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Unread 07-16-2022, 01:25 PM
Jonathan James Henderson Jonathan James Henderson is offline
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Default Meter Vs Natural Speech

Spun-off from the discussion starting here: https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...827#post481827

Very interested to hear other thoughts on this, but, first things first:

To Tim:
https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/newre...reply&p=481848

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim McGrath View Post
Meter displaces natural speech. Meter obliterates natural speech. Like a drummer in a good band, meter provides the beat--the heartbeat--of a good poem. Contemporary critics, fools that they are, like to say, in writing no less, that they admire a certain poem's "conversational rhythms." The problem with this bit of sophistry is that poetry is not conversation, no more than it is prose. If a poet takes the time and trouble to cast his thoughts into rhyme and meter, why in the world would you or anyone want to de-emphasize the music? As they might say in Oklahoma, if you decide to put wings on a horse, you can't just ride around in your backyard.
If you want to state this as a personal preference that's fine, but I can assure you the vast majority of poets now and throughout history have not thought this way. However, I will say that nobody (certainly not me!) is saying one should "de-emphasize the music" of meter; what I'm describing is being alive to the ways in which natural speech and meter/rhythm work with and against each other. This is a complex interaction, and anyone who wants to take absolute, autocratic approaches is going to be missing out on a lot of nuance.

Even a cursory reading of the classics will show that either the great poets of the past (like Shakespeare), who wrote in times when meter was much more of a fixed and studied discipline than it is now, were frequently either inept when using meter to put stress on words that would never be stressed in common speech; or else they utilized metrical substitutions for rhetorical/poetic effect. Since I'm more inclined to think Shakespeare forgot more about poetry than any of us will ever know, I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, this means that there will always be a controversy when any natural speech would conflict with the meter: should those syllables be read as promotions/demotions, or should they be read as substitutions? What you're describing, Tim, would force us to, like a robot, read them all as promotions/demotions, and this just doesn't work, for reasons I said above (I had many examples handy years ago when I was studying this in-depth; they've been sadly lost to time). This doesn't mean, however, that we automatically read everything as natural speech. When such conflicts arise, we have to try it both ways: both metrically and naturally. Often times you will find poetry that works well both ways. Shakespeare was also a model here in that he'd often use meter to put emphasis on atypical words to highlight shades of meaning and nuances (I give examples in the thread linked below); that's a perfectly valid way of approaching meter, certainly. However, there also exists expressive possibilities that are only capable via substitutions: Alexander Pope laid out many such examples in his Essay on Criticism.

You mention "the music of meter," Tim, and while this is something I agree with it's useful to expand the analogy to realize that the time signature and ictus of music is no more all there is to musical rhythm than meter is all there is to poetic rhythm. Metrical substitutions can be musical; can, indeed, add to the music (and effect) of poetry, and this is just as true of natural speech rhythms. It's often said that poetry is the navigation between the poles of natural speech and artful (which can become artificial) writing; and meter/rhythm is no different. In the original thread I posted a link to a very old thread on metrical substitution and my posts there discussing this in a slightly different way, but many of those ideas are relevant here: https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...740#post227740

Last edited by Jonathan James Henderson; 07-16-2022 at 01:27 PM.
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