The British Journal of Aesthetics 44, no. 4 (2004)

The Audible Reading of Poetry Revisited

This paper is a polemic against the science of linguistics, to the extent that, with its relentlessly reductive methodologies, it has encouraged the marginalization of the aesthetic in literary studies – particularly in the field of metrics. The paper also suggests how this aesthetic imperative might yet be reclaimed through study of the audible reading of poetry.

I

IN HIS essay on ‘The Audible Reading of Poetry’, Yvor Winters remarks:

In general I think the world would be well enough off without actors: they appear to be capable of any of three feats – of making the grossly vulgar appear acceptably mediocre; of making the acceptably mediocre appear what it is; and of making the distinguished appear acceptably mediocre. In any event, they cannot read poetry, for they try to make it appear to be something else, something, in brief, which they themselves can understand.1

The actor Richard Austin has recently produced a CD ‘performance’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems.2 It is highly distinguished, which would seem to suggest that Austin understood what he was reading – in spite of his professional handicap. But what does it mean to ‘understand’ Hopkins with respect to reading him aloud? The question is not merely artisan, but also engages, substantively, with the very idea of an aesthetics of poetry, for a successful audible reading depends absolutely on the successful interpretation of a poem's aesthetic identity.

Winters’s recommendations for how best to thus ‘understand’ poetry with respect to audible reading may be distilled into a single imperative, that the reader should not put into the poem what is not already there. The poem should

be conceived as having a movement of its own, an autonomous movement, which should be rendered as purely and as impersonally as possible. The reader has no more right to revise the rhythms in the interest of what he considers an effective presentation than he has a right to revise any other aspects of the language. The poem, once set in motion, should appear to have its own momentum.
(p. 85)

Significantly, no special licence is afforded the poet here. It is not only ignorant actors who may ‘botch’ poetry readings; even poets can compromise the ‘autonomous movement’ of their work. The British Library’s Spoken Word CD of poets reading their own poetry is documentary proof of this theoretical possibility.3 Reviews of the recently released CD have emphasised how ‘interesting’ and ‘challenging’ and ‘surprising’ the readings are. But none has ventured to comment that, whatever else they may be, many of them are also very poor recitals. Quite how, and why, they are deficient will be teased out in the following analysis, with a view to explicating what might be meant by that most elusive quality, the ‘aesthetic’ in poetry.

Generally, the problem is one of reductionism. In the interests of clarity, and dramatic effect, the poem’s ‘meaning’, crudely conceived of as mere paraphrasable sense, is drawn out; but this inevitably distorts, anamorphically, its formal features, such as metre, lineation and rhyme, that must also affect how and what the poem ‘means’.

Robert Frost’s rendering of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening”, for example, pays no respect to the metrical mandate of the poem. By the second stanza, the marked evenness of the rhythm is overtaken by a peculiar vocal impatience that completely misrepresents the regular iambic metre. Then, in the middle of the third stanza, this aberrant style gives way to its opposite: a slow, over-luxuriant movement, which is particularly inappropriate in contrast to the delivery of the lines immediately before it.

Alfred Noyes exemplifies another style of bad reading. He is swept away by the excitable rhythms and technique of anaphora in “The Highwayman”. This is not inevitable in a poem with this structure, as Tennyson demonstrates by his fine reading of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. Although Tennyson allows full expression to the grammatical parallelisms of the poem, and to its triple rhythm, he resists a predictable or exaggerated lilt.

In his reading of “Spring and All”, Williams Carlos Williams falls foul of a third kind of fault: ignoring lineation. It is a pervasive failing (Tom Paulin, to name one contemporary poet, read straight through his line-endings at the 2002 Poetry Proms), but it is particularly conspicuous, and egregious, with Williams because so much hangs on his line-breaks. Consider his short, celebrated, poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow”:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

It is a puzzling provocation on first meeting. The expectation of great import – ‘so much depends/ upon’ – is frustrated by the quotidian images that follow (a wheelbarrow, rain and chickens). Attention to the formal structure of the poem reveals a more complicated relation between these otherwise unexceptional figures, however, as its line-breaks harry semantic limpidity: ‘depends/ upon’; ‘wheel/ barrow’; ‘rain/ water’; ‘white/ chickens’. Concepts are disrupted, such that the reader is forced to notice, for instance, how the single concept ‘depends upon’, which refers to contingency, itself ‘depends upon’ two contingent signifiers.

Similarly, a ‘wheelbarrow’ is a single, simple, image; but its lexical and ontological etymology as ‘wheel’ yoked to ‘barrow’ is only obviously apparent when language is, to use the Formalist term, defamiliarized. The poem demands that language be reconsidered in this way: what glazes the ‘wheel/ barrow’ is not merely ‘rain’, or ‘water’, but ‘rain/ water’, the compound of these concepts, which is distinct from either when taken singly.

The whiteness of the chickens is the last, bathetic, compound concept in the list that promised ‘so much’, but, apparently, offers so little. At which point, the poem invites re-interpretation – to see if anything has been missed. And something surely has: that language is synthetic: signifiers ‘depend/ upon’ each other. Of course, it would be a meagre poem whose value rested merely on the pedagogic promotion of Ferdinand de Saussure’s idea of ‘relative motivation’ in language.4 But it is more than this. First and foremost, it succeeds as a poem – that is, as an aesthetic object –, which is ultimately irreducible. Its two colours, for instance (‘white’ and ‘red’), are pregnant with connotations, ranging from Christianity to Communism, that eschew clean, didactic, abstraction, being fruitfully ‘ambiguous’ in Empsom’s sense. Neither are the domestic images mere expedients. A ‘red firebrand’ and ‘white microchips’ could not work in the same way, not least because the work-a-day banality of Williams’s scene prompts the idea that, as it is concealed in language, ‘so much’ dependency may also be concealed in many other relationships – even in the most unremarkable.

Admittedly, with the kind of ludic, meta-textual poetry of e. e. cummings (note the lower case form, which he insisted on), or Charles Olson, drawing out such formal features in auditory reading can be problematic, if not impossible. Such poems are relatively rare, however, whereas neglecting the significance of typography in audible reading is very common.

W. B. Yeats offers a more complicated and provoking case. His style of reading is not insensitive in any of the crude ways observed above; but he represents a category of audible reading that is particularly vulnerable to insensitivity. Winters never actually heard Yeats read – perhaps if he had he might have revised his dogmatic stance – but condemned what he understood to be his habit of ‘chanting’ (p. 85). Yeats pre-empted such criticism in a broadcast on 10 April 1932 (contained on the CD) where, recalling William Morris’s complaint, he insists: ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am about to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose’.

Evidently, Winters and Yeats are not so dissimilar in their outlook. They agree that the reader must be faithful to the poem; they differ only in respect of how they think this fidelity ought to be expressed. The distinction has broad ramifications, however. Winters’s insistence that all poems be read in a ‘formal’ way implicitly condemns John Mansfield’s drift into song in the second line of the second stanza of “Sea Fever” (‘Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied’). Winters could not have tolerated Ezra Pound’s quivering exequy with kettledrums for “The Seafarer”. Edith Sitwell’s declamations to orchestral accompaniment, and Hilaire Bellock’s high-pitched singing of “Tarantella”, are unacceptable for the same reason.

As performances in their own right they may be skilful and worthy; but they are, Winters would argue, something altogether different from the poems themselves, and should not be confused with them. Audible reading requires the same focus as that demanded by the New Critics for the interpretation of poetry: that the reader pay attention only ‘to the words on the page’. Nothing should be omitted; nothing should be embellished.

II
Building on this analysis, I should like to argue that the reductive methodologies that predominate in literary studies marginalize the aesthetic in poetry in ways directly analogous to these aberrant audible readings. Austin’s reading of Hopkins’s poems will be considered first, however, because the particular, prodigious difficulties that attend such a performance provide ballast for a polemic that is otherwise liable to stray into the abstract.

Perhaps the first important thing to note is that Austin could not have chosen a poet less amenable to a ‘formal’ rendering. Whether one generally agrees with Winters’s thesis or not – and for all its bravura, the plain logic of his argument is hard to resist – it is easier to sustain with some poets than with others. There could be little dispute about reading, say, Eliot’s poems in a ‘formal’ way. That was generally how he read them himself; and the subtle flexes of his rhythms and his tempered register are well suited to it. By contrast, the spring of ‘sprung rhythm’ militates against this kind of control.

Clearly, ‘formal’ does not mean monotone, and Winters’s counter-complaint is reasonable:

I have been told that this [formal] method of reading makes all poems sound alike, but this can be true only for those persons for whom all poems sound alike in any event, or for whom essential differences are meaningless. (p. 98)

Nonetheless, the abruptness of sprung rhythm is so marked that any attempt to dulcify it would be to ‘misunderstand’ the fabric of his sprung poems. As Hopkins explained to his friend Canon Dixon:

I shd. add that the word Sprung which I use for this rhythm means something like abrupt and applies by rights only where one stress follows another running, without syllable between.5

Any reading that does not, to use Hopkins’s phrase, ‘fetch out’ this chiaroscuro must therefore be in some sense deficient. His ‘figures of spoken sound’ require the same bold attention. Dense and complex patterns of alliteration and rhyme derived from (or at least analogous to) cynghanedd, Skaldic, Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Greek poetry, as well as ablaut vowel modulations, ‘vowelling on’ or ‘vowelling off’, ‘or changing of vowel down some scale or strain or keeping’,6 create a complex lattice-work of sound that can only be delineated by great contrasts. Hence, Hopkins advised Bridges to observe ‘long rests, long dwells on the rhyme’.7 Two excerpts are sufficient to illustrate the importance of this imperative.

First, “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”, about which Hopkins wrote that he ‘never did anything more musical’. The homophonic spin that the ‘Golden Echo’ gives in response to the negativity of the ‘Leaden Echo’, from the six times repeated ‘despair’ to ‘Spare!’, marks a turn of mood and a change in the direction of the thought: from despondency to metaphysical optimism. The significance of the pun is profound in the context of the poem, and qualitatively different from that which occurs, for instance, in his “The Lantern out of Doors” (l. 11-2): ‘I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind./ Christ minds’.

In both examples, the pun marks a change of mood and thought. In “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”, however, this change is climactic, the culmination of an intricate series of acoustic steps, which James Milroy describes as ‘gradience’:8 sixteen lines of tortuous acoustic peregrination anticipate this possibility, realised by the allophonic twist, that ‘beauty’ may be kept (spared) from ‘vanishing away’. Consider the first sentence. The lines have been divided by a diacritic (*) into the constituent parts of the acoustic progression; the phonetic echoes that act as links between each of these parts have been italicised:9

How to keep-*is there any any, *is there none such, *nowhere
Known some, *bow or brooch or *braid or brace, *lace,
*latch or catch or *key to keep
Back beauty, *keep it, *beauty, beauty, beauty,…from vanishing away?

This syncopated interrogative may be restored to, ‘How to keep beauty from vanishing away?’ The larger, interpolated section is an emotional response to the question that parenthesises it. Each stage has its own phonetic feature that is dominant. For example, ‘none’ and ‘such’ share vowel rhyme, whereas ‘nowhere’ and ‘known’ are joined by alliteration and assonance in the following stage. Further, each stage incorporates the dominant feature of the stage that precedes it. As the italicised phonemes illustrate, the acoustic logic is unbroken. Nor is this patterning mere reduplication. None of the stages could be elided or substituted without disrupting its organic unity.

Thus, in an inversion of Pope’s famous dictum, ‘sense’ becomes ‘an echo’ to the ‘sound’, which can only progress through the phonetic hoops and tunnels of an overarching, acoustic grammar. The words still mean what they mean as words, but the role of sound is reclaimed and, in the process, promoted. Reclaimed, in that we are encouraged to notice their acoustic texture, something that tends to have been worn away in words that are common in the language; promoted, in that the detail of this texture constrains and determines the run of thought. A phono-semantic dialectic also operates as each flurry of chimes recalls and provokes fresh phono-semantic associations according to what Roman Jakobson describes as the ‘neuropsychological laws of synaesthesia’.10

There is a feeling that Hopkins has momentarily thrown off, in Max Müller’s phrase, ‘the bit and bridle of literature’.11 Untrammelled by syntax and strict narrative sense, language is set free. Free in the sense of spontaneous, as Hopkins is faithful to the characteristic imperfections of such extemporary outpouring, through his use of repetition, ellipsis, circumlocution and half-realised images.12 The poem also expresses a far more striking sense of liberty arising from the puissant acoustic logic that underpins it.

The second illustrative excerpt comes from stanza twenty-two of “The Wreck of the Deutschland”:

Five! The finding and sake
And cypher of suffering Christ.
Mark, the mark is of man’s make
And the word of it Sacrificed.

‘Five’ is a cypher because it is symbolic of the pain Christ endured on the cross with respect to his five wounds; one through each hand and foot, and one through his side. The symbol is taken up phonetically with a pun and seven alliterative chimes (four initial, one medial, two terminal) that climaxes with ‘the word of it’, which announces the ‘decoding’, as it were, of this cypher of suffering. (It is noteworthy that ‘the word of it’ loads this climatic act of sacrifice with a great and particular resonance since it recalls the identity that Christ, as the second Person of the Trinity, shares with the ????s.)

Unravelling the cypher reveals the key word ‘Sacrificed’; and this unravelling (or ‘decoding’) is effected by an acoustic logic. An expression of this logic may be observed with regard to the chiming chain of words in the third line, but the major contribution derives from the first two lines that almost perfectly prefigure the dramatic conclusion. The salient elements of the first two lines – ‘five’, ‘finding’, ‘sake’, ‘cypher’, ‘suffering’ and ‘Christ’ – may be resolved to the consonants /f/ (x4), /v/, /n/, ‘ng’ (x2), /s/ (x4), /k/ (x2), /r/ (x3) and /t/; and into the vowel sounds /ai/ (x4), /i/ (x2), /ei/, ‘e[r]’ (x2) and ‘u’ (short). ‘Sacrificed’ incorporates the three most common elements, /f/, /s/ and /ai/, the second most common element, /r/, and three of the four third most common elements, /k/, ‘e[r]’13 and /i/. The cascading fragments of sounds of the previous lines that mingle and fuse in this single most significant word of the passage conflate form and content as they simultaneously resolve the acoustic and metaphysical tensions of the preceding lines in this final tonic chord.

David I Masson, who is the only critic who appears to have noticed this extraordinary phono-semantic resolution, describes this effect as a curious idiosyncrasy, a ‘phonetic conjuring trick’.14 But it is far more than this: ‘Sacrificed’ – which also contains all the sounds of ‘Christ’ – is the rubric of the entire poem, because ‘Not out of his bliss/ Springs the stress felt’: ‘It dates from day/ Of his going to Galilee’ (l. 41-2; l. 49-50). Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion made man’s redemption possible. The theme of suffering and sacrifice that Hopkins experiences himself, and, vicariously, through the slow drowning of the five nuns that inspired him to write the poem, derives meaning, purpose, justification and, even, glory from the example of Christ’s own sacrifice. As the ‘cypher’ explodes its meaning with the acoustic pyrotechnics described above, it enacts what it symbolises. It resolves the disparate phonetic echoes as the symbol of sacrifice itself may resolve the stray metaphysical uncertainties that are ‘laced with the fire of stress’ (l. 16).

Hopkins here realises the ambition that his former Oxford tutor, Walter Pater, describes for all art, ‘to aspire to the condition of music’:

For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it […]. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression.15

Winters notes with some disapproval that Hopkins recommended a ‘dramatic or declamatory reading’ for his poems, but given this phono-semantic aesthetic (parallelisms of sound being utterly wedded to ‘meaning’) it is difficult to imagine how they could otherwise be rendered adequately. Austin evidently agrees. Yet, though Austin can raise his voice and emotional pitch for a climax like that of ‘Buckle!’ (“The Windhover”, l. 10), he also possesses a delicate touch; his voice is very crisp. The first line of the first poem on the CD, ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’, is a keen illustration of this quality. On the page, the dense, parallel alliterative pattern is clear to the eye, but Austin encourages you to hear it: /k/, /d/, /f/ and /s/ are enunciated with such clarity that the highly wrought structure can be discerned by the ear.

He is strict, too. For example, when “The Windhover” is read on the page it is obvious that ‘king’ in ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king- / dom of daylight’s dauphin’ is more than just the first syllable of ‘kingdom’. The ‘windhover’ becomes a symbol of Christ, its outstretched ‘wimpling’ wings like outstretched arms on the cross: it becomes a symbol of Christ as ‘king’. Austin does something very canny to capture this nuance. If he had introduced a heavy pause between the syllables, this would have succeeded in highlighting ‘king’, but would have failed to preserve the integrity of ‘kingdom’ as a word in its own right. So, instead, he marks out the syllables by bouncing their sounds of each other. The primary stress of the word would, in typical English pronunciation, fall on ‘king’; and ‘dom’ would take a secondary stress. By granting both syllables the same degree of stress, he is able to highlight the discrete syllables without rupturing the complete word.
Only Hopkins’s directions for performance, of which there are many more in the manuscripts than appear in any edited text of the poems, cause Austin any difficulty. Or rather, they do not cause him any difficulty because he shirks the responsibility of accommodating these directions into his performance, by completely ignoring them. This is important, since although Hopkins insisted that they were there only ‘for where the reader is likely to mistake’,16 they can work much harder than this. Sometimes, notably in the case of his stress markings, they can directly pull away from the apparent (paraphrasable) sense. Austin has no truck with this, which, it is tempting to think, is no bad thing – especially given the bungled audible readings that many poets have produced for their poems.

But this conclusion provokes a fresh enquiry: is it possible that Hopkins was not in fact misrepresenting the ‘meaning’ of his poems when his marks appear to work against the sense? (That Hopkins’s diacritics are mere idiosyncrasy, often wrenching his rhythms away from the sense of the poem, is a case that has been made by many Hopkins critics, notably Elisabeth Schneider.17) Is it possible that with his stresses, his ‘outrides’, his ‘slurs’, his pauses et cetera, as well as his musical directions (‘rallentando’, ‘staccato’), he was directing another kind of meaning that lies, as Basil Bunting put it,

in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands, lines drawn in the air which stir deep emotions which have not even a name in prose.18

III
A further, broader, point attends this conclusion, which pertains to the status of poetry as an aesthetic object. In his New Bearings in English Poetry, F. R. Leavis notes that T. Sturge Moore offers an ‘improvement’ of the same excerpt from “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” (considered above).19 Moore suggests the following reworking:

How to keep beauty? Is there any way?
Is there nowhere any means to have it stay?
Will no bow or brooch or braid,
Brace or lace
Latch or catch
Or key to lock the door lend aid
Before beauty vanishes away?

That Moore’s ‘improvement’ forfeits the crucial mimetic drama of Hopkins’s original may seem obvious. Leavis judges that Moore has discarded ‘not merely a certain amount of music’, ‘but with the emotional crescendo and diminuendo, the plangent rise and fall, all the action and substance of the verse’ (p. 173).

Moore is no straw target, however. As an accomplished poet, his reworking is far from footling. He preserves, and indeed highlights, key parallelisms through his use of lineation, which marks them off as discrete phrases. This heightens some salient phonetic echoes and oppositions, at the same time making the sense more immediately comprehensible. To this end, he also pares the apparent redundancies, and inserts the figure of the locked door, which interprets and makes explicit the oblique references to ‘latch’ and ‘key’, as well as more general images of restraint, from the original.

It should also be noted than his reworking does not try to force a traditional metrical framework onto the lines. Therefore, his recommendations cannot be dismissed peremptorily, since Moore has not merely razed the poem in order to rebuild something else that accords with a narrow prescription of what constitutes poetic success in formal terms.

What Moore is so keen to ‘improve’, the organic, stammering, sprawling nature of the original is, however, aesthetically richer than the clean and clear expression with which he replaces it. Repetition, ellipsis and circumlocution may be redundant in semantic terms, but they are very significant aesthetically: whereas the tone of the original is breathless, uncertain and desperate, Moore’s reworking is measured, halting and didactic. By tampering with the form, Moore has utterly transformed the emotional landscape of the expression.

Moore’s experiment bears on the previous discussion in so far as it highlights the specific, ineluctable, relationship between sound and sense in Hopkins’s poetry – and, indeed, in all good poetry – that audible reading must respect absolutely. Wittgenstein puts it succinctly in his distinction between poetry and prose:

We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.) In the one case the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences, in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions (Understanding a poem).20

If this seems something of a platitude, and Moore’s ‘tampering’ a critical idiosyncrasy, or at least an anachronism, it will come as a rude revelation that poetry continues to suffer widespread philistine handling of this sort, even by leading academics. Stanley Fish summarises the present position (for a more rounded, historical account of the marginalization of the aesthetic in literary studies, see Murray Krieger’s paper on the subject21):

These days being an apologist for poetry means resisting the various historicisms – old, new, cultural, material – whose expansive arguments are made at the expense of the aesthetic, a category (and area) that either disappears in the analysis of “discursive systems” or is identified (and stigmatized) as the location of a status-quo politics anxious to idealize its own agendas.22

That the aesthetic in poetry is under threat from the indomitable rise of extra-textual interests in criticism has been widely acknowledged – though by no means as widely condemned (many theorists having a stake in these ‘various historicisms’) – in the literature departments of universities in Europe and North America. T. V. F. Brogan sees this regrettable academic imperialism as due, in part, to the modern pressure for academic publication, which has led scholars from other disciplines to make ‘sorties into the regions of poetics to see if the territory is inviting or the natives easy to subdue’ (p. xiii).23 ‘The absence of systematic criticism’ in literary studies has, Northrop Frye explains, ‘created a power vacuum’, such that ‘all the neighbouring disciplines have moved in’.24

Prosody is particularly vulnerable to such ‘sorties’ because there is no orthodoxy in metrical studies: critics cannot even agree upon the fundamental principles of scansion. In addition to the problem of working with a metrical tool-box designed for the binary, quantitative values of ancient Greek and Latin, which may be only imperfectly applied to the gradated, stress values of English rhythms, contrariety and confusion in English prosody has been exacerbated by the pervasive ambiguity surrounding the terms and concepts used to describe metrical phenomena. This same ambiguity also serves to obscure the true extent of this diversity. The ‘territory’ of metrics is, thus, uniquely inviting; and the natives, if not easy to subdue, are certainly excessively tolerant.
Worse: critics on prosody work within its uncertain terms and concepts without, even, the possibility of incremental progress in the field because, as Michel Grimaud laments:

The discipline itself is divided into a multitude of non-communicating sub-fields.
And unlike many other disciplines we possess no textbooks and no book-length
‘Annual Survey of…’ or ‘Annual Review of…’ offering present state syntheses of
the subdisciplines of literary studies.25

There is, moreover, an important lacuna in Fish’s account of the threats to the aesthetic. He has overlooked, as the vast majority of critics who have appraised the degraded status of the aesthetic in literary discourse have overlooked, the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, but at the same time quite logically, the literary approach to poetry has also been vitiated by its filial discipline, linguistics.
George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prosody opens by reassuring the reader that

At any rate, I am sure that attention to prosody never barred or spoiled attention to poetry, except in those who have been made unpoetical from the beginning.26

His apophthegm was intended as a rebuff to the Romantic anxiety that the ‘meddling intellect’ ‘misshapes the beauteous forms of things’; that, in professional literary criticism, ‘we murder to dissect’.27 It is tempting to believe that the New Critics quashed this particular anxiety. Yet, with the advent of American, post-Chomskian generative metrics, and the Russian school of prosody, led by Mariana Tarlinskaja, which is heavily concerned with quantitative and statistical analysis, ‘poetry’ has become increasingly dislocated from metrical analysis. Correspondingly, Saintsbury’s words have assumed fresh, and pressing, significance for the critic of poetry. Both in terms of the volume of research and its influence, current work in metrics – which is, of course, the most conspicuous feature of the ‘autonomous movement’ that Winters describes – is dominated by linguistic debates, debates that are predicated purely on an interest in language qua language. ‘Attention to poetry’ is not so much ‘barred or spoiled’ as rejected a priori; there is no longer a perceived threat of ‘murder’ – this has been supervened by the no less treacherous, and far more insidious, prospect of death by wilful neglect.
Beth Bjorklund characterises the teleological clash in broad terms:

Just as twentieth century philosophy is characterised by a ‘linguistic turn’ that led thinkers to view philosophical questions primarily as questions of language (Keller, 1979), so too is modern poetics characterised by a ‘linguistic turn’ that led analysts to view issues of poeticality [sic] primarily as questions of language in its broadest context, including psychology, information and communication theory, and the theory of signs. Linguistics, meanwhile, came into its right as an independent discipline, which led to increasingly abstract analysis, divorced from literary and aesthetic concerns; thus there arose a gap between linguistics and literature.28

A thorough evaluation of exactly how this ‘linguistic turn’ manifests itself in prosodic analysis, both directly (linguists writing on prosody) and indirectly (the influence of linguistics on ‘literary’ critics writing on prosody), must run beyond the available space in this paper. The thrust of the argument may nonetheless be pursued, by considering the most conspicuous feature of this linguistic influence: generative metrics.29 The primary complaint against the various generative models is not based on their capacity to delineate the over-arching ‘correspondence rules’ that govern metre – this is unquestionable – but on the plain truth that such knowledge has no great relevance for the aesthetic perspective. For, as Derek Attridge puts it, ‘widely different rhythmical phenomena are treated as identical because they can be captured in a single rule, and so satisfy the demands of generative theory’.30

A similar charge may be made against the quantitative approach that Mariana Tarlinskaja has championed. In her English Verse: Theory and History,31 she writes that, ‘The case of the average citizen who is content with the general impression that this summer is hotter than last is analogous to the dilettante who is happy with the general impression, for example, that the eighteenth-century iamb is “stricter” than the nineteenth-century iamb’. She advocates, instead, that in considering eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century iambs the critic should ‘choose several features which may be inventoried so as to calculate the precise difference between the metrically strict eighteenth-century verse and the more irregular, slacker nineteenth-century verse’. Only then may the ‘subjective evaluations, “slacker”, “less regular”, “more regular” and “stricter”, receive an objective scientific foundation’ (p. 4).

Her book attempts to establish such a ‘scientific foundation’, to which end she appends one hundred and forty pages of tables and statistics to an argument that runs to less than two hundred. Whilst her analysis succeeds in offering a sharper distinction between the prototypical iambs of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in so far as ‘the several features’ of her inventory may be amenable to such a statistical approach, they are necessarily generalised. As such, the results of this inventory are necessarily generalised too: they cannot therefore reveal anything about the aesthetic significance of the character of these iambs, which by definition lies in the specific, the particular manipulation of form – not in the general adherence to form.

C. T. Scott’s study of Hopkins’s “The Windhover” exemplifies just how specious such ‘scientific foundation’ may be when it extends beyond its remit. Echoing Tarlinskaja’s confidence, with the same implied ridicule of the traditional, aesthetic, modes of analysis, Scott’s paper opens with a brusque apology for the linguistic analysis of poetry, on the basis that ‘rigorous analysis of the primary data is the best means of obviating vapid and impressionistic conclusions’.32 Ironically, his subsequent argument serves to undercut the authority and the relevance of the linguistic perspective he is advocating. The methodology by which he attempts to collect his ‘primary data’ violates the relationship between form and content in the poem, proving his approach to be incompatible with the literariness of the subject that he is examining.

Notably, he attempts to understand the rhythm and metre of “The Windhover” in generative terms by including the title and subtitle in the analysis, as well as reconfiguring the lineation such that the scansion of each line fits more neatly, restoring ‘king-/dom’ to ‘kingdom’ in the first line. The significance of the compound concept has been noted in general terms above with respect to the effect of lineation in Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”; as the specific case of ‘king-/dom’ has been explored with respect to Austin’s fine handling of this potent double meaning. In the light of which, it is clear that Scott pays no respect to the poetic structure: as Winters and Wittgenstein have variously described it, he fails to ‘understand’ the poem as defined absolutely by ‘these words in these positions’. He does not consider that line-breaks may not be arbitrary divisions like the margin of a page in prose, but aesthetically significant in themselves; or that the title and sub-title might also carry formal, aesthetic significance.

Scott’s approach, and his intellectual hubris as one confidently ‘obviating vapid and impressionistic conclusions’, is eloquent of prosody’s relentless drive towards scientificity that Simon Jarvis calls ‘a comedy of enlightenment’.33 ‘Rigorous’ data collection offers the bright promise of scientific respectability – but for a methodology that is aesthetically bankrupt. The exercise is self-defeating. In seeking a more sophisticated account of the metrical topography of the poem, the poem itself is forsaken; under the gimlet-eye of the linguist, poetry is reduced to mere language.

IV
It may seem extravagant to suggest, by way of conclusion, that study of the audible reading of poetry could have a corrective effect on this encroaching scientism. Yet, it might at least serve as the first earnest for such a redress. For it is apparent that, inter alia, both the would-be performer and the literary critic require the same careful attention to the aesthetics of poetry if they are not to risk making it ‘appear to be something else, something, in brief, which they themselves can understand’. Moreover, whereas the practical business of audible reading is conspicuously concerned with the aesthetic, with transducing, as faithfully as possible, the written poem into an aural correlative of that same poem, literary criticism is, by contrast, less firm in its teleological footing. The positive example of poetry performed thus serves as a tacit, salutary rebuke to literary criticism; as, indeed, the aesthetically denuded efforts of less worthy recitations must caution, and so chasten the critic for the opposite reason.

One thing at least is certain: if ‘the beauteous forms of things’ in poetry are to avoid the death by wilful neglect forecast above, literary criticism must assert itself not only against the apparent threat posed by non-aesthetic, historicist modes of discourse, but also against the ‘linguistic turn’ in literary studies, which is the enemy within.

End Notes

1) ‘The Audible Reading of Poetry’, in The Function of Criticism (London: Routledge, 1967), pp. 79-100 (p. 85).

2) Back to Beauty’s Giver. Here Buckle! Productions. 2003 (see www.richard.austin.sh).

3) The Spoken Word: Poets. The British Library Board. 2003 (see sound-archive@bl.uk).

4) Saussure notes that in relation to other signs, ‘the sign may be motivated to a certain extent’ (Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 130).

5) The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, 2nd imp. rev. ed. by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 23.

6) The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 284.

7) The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, 2nd imp.rev., ed. by Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 246.

8) The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977), p. 148ff.

9) This analysis does not exhaust the phonetic echoes of the lines: there is assonance between ‘latch’ and ‘back’, for example; and, what Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edn (London: University of California Press, 1967), p. 369) calls ‘concealed alliteration’ in clusters of cognate consonants, especially in the last line.

10) Six lectures in Sound and Meaning, trans. by John Mephan (Sussex: The Harvester Press Ltd.,1976), p. 113.

11) Lectures on the Science of Language, First Series (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), p. 54.

12) David Abercrombie describes spontaneous utterance as being most conspicuously characterised at the phonetic level. In particular, by features that include incompleteness and repetition, accompanied by variation in tempo, intonation, pauses, silence, elisions and stammers (‘A Phonetician’s View of Verse’, Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics (London, 1965), Ch. 1).

11) OED distinguishes between the ‘a’ of ‘sacrificed and the dipthongs of ‘cypher’ and ‘suffering’. They are so closely related that, for the purposes of the argument, they have been granted the same phonetic identity. If the distinction can be felt, it counts for a weakening rather than a rejection of the echo.

12) ‘Poetic Sound-Patterning Reconsidered’, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 16 (1976).