"Secret Measure": The Origins of Free Verse in English: Cultural Contexts, Poetic Antecedents and the Case of Emily Dickinson by Rocío Saucedo Dimas (review)

This dissertation explores the possible origins of free verse in English. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss a number of cultural and material conditions and practices originating at the end of the eighteenth century and present throughout the nineteenth century in England and the United States that relate to what may be termed the "prosaism" of modernity. Romanticism, with its valorization of poetic innovation and aesthetic interest in the fragmentary, as well as the consolidation of the novel as a literary form, are here understood as critical and creative responses to such "prosaism" and as key elements in the development of free verse. The intensification of formal freedom prompted by Romantic organicism and subjective notions of poetry, and their connection with the eventual proliferation of open and free forms in modernism are also examined. Some examples from the work of the Romantic poets who contributed most to the freeing of verse (Blake, Coleridge, etc.) and of Whitman, who definitively freed it, complement this section. Throughout this dissertation, the poetic experimentation leading to this freeing of verse is seen as expressive of the intellectual doubt, ironic engagement with literary tradition, and critical evaluation of social and cultural institutions that characterize Romantic aesthetics. In that sense, Dickinson's poetry, though it cannot be considered free verse, certainly shares those characteristics and provides many examples of breaking points, moments in which traditional patterns break under the weight of creative forces.

Chapter 3 then considers how Dickinson's resistance to poetic convention may be related to her resistance to the authority of three major patriarchal institutions: marriage, religion, and the literary market. Using mostly poems from Fascicle 37 (which includes "Publication - is the Auction" and a few metrically irregular poems like "Four Trees - opon a solitary Acre - " and "Renunciation - is a piercing Virtue - "), I suggest that these three institutions are interrelated in her poetry through trope, conceptual irony, and metrical disobedience. I thus explore Dickinson's treatment of the ballad and hymn stanza and the interaction between syntax and meter. In dialogue with Cristanne Miller and Mary Loeffelholz, I insist on the importance of the poem's aurality for Dickinson and emphasize the deliberate way in which expectations of regularity are often frustrated through the unconventional and idiosyncratic use of rhyme, rhythm, and meter in an otherwise very conventional and popular poetic form. However, departing from Miller and Loeffelholz, I contend that this aurality cannot be understood apart from the poem's visual dimension and that Dickinson's irregularities become more prominent when the two aspects are considered together, especially as they help communicate the tensions produced by the poet's resistance and negotiation with social, gender, and literary conventions. Finally, Dickinson is not presented here as a proto-modernist, since that entails an unnecessarily teleological view of poetry, but rather as a nineteenth-century writer whose poetics innovates on traditional patterns as a consequence of what Frye called "subjectivized decorum" (273).