To Rhyme Is Human

To have a theory of the long-established practice of prosody (that is, of versification and the rest of the poetic art) was once a gentleman’s decent avocation. As Paul Fussell observed in his study of the subject, in the eighteenth century, “prosodic theorizing was an activity in which many of the finest minds of the period participated … and the widespread interest in verse structure drew prosodic treatises from a horde of minor out-at-elbows schoolmasters, penny-a-line critics and Grub-streeters, and genteel country curates. Even Thomas Jefferson somehow found time to pen a hurried essay on the subject.”

Such treatises in versification, however, were at a more than theoretical remove from the practice of English poets; their definitions of the principles of English meter did not accurately describe the way actual English verse lines operated. While those definitions did have the effect of influencing eighteenth-century poets to become somewhat smoother in their verse-making, on the whole we can say that the poets practiced their art with little or no help from the critics and pedagogues. Jefferson’s pen changed many things in our world, but verse craft was not among them.

English poetry is a powerful example of an art being communicated entirely through its practice and often despite the theoretical prescriptions made about it. From Sir Philip Sydney and William Shakespeare on to Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, the poets knew how to compose their works even as they generally lacked the critical vocabulary to describe what they were doing. So, also, could the anonymous readers of poetry recognize a sound iambic pentameter when they heard it, even when, if asked, they often could tell you no more than that the line must have ten syllables.

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 11, oil on canvas, 1913.

In the twenty-first century, the case is almost precisely inverted. The average reader will have been raised with little exposure to poetry beyond Mother Goose, and while some vague sense perdures that poetry must have a strong rhythm and while the conviction that rhyme has something essential to do with the art seems stronger than ever, the reader will be at a loss to recognize the iambic pentameter – the paradigmatic line of English verse – when confronted with it.

And yet, increasingly, people do want to learn to recognize these things; they do want to understand an art form that is as ancient as civilization itself, and they want to do so all the more because of a sense that something precious has nearly slipped away. We are to be relieved, perhaps even grateful, therefore that, while the intuitive and practical understanding of verse has much retreated, the study of prosody has much improved from previous centuries. Indeed, the last generation or so has seen the publication of the first works of English prosody in its five-centuries-long history that can actually describe perceptively and competently how verse really works.

I want to consider three such works, each aimed at a different audience, and each, with some qualifications, to be recommended. Their intended audiences range from the student, to the adult amateur, to the practicing poet, or so I would contend. They will be discussed in that order.

David J. Rothman and Susan Delany Spear have composed a promising resource for schoolteachers who wish to introduce their students to the centuries of practice of English verse craft. They have done so in a fashion that is a blend of the thoughtful, sharply intuitive, and eccentric. If the state of the knowledge of poetry in our day is as I have described it above, then it should be small wonder that teachers in high schools steer away from it as much as they can. They concede they do not understand verse and often that they can only talk about poetry insofar as its themes are sufficiently topical to allow one to discuss the poem without actually examining it. Poetry is treated as a series of moral or political maxims to affirm or as a disclosure of personal experience suitable for the sociologist’s case study, but rarely as a thing with an integrity proper to itself. Even when schools offer students a richer, more patient, and compelling kind of instruction in great poems, such works are often gazed on in wonder for their wisdom or genius, while the formal properties that make poems poems are examined cursorily and, as it were, only from the outside.

Rothman and Spear have composed a book that will aid student and teacher alike overcome such formal illiteracy and last-ditch moralizing. It is one rooted in their shared experience of teaching in both university and high school settings and, in fact, the volume directly comes out of their work in the high school classroom. Each of their main chapters introduces a historical verse form, defines it, and provides an example of its practice from the tradition. Their texts included partial scansions (that is to say, markings to show how the meter works), which students are asked to complete. They then provide an assignment for students to complete to try out the practice of this or that form, which is followed by examples of student work from actual American classrooms. Those examples are, finally, commented upon by the authors, showing where the students’ efforts succeed and where their versification needs correction. The structure of each chapter thus introduces the students to the practice of verse, gives them the means to practice it themselves, and provides the right amount of sample exercises to help them become comfortable in the hearing of stresses, the arrangement of metrical feet, and finally the use of rhyme and stanza. To read this book is to learn along with the students whose work is discussed within it.

Almost everything Rothman and Spear include will be resources teachers otherwise lack. As I have proposed elsewhere, we take it for granted that a practicing violinist will understand Beethoven’s string quartets better than those of us who lack musical training. We should also recognize that the perception and understanding of verse lines will only be possible to the extent that one becomes literate in prosody, and such literacy comes best and easiest through the practice of making verses. Rothman and Spear have given us a well-structured series of modules to initiate young people into just that practice.

Their textbook has something more to recommend it. More than a decade ago, when I first became interested in helping students grasp the elements of verse craft, I proposed simply introducing them to the forms in the order that they emerged in history. That is, one could begin with hearing the four stresses of Anglo-Saxon accentual alliterative meter, move on to the strong stressed ballad quatrains of nursery rhymes and folk songs, and continue still further toward the emergence of the iambic pentameter and its gradual maturation into a versatile form in the hands of Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, and beyond. One might stop at several weigh-stations on the road – such as the looser accentual lines of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight or the sixteenth-century “fourteener” line that bridged the gap between the primitive verse of Everyman and the iambic pentameter of the Elizabethan theater – to see what each age added to the development of modern English verse as a flexible, capacious, and expressive medium. Rothman and Spear have given us just such a historical introduction to verse craft, one which has students begin with primitive accentual verse, ballads, and classical imitations, before moving on to iambic tetrameter and pentameter and more complex stanzas. English verse developed in the direction it did for reasons rooted deeply in the structure of our language. Simply following the course it took is a fine way to initiate students to versification piecemeal and in a way that will become intuitive to them much as it was to our scribbling ancestors.

Some confusions are likely to emerge for students studying this text, though not insurmountable ones. Rothman and Spear elect to use the late poet, translator, and Harvard professor Robert Fitzgerald’s eccentric system of scansion. Fitzgerald’s system is overly complex and at times misleading and may prove more obstacle than resource for the student. For the scholar, it must be said, Fitzgerald’s system is of serious historical interest, but scholars are not the primarily audience of this book.

Samuel Johnson denominated prosody one of the four parts of grammar and included a guide to it in his dictionary. To be literate, he suggested, one must know versification. Rothman and Spear are the first writers I have seen to take that claim seriously and to give to the young the resources they need to become fully literate.

David Noller’s Master Poetry Forms attempts to give the gift of literacy to those of us who came to poetry later in life and must shift on our own to figure out the art. It is a volume written with the playful, self-deprecating, patient, and repetitive style of an instructor who knows his charges are uncertain of what and why they are reading and may give up at the first sign of difficulty. It is a fine style for an age such as ours, deliberately on par with those Idiot’s Guide volumes that propose to lead the ignorant through the basics of everything from chess and religion to buying an RV or programming in Fortran. For someone long removed from the classroom and otherwise setting out alone, Noller’s book makes an excellent virtual companion.

Noller’s book has a unique strength. We have long had excellent, encyclopedic volumes on poetry, such as the Preminger and Brogan Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics; we have also a capacious grab-bag gathering together all kinds of meters and stanzas, called the Book of Forms by the poet Lewis Turco. Noller attempts to take all that information (all of it!) and systematically arrange it so as to offer a careful, rightly ordered introduction to the two essential dimensions of poetry: meter and mimesis. The volume even includes a schematic chart that shows where every aspect – every formal choice – a poet has stands relative to every other. He introduces rhyme in all its variety; meter in all its variety; stanza in all its variety; and to a lesser extent the fixed forms and what he calls “the rebel forms” of different kinds of free verse.

While the presentation is comprehensive and orderly, and while it attempts to highlight what is most important and to keep present, but to the side, what is of lesser importance, Noller’s volume is overcome by sheer abundance. He introduces every possible variety of rhyme, for instance, but an English poet really only needs to be introduced to the practice of end-rhyme. Other varieties of assonance, consonance, and alliteration will take care of themselves and make their appearance unbeckoned in a poet’s work, regardless of whether one has been given all the various names for them. Internal rhymes, in English, ornament and deepen, but, again, it’s only end rhyme that requires a measure of instruction and discipline if it is to function well.

A more serious instance of this occurs in his two chapters on meter. Meter is the cornerstone of the whole art of English verse. And by this, what I really mean is that the aspiring poet needs, before all else, to understand iambic meter and the variations within it that poets have historically allowed themselves. Other, less common, meters in English, such as the trochaic and the anapestic follow easily if one can only master the iambic. Noller, however, introduces just about every conceivable way of “measuring” a poem, from accentualism and syllabism to what he calls “word count meter.” Iambic meter is discussed, but less thoroughly than it needs to be, because Noller introduces it only as one important metrical form among many. His system does not in this respect accurately represent how much of English prosody is simply iambic measure and the ways in which it is modulated.

Robert Frost once wrote that there are two meters in English: iambic and loose iambic. While that is not quite so, that could well be the impression one receives from actually reading the bulk of the archive of English poetry from Chaucer to the twentieth century. Noller advises us that the reader “will need more examples and more practice than this chapter [on meter] alone can provide.” That is an understatement in my view. In a similar way, in his discussion of stanzas, he mentions the major English forms judiciously enough but then includes such oddities as inverted terza rima. Yes, there may be a place on a systematic chart of forms for such a thing, but since I have never seen a single instance of inverted terza rima in English poetry, I wonder whether the form is a reality that needs to be categorized rather than an insubstantial fiction created by the necessity of the chart’s rage for order.

Noller’s turn from meter to mimesis, in the later portion of the volume, is in one sense inspired and in one sense likely to mislead. In Aristotle’s Poetics, the philosopher begins by noting that most people talk about poetry in terms of its meter – its metrical form. But, says Aristotle, this does not take us very far into understanding what poetry is; after all, some philosophical and historical texts are or could be set in meter, but they would still be philosophy or history. Poetry therefore must consist essentially of something in addition to meter and that something, for Aristotle’s limited purposes (he discusses only tragedy and epic), is the imitation (mimesis) of human action that we call plot. Modern readers of Aristotle have tended to think of this division of meter and mimesis as one between form and content, and to interpret Aristotle as rendering the form (the how of a poem’s saying) as a matter of indifference relative to its content (the what said, the story told).

Noller rightly corrects this. Meter and mimesis are both formal properties; they refer to the “how” of construction. He then gives us a systematic presentation of the forms of mimesis from epic and lyric and onward. All this is helpful indeed. One great resource that poets have recovered in recent decades is that of poetic genres outside the lyric: the epigram and the didactic poem, as well as the verse essay and longer narrative poem. Noller ticks off the prothalamium, elegy, aubade, and serenade, all of which will alert the aspiring poet to different possibilities of form and subject. It must be noted, however, that since the eighteenth century, the range of subject and formal modes of the lyric have expanded almost beyond any list of categories. It ceases to be particularly helpful or to give an accurate reflection of poetic practice to think of the various modes, when a short poem might now be written on any subject from plant biology to the color of fire engines and on and on. Noller’s patience, good humor, and impressively well-ordered exposition will, however, be a helpful how-to for many who want to find their way into the poetic art.

It is, in a sense, unfair to mention Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing at the end of a review of this sort. Steele’s book, reissued with a new preface to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, has from the moment of its publication been recognized as the most authoritative account of English versification yet to appear. Steele draws liberally on both the literary critical study of prosody as well as the insights of structural linguistics and does so to provide a description of meter that accounts for the whole history of actual poetic practice. Many poets have written on versification before; Steele seems to be the first to describe not just the theories of a period but the practices of the tradition taken whole.

Steele makes three crucial observations that his study explains. First, he notes that English meter emerges out of the natural contours of English language. English speech entails a frequent alternation of stresses; English meter simply brings that pattern into regular (measured) order. Most accounts of the relationship of meter to speech rhythm are dualistic in nature and suggest that meter is an artificial imposition on natural speech. Steele shows that, to the contrary, meter merely brings to a refinement of pattern properties intrinsic to the structure of our language and already present in our everyday cadences.

Second, Steele explains why the iambic pentameter line emerged as the paradigmatic (not to say the exclusive) line for our poetry. Longer than the trimeter and tetrameter lines of ballad and song, the pentameter has both the capacity to become musical like them, but also to take on the movements of high rhetoric and colloquial speech. It has ten syllables but only five stresses, and this blend of an odd number of stresses alternating across an even number of syllables, of itself begets a certain irregularity and asymmetry to each new verse line, making it ever-various and surprising. All iambic pentameter lines share the same meter, but none ever sounds quite the same. The pentameter is flexible enough to be bold and elevated in one line, but subtle and familiar in the next. It can sing, but it also can be plain. It is the most versatile of media.

Following from this: third and finally, the practice of English poets has been to maintain the regularity of the verse line but to “modulate” its rhythm. That is, the beauty of verse craft derives from following the standard metrical pattern but discovering new ways that degrees of stress, caesurae, enjambment, and a rich vocabulary can generate, as Steele puts it, “boundless wealth from a finite store.” Contrary to T. S. Eliot’s baseless claim that the “most interesting verse” takes a simple form “like the iambic pentameter” and constantly withdraws from it, Steele shows that the genius of English poetry has generally been to maintain a regular verse measure but to build upon that foundation a various, well-modulated overall rhythm.

Steele’s study contains everything one needs to know to understand the art of verse in English, but it is so ordered as to emphasize and explain fully what is most important. And yet, since reading the first edition a quarter century ago, I have always suspected that Steele began the text as an introduction for students, only gradually to realize he had many expert observations about verse practice unsuitable for a beginner’s guide but which he wanted to include, for fear that we would never have occasion to jot them down elsewhere. How else to explain his digressions on such a topic as typography in Ben Jonson or his elaborate history of the practice of elision in verse? These are not defects in the work, no, far from it. The practicing poet will find them ongoing food for thought and indeed the most thorough account of the art we have yet had. The novice, however, may feel glutted and overwhelmed. In consequence, the book has always been a tough one for students still struggling to hear iambic measure for the first time.

Ours would be a more literate culture were schoolteachers to adopt Rothman and Spear’s text and were the curious amateur to take a first step into a greater world with help from Noller’s impressive book. Steele’s work is in a category apart, however. No serious poet can afford to ignore it, and in fact few have. The first edition was praised by Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, the two greatest metrical poets of the later twentieth century. Younger writers will swear to you that Steele’s is the one book needful. One might go so far as to say that there have been three ages in the practice of poetry in English. There were those centuries where poets lacked either a clear theory or vocabulary to describe their practice, but they did it nonetheless. There was the long twentieth century, where even those poets who practiced verse conceived of it in a dualistic manner that made verse practice seem an artificial imposition rather than a refinement of natural English speech. And then there is the present age, where we have Steele’s perceptive and thorough account of versification. In this new age, practicing poets are without excuse for ignorance or abuse of their elected art form. In this new age, with Steele and others seeking not only to account for and renew the art but to bring it to a wider audience, we may someday see a public that not only understands verse craft, but which can practice it too. Such an age Steele has made possible.