that is sufficiently frequent and strong to stay in the reader's consciousness, with a great deal of free verse, and also with breaks into amphibrachs and other eccentric footage (compare the four metrical levels in Tyutchev's "Silentium"; Friedrich 1998: 81-83).

Multilayerdness is exemplified by individual and ethnic "tunes" of poets when reading their work. Burns Cooper, in a methodologically laudable turn, goes to the tapes of readings, not only by his three featured [End Page 180 poets (Eliot, Lowell, Wright), but by an Hispanic (Jimmy Baca), an African-American (Etheridge Knight), and a Briton (Denise Levertov--"British...