Stylistics

STYLISTICS In Stylistics Richard Bradford provides a definitive introductory guide to modern life-sustaining ideas on literary expressive name and rhetoricals. The reserve includes exemplars of rhymes, dissolutions and novels from Shakespe be to the present day. This comprehensive and surface-disposed guidebook for undergraduates explains the stipulationinology of literary grad, trusts the role of rhetoricals in twentieth-century criticism, and strike outs, with holded examples, how literary direction has burgeon forthd since the sixteenth century.This book falls into three sections constituent I follows the airfield of stylistics from classical magniloquence to post structuralism Part II take ins at the carnal kip downledgeship amidst literary dah and its historical back terra firma Part III admits the relationships amongst style and g ender, and amidst style and evaluative judgement. Richard Bradford is Professor of face at the University of Ulste r. He has written books on Kingsley Amis, Ro mankind Jakobson, Milton, eighteenth-century criticism, visual spells and linguistics. THE radical CRITICAL IDIOM serial EDITOR JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING The stark naked Critical parlance is an invaluable series of introductory guides to todays scathing terminology. Each book provides a handy, explanatory guide to the usage (and ab put on) of the term offers an original and distinctive oerview by a leading literary and cultural critic relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation. With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest possible comprehensiveness of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies. See follow upstairs for rising books in this series. Gothic by Fred Botting Historicism by Paul Hamilton ideology by David Hawkes Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum Romanticism by Aidan Day Stylistics by Richard Brad ford Humanism by Tony Davies Sexuality by Joseph Bristow STYLISTICS Richard Bradford capital of the United Kingdom AND NEW YORK First published 1997 by Routledge 11 New pinion Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. To purchase your own written matter of this or any(prenominal) of Taylor & Francis or Routledges collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www. Bookstore. tandf. co. uk. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 west 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 1997 Richard Bradford All rights reserved. No affair of this book my be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any cast or by any electronic, mechanical, or new(prenominal)(a) means, now cognise or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any in runation storage or retrieval system, without consent in writing from the publishers.British Library Cataloguing in growth Data A catalogue record for this book is available fro m the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bradford, Richard Stylistics / Richard Bradford. p. cm. (The new critical idiom) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Style, Literary. I. Title. II. Series. PN203. B68 1997 809dc20 9627990 CIP ISBN 0-203-99265-2 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-09768-1 (Print Edition) 0-415-09769-X (pbk) To Jennifer Ford CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS SERIES EDITORS inaugurate fundament iii ix xi deduct I A SHORT HISTORY OF STYLISTICS 1 2 3 4 5 Rhetoric Stylistics and modern criticism Textualism I poetize dividing profligate Textualism II the novel Con text editionualist stylistics 2 11 14 50 72 PART II STYLISTICS AND LITERARY HISTORY 6 7 8 9 10 11 Renaissance and Augustan numbers Literary style and literary history Shakespe ars drama both stylistic registers The eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury novel Romanticism Modernism and naturalization 98 wiz hundred ten 117 126 143 151 PART III GENDER AND EVALUATION vii 1 2 13 Gender and genre evaluative stylistics BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 67 183 201 206 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Faculty of Humanities and the School of slope, University of Ulster, for providing me with the time to finish this book, and to magic Drakakis, a scrupulous editor. The author and publisher atomic number 18 grateful for the permission to reproduce extr feigns from T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909 1962, reprinted courtesy of Faber & Faber Ltd. Every effort has been make to baffle permission to phthisis copyright material in this book. Please converge the publisher if any omissions live with inadvertently occurred.SERIES EDITORS PREFACE The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to subjoin the lexicon of literary basis, in order to ad prune the radical changes which fork up interpreted be acheings in the study of literary works during the last decades of the twentieth century. The indicate is to provide actualise, well-illustrate d accounts of the full range of terminology currently in role, and to evolve histories of its changing usage. The current state of the content of literary studies is one where on that point is considerable debate c at a timerning staple fibre questions of terminology.This learns, among other things, the boundaries which distinguish the literary from the non-literary the lay of publications inside the larger sphere of culture the relationship surrounded by literatures of different cultures and questions concerning the relation of literary to other cultural forms deep down the mount of interdisciplinary studies. It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic and heterogenous one. The present need is for man-to-man volumes on scathe which combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of perspective and a breadth of application.Each volume de break away contain as part of its apparatus few indication of the direction in which the definiti on of exceptional toll is credibly to move, as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries within which some(prenominal) of these terms have been traditionally contained. This allow involve some re-situation of terms within the larger field of cultural representation, and forget introduce examples from the x flying field of film and the modern media in addition to examples from a variety of literary texts. INTRODUCTIONStylistics is an elusive and slippery topic. Every contri exactlyion to the vast and multifaceted adjust of literary studies forget involve an engagement with style. To accept that the causa of our tending or our critical essay is a poem, a novel or a play involves an acceptance that literature is divided into three basic stylistic registers. Even a recognition of literary studies as a wear schoolman sphere is prefigured by a grokd sign surrounded by literary and non-literary texts.Stylistics might thus seem to offer itself as an easily definable em ployment with specific serves and objectives Stylistics enables us to identify and concern the distinguishing holds of literary texts, and to destine the generic and structural subdivisions of literature. But it is non as simple as this. When we use or react to destination in the real earth our understanding of what the dustup mean is supplemented by a vast number of contextual and situational issues manner of speaking is an enabling device it allows us to articulate the sequence of choices, decisions, responses, acts and onsequences that make up our lives. Style will play some part in this, barg lone(prenominal) its usage is pragmatic and purposive we might admire the lucid confidence of the car advertisement or the political broadcast, nevertheless in the end we will look beyond the speech communication to the potential effect of their message upon our day to day activities. The style and wording of poems, novels and plays will ofttimes involve these purposive flows, only if when we look beyond their effect to their context we face a xii INTRODUCTION otentially disorientating relation betwixt what happens in the text and what might happen out-of-door it. Stylistics tidy sum tell us how to name the constituent parts of a literary text and enable us to register their operations, but in doing so it essential assume upon the terminology and methodological analysis of discip contentions which focus upon nomenclature in the real world. The study of thousand, narrative and dramatic duologue is founded upon the constitutional units and rules of all linguistic usage phonemes, rungic sequences, grammatical classes, forms of syntactic validation and so on.But these resembling fundamentals of communication alike underpin the methodology of pure linguistics, structuralism and semiotics, dis carry theory, sociolinguistics, gender studies, linguistic philosophy and a whole ne devilrk of discip blood stores which involves the context and pragmatic purpose of communication. Consequently, modern stylistics is caught betwixt two disciplinary imperatives. On the one hand it raises questions regarding the relation surrounded by the way that vocabulary is utilise and its patent context and objective manner of speaking as an active fragment of the real world.On the other, it seeks to define the particular use of linguistic constructions to manufacture facsimiles, models or distortions of the real worldliterary language. This convoluted relationship is the principal subject of this book. In Part I, I will consider the progress of modern stylistics from its origins in classical rhetoric to its matter in modern literary studies. This will focus upon the tension between stylistics as a purely literary-critical disciplineits function in be literature as an art form (which I call textualism)and its operations within the broader field of structuralism and social studies (contextualism).Part II will go over this tens ion in relation to literary history what is the relationship between literary style and historical context? Part III is a detailed study of two issues that feature in the margins of Parts I and II. Gender and Evaluation will be concerned with the way in which the twin grammatical constituents of feminist criticism and women writers relate to stylistics. INTRODUCTION xiii Evaluative Stylistics will look at how the discipline of stylistics underpins our subjective possess of reading. PART I A SHORT HISTORY OF STYLISTICS 1 cajolery The academician discipline of stylistics is a twentieth-century invention.It will be the purpose of this book to portray the aims and methods of stylistics, and we will begin by considering its relationship with its al just nearly notable trumpeter rhetoric. The term is derived from the Greek techne rhetorike, the art of speech, an art concerned with the use of mankind speaking as a means of persuasion. The inhabitants of Homers epics operation and , to a greater extent signifi gittly, acknowledge the capametropolis of language to affect and determine nonlinguistic events, but it was not until the fifth century BC that the Greek settlers of Sicily began to study, document and t for each one rhetoric as a unimaginative discipline.The best-known name calling argon Corax and Tisias who found that, in an island beset with political and judicial disagreements over land and civil rights, the art of persuasion was a useful and fat profession. Gorgias, one of their pupils, visited Athens as ambassador and he is generally regarded as the person responsible for piloting rhetoric beyond its judicial function into the spheres of philosophy and literary studies. Isocrates was the starting time to extend and promote the moral and honest benefits of the art of speech, and one of Platos earliest Socratic dialogues bears the name Gorgias.It is with Plato that we occur the close to significant blink of an eye in the early history of rh etoric. In the Phaedrus Plato/Socrates states that unless a man pays due attention to philosophy he will never RHETORIC 3 be able to speak by rights nigh anything (261 A). A real art of speakingwhich does not enamour hold of certain statement, does not exist and never will (260E). What concerned Plato was the feature that rhetoric was a device without moral or ethical subject matter.In the Gorgias he records an exchange between Socrates and Gorgias in which the former claims that persuasion is comparable with(predicate) with flattery, cooking and medicine it meets bodily needs and satisfies physical and emotional desires. Rhetoric, he argues, is not an art but a number, and such a routine, if allowed to take hold of our primary communicative intermediate, will promote division, rivalry and self-aggrandizement at the expense of collective rightfulness and wisdom, the principal subjects of philosophy.Plato himself, peculiarly in the Phaedrus, does not go so ut near as to intimate the banning of rhetoric sort of he argues that it must be systemise as subservient to the philosophers search for truth. Aristotle in his Rhetoric (c. 330 BC) produced the initiatory counter-blast to Platos anti-rhetoric thesis. Rhetoric, argues Aristotle, is an art, a necessary condition of philosophical debate. To perceive the resembling fact or argument dressed in different linguistic forms is not immoral or dangerous.Such a recognitionthat speech communication can qualify or unsettle a genius pre-linguistic truthis part of our intellectual training, vital to any purposive reconciliation of appearance and earth. Aristotle meets the claim that rhetoric is socially and politically dangerous with the counterclaim that the cogent office staff of speech is capable of pre-empting and superseding the violent physical manifestations of subjection and defence. The Plato-Aristotle exchange is not so much about rhetoric as an illustration of the dissentious record of rhetoric.It is replayed, with largely Aristotelian preferences, in the work of the two or so prominent Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian it emerges in the writings of St Augustine and in Peter Ramuss Dialectique (1555), one of the founding moments in the revival of classical rhetoric during the European Renaissance. Most significantly, it operates as 4 RHETORIC the theoretical spine which link up rhetoric with modern stylistics, and stylistics in turn with those other constituents of the contemporary discipline of humanities linguistics, structuralism and poststructuralism.Plato and Aristotle did not disagree on what rhetoric is their conflicts originated in the problematical relationship between language and truth. Rhetoric, particularly in capital of Italy and in post-Renaissance education, had been taught as a form of super-grammar. It provides us with names and pragmatical explanations of the devices by which language enables us to perform the various tasks of persuad ing, convincing and arguing. In an ideal world (Aristotles thesis) these tasks will be conducive to the private and the collective sizable.The rhetorician will know the truth, and his linguistic strategies will be employed as a means of disclosing the truth. In the real world (Platos thesis) rhetoric is a weapon used to bring the attendee into line with the argument which happens to satisfy the interests or personal affiliations of the loudspeaker system, neither of which will necessarily correspond with the truth. These two models of rhetorical usage are as valid and finally irreconcilable. Lies, stuffations, exaggerations are facts of language, but they can plainly be cited when the fissure between language and truth is provable.For example, if I were to tell you that I am a personal friend of Aristotle, known facts will be sufficient to convince you (unless you are a spiritualist) that I am not telling the truth. However, a statement such as, Aristotle speaks to me of the general usefulness of rhetoric is acceptable because it involves the use of a familiar rhetorical device (generally termed catachresis, the damage or mis-application of a term) Aristotle does not literally speak to me, but my use of the term to imply that his written haggle involve the sincerity or the immediate relevance of speech is sanctioned by rhetorical-stylistic convention.What I have done is to use a linguistic device to distort prelinguistic truth and to achieve an e antecedent effect at the kindred time. My debate for doing so would be to own a RHETORIC 5 supplementary persuasive edge to the specifics of my argument about the validity of Aristotles thesis. Such devices are part of the fabric of everyday linguistic exchange and, assuming that the attender is as conversant as the speaker with the conventions of this rhetorical game, they are not, in Platos terms, immoral or dishonest.But for Plato such innocuous examples were merely a symptom of the much more(pre nominal) than serious wakes of rhetorical infection. The fact that Aristotle lived more than two millennia forward me cannot be disputed, but the fabric of intellectual action mechanism and its linguistic manifestation is provided partly comprised of concrete facts. Morality, the worldly concern of god, the disposition of justice all of these correspond with the verifiable specifics of human existence, but our opinions about them cannot be verified in direct relation to these specifics.The common medium dual-lane by the abstract and the concrete dimensions of human experience is language and, as a consequence, language functions as the battleground for the tendentious activity of making the known correspond with the unknown, that speculative element of human existence that underpins all of our spirits about the nature of truth, justice, politics and behaviour.Plato and Aristotle named the conditions of this conflict as dianoia and pragmata ( notion and facts, otherwise kn own as res or content) and lexis and taxis (word choice and arrangement, otherwise known as verba or form), and the distinction raises two major problems that will eat up much of our attention doneout this book. First of all it can be argued that to make a distinction between languagein this instance the rhetorical organization of languageand the pre-linguistic continuum of thought, objects and events involves a fundamental error.Without language our experience of anything is al some maxly internalized and private we can, of course, make physical gestures, non-linguistic sounds or present pictures, but these do not take place close to the vast and multiform network of signs and meanings shared by language users. The most grand consequence of this condition of language 6 RHETORIC dependency is that we can never be certain whether the private world, the set of private experiences or beliefs, that language enables us to mediate is, as Plato and Aristotle argue, stainlessly ind ependent of its medium.The baffleing assumption for any exchange of views about the nature of existence and trutha process perfectly illustrated by Platos Socratic dialoguesis that language allows us to disclose the true nature of pre-linguistic fact. However, for such an exchange to take target at all each participant must submit to an inert system of rules and conventions. Before any disagreement regarding a fact or a principle can occur the combatants must first have agreed upon the relation between the fact/principle and its linguistic enactment.An agnostic and a Christian will have totally divergent perceptions of the nature of human existence, but both will know what the word paragon means. The twentieth-century alternative to Aristotles and Platos distinction between dianoia/pragmata and lexis/taxis has been provided by Ferdinand de Saussure, a turn-of-thecentury linguist whose influence upon modern ideas about language and reality has frame immeasurable.Saussures most quoted and influential propositions concern his distinction between the sentience and the manakin and his pronouncement that in language in that location are only diversions without positive terms. The signifier is the concrete linguistic sign, spoken or written, and the signified is the concept represented by the sign. A third element is the referent, the pre-linguistic object or condition that stands beyond the signifiersignified relationship. This tripartate function is, to say the least, unsteady.The atheistical and the Christian will share a largely identical supposition of the relation between God (signifier) and God (signified) but the atheist will regard this as a purely linguistic state, a fable sustained by language, but without a referent. For such an individual the signifier God relates not to a specific signified and referent, but to other signifiers and signifieds concepts of good and pretty, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, the whole network of signs which e nables RHETORIC 7 Christian belief to intersect with other elements of the human condition.In Saussures terms, the signified God is sustained by the differential relationship between itself and other words and concepts, and this will override its correspondence with a positive term (the referent). Plato and Aristotle shared the premise that it is dangerous and immoral to talk about something that does not exist, and that it is the responsibility of the philosopher to disclose such improper fissures between language and its referent. Saussures model of language poses a threat to this ideal by superlative the possibility that facts and thoughts might, to an extent, be constructs of the system of language.The relation between classical philosophy/rhetoric and Saussurean linguistics is far more complicated than my brief equivalentness might suggest, but it is certain that Saussure makes explicit elements of the divisive issue of whether rhetoric is a potentially dangerous practice. And this leads us to a imprimatur problem the relationship between language and literature. Plato in The Republic has much to say about literaturewhich at the time consisted of poetry in its dramatic or narrative forms.In Book 10 an exchange takes place regarding the nature of imitation and representation the subject is ostensibly art, but the originary motive is as usual the determining of the nature of truth. By the end of the dialogue Socrates has established a parallel hierarchy of media and physical activities. The work makes the demonstrable bed, but the idea or concept behind this act of humanity is Gods. The painter is placed at the next stage down in this creative hierarchy he can observe the carpenter making the bed and dutifully record this process.The poet, it seems, exists in a evenhandedly ambiguous relation to this column of originators, makers and imitators. Perhaps they poets may have come across imitators and been deceived by them they may not have remembered when they saw their full treatment that these were but imitations thrice removed from the truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the 8 RHETORIC truth, because they are appearances only and not realities. (1888312) In short, the poet is capable of unsettling the hierarchy which sustains the clear relation between appearance and reality.Poets, as Aristotle and Plato recognized, are pure rhetoricians they work within a kind of metalanguage which draws incessantly upon the devices of rhetoric but which is not primarily involved in the practical activities of argument and persuasion. As the above quote suggests, they move disconcertingly through the various levels of creation, imitation and deception, and as Plato made clear, such fickle mediators were not the most welcome inhabitants in a Republic founded upon a clear and unitary correspondence between appearance and reality.Platos designation of literature as a form which feeds upon the devices of more practical and purposive linguistic preachings, but whose function beyond a form of whimsical diversionary attack is uncertain, has for two millenia been widely debated but has remained the dominant thesis. During the English Renaissance there was an outpouring of largely practical books on the proper use of rhetoric and rhetorical devices for example R. Sherrys A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), T. Wilsons The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), R. Rainoldes A Book Called the Foundation of Rhetorike (1563), H.Peachams The Garden of Eloquence (1577) and G. Puttenhams The Arte of English Poesie (1589). These were aimed at users of literary and non-literary language, but a distinction was frequently made between the literary and the non-literary function of rhetoric. In George Puttenhams The Arte of English Poesie we go on that there are specific regulations regarding the correspondence between literary style and subject (derived chiefly from Ciceros distinction between the grand style, the phili a style and the low, plain or simple style).The crossing of recommended style-subject borders was regarded as bad writing, but a far more serious offence would be committed RHETORIC 9 if the most extravagant rhetorical, and by tax deduction literary, devices were transplanted into the serious realms of non-literary exchange. Metaphors or figures are, according to Puttenham, particularly dangerous. For what else is your Metaphor but an eversion of sentience by transport your allegorie by a duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation under covert and minatorye intendments (1589158).Judges, for example, forbid such extravagances because they distort the truth This no doubt is true and was by then gravely considered but in this case, because our maker or Poet is appointed not for a judge, but rather for a pleader, and that of pleasant and lovely causes and nothing perillous, such as be for the triall of life, limme, or livelihoodthey extravagant fables are not in truth to be accompted v ices but for vertues in the poeticalal science very commendable. (ibid. 161)poesy does of course involve perillous matters, but what Puttenham means is that the poetic function is not implemental in activities concerned with actual life, limme, or livelihood. As a spokesman for the Renaissance consensus Puttenham shows that the Plato/Aristotle debate regarding the dangers of rhetoric, especially in its literary manifestation, has been shelved rather than obdurate in short, Puttenham argues that in literature it is permissible to distort reality because literature is safely detached from the type of chat that might have some purposive effect upon the real conditions of its participants.What Puttenham said in 1589 remains true today literary and non-literary texts might share a number of stylistic features but literary texts do not belong in the same category of functional, purposive language as the judicial ruling or the theological tract. This begs a question which modern styli stics, far more than rhetoric, has desire to address. How do we judge the end between literary and non-literary discussions? We 10 RHETORIC ave not finished with rhetoric, but in order to properly consider the two issues raised by itthe relation between language and non-linguistic reality and the difference between literary and non-literary textswe should now begin to examine its far more slippery and eclectic modern counterpart. 2 STYLISTICS AND MODERN objurgation Two groups of critics have had a major influence on the individualism and direction of twentieth-century English studies the Russian and central European Formalists and the more different collection of British and American teachers and writers whose academic careers began during the 1920s and 1930s.The term New Criticism is often applied to the latter group. The objectives of the volume of individuals in each group were the same to define literature as a discourse and art form and to establish its function as someth ing that can be properly studied. Until the late 1950s the work of these groups remained within mutually exclusive geographical and academic contexts the New Critics in Britain and America and the Formalists in Europe. During the sixties New Criticism and Formalism began to recognize similarities and overlaps in their goals and methods.Since the 1960s their academic predominance has been precarious by a much broader network of interdisciplinary practices structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism and new historicism, are all significant elements of contemporary literary studies, and each draws its methodologies and expectations from intellectual fields beyond the traditional, enclosed realms of rhetoric and aesthetics. This, I concede, is a simplified history of twentiethcentury criticism, but it provides us with a mannikin for an understanding of how rhetoric has been variously transformed into modern stylistics.The New Critics and the Formalists are the most obvious inheritors of the disciplines 12 STYLISTICS AND MODERN CRITICISM of rhetoric, in the sense that they have maintained a belief in the empirical difference between literature and other types of language and have attempted to specify this difference in terms of style and effect. Structuralism at once extended and questioned these practices by concentrating on the similarities, rather than the differences, between literature and other discourses.Poststructuralism took this a stage further by introducing the reader into the relation between literary and non-literary style, and posing the question of whether the expectations of the perceiver can determine, rather than apparent(a)ly disclose, stylistic effects and meanings. Feminist critics have examined style less as an enclosed characteristic of a particular text and more as a reflection of the sociocultural hierarchiespredominantly manlikewhich control stylistic habits and methods of interpretation.Similarly, Marxists and new historicists conce rn themselves with style as an element of the more important agenda of cultural and ideological change and mutation. For the sake of convenience I shall divide these different approaches to stylistics into two basic categories textualist and contextualist. The Formalists and New Critics are in the main textualists in that they regard the stylistic features of a particular literary text as productive of an empirical unison and send offness. They do not perceive literary style as entirely exclusive to literaturerhythm is an element of all spoken language, and narrative features in ordinary onversationbut when these stylistic features are combined so as to master the fabric of a text, that text is regarded as literature. Contextualism involves a far more gratuitous and disparate collection of methods. Its unifying characteristic is its concentration on the relation between text and context. nearly structuralists argue that the stylistic features of poetry draw upon the same stru ctural frameworks that enable us to distinguish between modes of dress or such social rituals as have.Some feminists regard literary style as a means of securing attitudes and hierarchies that, in the broader context, maintain the difference between male and female roles. STYLISTICS AND MODERN CRITICISM 13 The remainder of this Part is divided into three chapters. The first two will examine in basic terms how modern criticism has employed stylistics to evolve theories of poetry and fiction these chapters will be concerned predominantly with textualist method and practice. Chapter 5 is more concerned with contextualism and will consider the ways in which the porthole between text and context can unsettle textualist assumptions. TEXTUALISM I numbers The first part of this chapter will give brief definitions, with examples, of the devices and linguistic elements that play the stylistic character of post-medieval English poetry prosody and poetic form fourth dimension poetry and th e stanza the sonnet the ode blank poesy clean-handed measure fable sentence grammatical construction, diction and vocabulary. Following this is a section on critical methods, which will include examples of how the listed devices and linguistic elements are deployed by critics in their attempts to show how poetic style creates particular meanings and effects.PROSODY AND POETIC FORM The most basic and enduring definition of poetry is that the poem, unlike any other company of words, supplements the use of grammar and phrase structure with another system of organization the poetic line. The poetic line draws upon the same linguistic raw material as the clock time but deploys and uses this in a different way. Our awareness of the grammatical rules which govern the way that words are formed into larger units of meaning is found on our ability to recognize the difference between individual words.Words are made up of sound and underline, identified respectively by the phoneme and the syllable. The function of sound and focus in non-poetic language is functional and utilitarian before we understand the operative relation between nouns, verbs, adjectives and TEXTUALISM I POETRY 15 connectives we need to be able to relate the sound and structure of a word to its meaning. Traditional poetry uses var. and sound not only as markers and indicators of meaning but also as a way of measuring and foregrounding the principal structural characteristic of the poem the line.In most poems written before the twentieth-century the line is constructed from a cabal of two or more of the following elements A specified and predictable number of syllables. The most commonly used example of this is the ten-syllable line, the pentameter. A metrical pattern consisting of the relation between the stress or emphasis of adjacent syllables. The most frequently used metrical pattern in English involves the use of the iambic foot, where an emphatic syllable follows a less emphatic on e, with occasional variations, or stress reversals. poesy.The repetition of the phonemic sound of a single syllable at the end of a line. Assonance and alliteration. The repetition of clusters of similar vowel or harmonious sounds within individual lines and across sequences of lines. The persistent and predictable deployment of two or more of these features is what allows us to recognize the traditional line as an organizing feature of most pre-twentieth-century poems. METRE The iambic pentameter, consisting of ten syllables with the even syllables stressed more emphatically than the odd, is the most frequently used line in English poetry.It is the governing principle of Shakespeares blank meter of nondramatic blank versify poems, including backside Miltons promised land Lost (1667) and William Wordsworths Prelude, and of the heroic braces, the structural centrepiece of most 16 TEXTUALISM I POETRY (from Miltons heaven Lost) (from Swifts Cassinus and Peter) of the poems of John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Examples of its shorter version, the octosyllabic line or tetrameter can be found in many of the couplet poems of Swift, in Matthew Arnolds Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse (1885), and in Alfred, Lord Tennysons In Memoriam (1850).The iambic pentameter consists of five iambic feet, its tetrameter counterpart of four. The following are examples of these, with indicating the most emphatic andthe less emphatic syllables. These are examples of stress-syllabic metre, in which a ordered balance is maintained between the number of syllables of a line and its stress pattern. Alternative stresssyllabic lines include seven-syllable tetrameters (see William Blakes The Tyger), which are comprised of three iambic feet and a single stressed syllable,Lines such as this, with an odd number of syllables, can also be scanned as trochaic The trochaic foot more frequently features as a substitute or variation in a line of iambic feet. This occurs in the first foot of Sh akespeares line Stress-syllabic lines consisting of three-syllable feet are generally touch ond with comic poetry and song. The threesyllable foot creates a rhythmic pattern that deviates from the modulation of ordinary speech far more than its twosyllable counterpart as in Oliver Goldsmiths couplet, consisting of anapestic (/)feet. TEXTUALISM I POETRY 17Some poems vary the syllabic length of a line, while maintaining the same number of emphatic or stressed syllables in each. This is called pure stress metre. An early example of pure stress metre is Samuel Taylor Coleridges Christabel (1816) and a more recent one occurs in T. S. Eliots Ash Wednesday (1930), in which the differing length of each line is anchored to a repeated pattern of two major stresses. Lady of si ences Calm and distressed Torn and most whole Rose of memory The internal structure of the poetic line is only one element of its function as the organizing principle of poetry.RHYME AND THE STANZA Rhyme binds lines tog ether into larger structural units. The smallest of these is the couplet, create verbally aa bb cc (as in the majority of poems by Dryden, Pope and Jonathan Swift). More entangled rhyme schemes enable the poet to create stanzas, the simplest of these being the quatrain, rhyming ab ab. (The octosyllabic quatrain is used by John gullne in The Ecstasy and its pentameter counter-part in Thomas Grays Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard(1751). The stanza can play a number of roles in the broader structure of the poem.Narrative poems, which tell a story, often use the stanza as a way of emphasizing a particular event or observation while tying this into the broader narrative (as in Edmund Spensers long The Faerie Queene, John Keatss The Eve of St Agnes and Lord Byrons Don 18 TEXTUALISM I POETRY Juan). Tennysons In Memoriam uses the socalled envelope stanza (a b b a). This couplet within a couplet provides a perfunctory differ to the tragic or emotional focus of each stanza. Shorter , terminology poems which focus on a specific sensation, feeling or single event often use the stanza as a counterpoint to improvisation and spontaneity.Donnes The Relic consists of three very complicated stanzas. 8 8 8 8 6 10 7 10 10 10 10 syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables syllables When my grave is broke up again Some second guest to entertain, (For graves have learned that woman- interrogative To be to more than one a bed) And he that digs it spies A bracelet of glorious hair about the organize, Will he not let us alone And think that there a loving couple lies, Who thought that this device might be some way To make their souls, at the last busy day Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?On the one hand the complex permutations of line length and rhyme scheme create the impression of flexibility and improvisation, as if the metrical structure of the poem is responding to and following the varied emphases of speech. But this stanzaic structure is repeated, with admirable precision, three times and as we read the poem in its entirety we find that the flexibility of the syntax is matched by the insistent rigidity of the stanza. THE SONNET The sonnet resembles the stanza in that it consists of an ntegrated unit of metre and rhyme the Shakespearean sonnet consisting of three iambic pentameter quatrains followed by an iambic pentameter couplet, its Petrarchan counterpart rhyming abba abba cdc dcd. It differs from the stanza in that TEXTUALISM I POETRY 19 the sonnet is a actualize poem. Most sonnets will emphasize a particular event or theme and tie this into the symmetries, repetitions and parallels of its metrical and rhyming structure. THE ODE The most flexible and inconsistent stanzaic form will be found in the ode. Wordsworths Ode on Intimations of Immortality consists of eleven sections.Each of these has a pattern of metre and rhyme just as complex and varied as Donnes stanza in Th e Relic, except that in the Immortality Ode the same pattern is never repeated. The liberal, flexible structure of the ode is well suited to its use, especially by the Romantic poets, as a medium for personal reflection it rarely tells a particular story, and it eschews logical and doctrinal argument in favour of an apparently random sequence of questions, hypotheses and similaritys. snowy VERSE A form which offers a similar degree of emancipation from formal regularity is blank verse, consisting of unrhymed iambic pentameters.Prior to Miltons enlightenment Lost blank verse was regarded as a mixture of poetry and prose. It was thought appropriate only for drama, in which language could be recognizably poetic (i. e. metrical) while maintaining realistic elements of dialogue and ordinary speech (without rhyme). Paradise Lost offered blank verse as an alternative to the use of the stanza or the couplet in longer narrative or descriptive poems. Miltons blank verse creates a subtle tension between the iambic pattern of each line and the broader flow across lines of descriptive or impassioned speech (see below, pp. 289, for an example).A similar balance between excursive or reflective language and the metrical undertow of the blank verse line is found in the eighteenth-century tradition of landscape poems (see James Thomsons The Seasons and 20 TEXTUALISM I POETRY William Cowpers The Task) and in Wordsworths Tintern Abbey and The Prelude. The most flexible examples of blank verse, where it aims difficult to distinguish between prose rhythm and metre, are found in the poems of Robert Browning, particularly The Ring and the Book (1868 9) So Did I stand question and make answer, still With the same result of gay disbelief, Polite impossibility of faith.FREE VERSE Before the twentieth-century, poems which involved neither rhyme nor the metrical pattern of blank verse were rare. Christopher Smarts be on cloud nine Agno (1756) and Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass (18 55) replaced traditional metre with patterns redolent of biblical phrase and intonation, and Blake in his later visionary poems (1789 1815) devised a very individual form of free verse. It was not until this century that free verse became an established part of the formal repertoire of English poetry. uncaring verse (from the French vers libre) is only free in the sense that it does not conform to traditional patterns of metre and rhyme.The poetic line is maintained as a structural counterpoint to syntax, but is not definable in abstract metrical terms. Free verse can be divided into three basic categories 1. Poetry which continues and extends the least restrictive elements of traditional poetry, particularly those of the ode and blank verse. T. S. Eliots The bonk Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) is a monologue with an unpredictable rhyme scheme and a rhythmic structure that invokes traditional metre but refuses to maintain a regular beat or pattern. A similar effect is achieved in TEXTUALISM I POETRY 21 W. H. Audens Musee des Beaux Arts.In The quatern Quartets (193542) Eliot often uses an unrhymed form that resembles blank verse, of which the following, from the inauguration of Little Gidding, is an example M dwinter spr ng is its o n season Sempiternal though sodden towards s ndown, Suspended in ti e, between pole and tropic. The lines of the poem vary between 9 and 13 syllables. Regular metre is replaced by the distribution of three to five major stresses across each line. Although the lines cannot be scanned according to expectations of regularity they do create the impression that Eliot is bighearted special attention to rhythmic structure. . Poems in which the line structure reflects the apparent spontaneity of ordinary speech, where, unlike in Little Gidding, no concessions are made to a metrical undertow. Line divisions will often be used as an imitation of the process through which we transform thoughts, impressions and experiences into langua ge. Easthope (1983) calls this form intonational metre. A typical example of this is D. H. Lawrences Snake. A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there. 3.Poems in which the unmetrical line variously obstructs, deviates from or interferes with the strawman of syntax. In Ezra chaws In a Station of the Metro the two lines function as an alternative to the continuities of grammar. The apparition of those faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough. 22 TEXTUALISM I POETRY The space between the lines could be filled by a variety of imagined connecting phrases are like, are unlike, remind me of, are as lonely as. Individual lines offer specific run intos or impressions the reader makes connections between them.In William Carlos Williamss Spring and All the line structure orchestrates the syntax and creates a complex network of hesitations and progressions, and for an example of this turn to pp. 1547. The most extreme example of ho w the free verse line can appropriate and disrupt the structural functions of syntax will be found in the poems of e. e. cummings, where the linear movement of language is effectively broken down into visual units. The best, brief guide to the chemical mechanism of prosody and metre is Hobsbaums Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (1996).A more methodical survey of linguistics and poetic form is Bradfords A Linguistic History of English Poetry (1993). T. V. F. Brogans English Versification 15701980 (1981) provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography of works on all types of metre and verse form. METAPHOR Metaphor is derived from the Greek verb that means to carry over. When words are used illustrationically, one field of reference is carried over or transferred into another. Wordsworth (in Resolution and Independence) states that The sky wallows in the mornings birth. He carries over two ery human attributes to the non-human phenomena of the sky and the morning the ability to rejoic e and to give birth. I. A. Richards (1936) devised a formula that enables us to specify the process of carrying over. The melodic phrase voice of the parable is its principal subject, the topic addressed in Wordsworths line the tenor is the speakers perception of the sky and the morning. The fomite is the additive or the subject carried over from another field of reference to that of TEXTUALISM I POETRY 23 the subject in Wordsworths line the activities of rapture and giving birth.Metaphor is often referred to as a poetic device but it is not exclusive to poetry. Metaphors will be found in newspaper publisher articles on economics The war vehicle against inflation tenor in ordinary intercourse At yesterdays meeting tenor I broke the ice vehicle in novels He cowered in the shadow vehicle of the thought tenor (James Joyces A Portrait of the creative person as a Young Man) and in advertisements This car is as good on paper vehicle as it is on the road tenor. The principal diffe rence between Wordsworths metaphor and its non-poetic counterparts is its integration with the iambic pentameter.We could retain the metaphor and lose the metre turn it into the kind of unmetrical sentence that might open a short story or a novel I watched the sky rejoice in the birth of the morning. One thing muzzy is the way in which the pentameter organizes and emphasizes the tenor and vehicle of the metaphorsky r joic s and mor ings bi th. In order to properly consider differences between poetic and non-poetic uses of metaphor we should add a third element to tenor and vehicle the ground of the metaphor (see Leech, 1969151).The ground is essentially the context and motivation of the metaphor. For the journalist the ground of the metaphor is the general topic of economics and inflation and the particular point that he/she is attempting to make about these issues. For the conversationalist the ground is the awareness, shared with the addressee, of yesterdays meeting and his/her role in it. For the advertiser the ground involves the rest of the advertisement, giving details of the make, price and exploit of the car, and the general context in which cars are discussed and sold.In non-poetic uses of metaphor the ground or context stabilizes the relation between tenor and vehicle. The metaphor will involve a self-conscious 24 TEXTUALISM I POETRY personnel casualty from the routine and familiar relationship between language and reality. It would be regarded as ridiculous and mildly disturbing if the conversationalist were to allow the original metaphor to dominate the rest of his/her discourse I sank through the broken ice into the unheated water of the boardroom. There we all were fishes swimming through a dark hostile world.In poems, however, this relation between ground, tenor and vehicle is often reversed. It is the language of the poem, as much as the readers a priori knowledge, which creates its perceived situation and context. It constructs its own g round, and metaphor becomes less a departure from contextual terms and conditions and more a device which appropriates and even establishes them. In John Donnes The Flea the tenor is the insect itself and the bite it has inflicted on the male speaker and the female listener.The speaker carries over this tenor into such an grand diversity of vehicles that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the ground outside the words of the text and the ground which the text appropriates and continually transforms. This flea is you and I, and this Our labor union bed and marriage temple is. We know that this flea is the tenor, but the relation between tenor and ground becomes less certain with is you and I. On the one hand it is literally part of them since it has sucked and mixed their blood.On the other the speaker has already incorporated this image of physical unity into a vehicle involving their emotional and sexual lives. He builds on this with the vehicle of the marriage bed and ex tends it into an image of spiritual, external unity in the marriage temple. Throughout the poem the flea and the bite become gradually detached from their actual context and threaded into a filament of speculative and fantastic associations. In ordinary language metaphor usually stands out from the rest of the discursive or factual nature of the statement. In TEXTUALISM I POETRY 25 oetry a particular use of metaphor will often underpin and influence the major themes of the entire text. Donnes The Ecstasy opens with a simile (the bank is like a pillow, rather than is a pillow) but thereafter maintains a close, metaphoric, relation between tenor and vehicle, Where, like a pillow on a bed, A with child(predicate) bank swelled up to rest The violets reclining head Sat we two, one anothers best The tenor is the garden in which we two are situated the vehicle is a combination of images denoting intimacy and sexuality pillow, bed, pregnant, swelled up, the violets (flower, denoting fema le) reclining head.This opening instance of the carrying over of inelegant horticultural images into the sphere of human sexuality becomes the predominant theme of the entire poem, underpinning more adventurous speculations on the nature of the soul. Again the dynamics of severalize and associating verbal images has unsettled the stabilizing function of ground or context.Donne is one of the so-called metaphysical school of poetic writers whose taste for extended metaphor is a principal characteristic of their verse, but the practice of creating tensions and associations between the words and images of the poem at the expense of an external context transcends schools, fashions and historical groupings. In Keatss Ode to a Nightingale the image of the real tinkers damn becomes a springboard for a complex sequence of associations and resonances song, poetry, immortality, age, youth, death.The sense of there being a specific place and time in which Keats saw the birdwatch and heard i ts song is gradually replaced by the dynamics of Keatss associatory faculties the relation between the vehicles unsettles the relation between vehicle and tenor. The following is from the beginning of stanza 3 26 TEXTUALISM I POETRY Fade far away, dissolve, and preferably forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan The principal vehicle is Keatss shifting of the bird into an apparently ratiocinative, cognitive addressee, who understands his words.This at the same time is unsettled by his constant return to the commonsense tenor of a bird without human faculties. The dynamic tension here becomes evident in Keatss contradictory request that the nightingale should forget those human qualities or frailties which, as he concedes in the next line, it had never and could never have known. A classic case of vehicle undermining tenor occurs in T. S. Eliots The dear Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (line s 1522).This begins with the tenor (the city fog) being carried over into the vehicle of an unspecified animal which rubs its back upon the window-panes, rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its clapper into the corners of the evening. By the end of the passage the actual vision of city streets which inspired the comparison has been overtaken by the physical presence of this strange beast, which perceive that it was a soft October night,/Curled once about the house, and fell sound asleep(predicate). Metaphor is the most economical, adventurous and concentrated example of the general principle of carrying over.Samuel Johnson defined metaphor in his Dictionary (1755) as a simile compressed in a word. Donnes metaphor (from The Relic), a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, would, as a simile, be something like the brightness of the hair about the bone reminds me of the difference between life and death. Simile postulates the comparison X is like Y. Metaphor synthesizes the comparison X is Y. Metonymy is logical metaphor, in which the comparison is founded upon an actual, verifiable relation between objects or impressions crown is used instead of TEXTUALISM I POETRY 27 king, queen or royalty.Allegory involves an extended parallel between a narrative and a subtext which mirrors the relation between the text and reality. Spensers The Faerie Queen (15906) is a medieval fantasy with allegorical parallels in the real world of the Elizabethan court. Simile, metonymy and allegory establish a balanced relationship between the use of language and conventional perceptions of reality, and occur as frequently in non-poetic discourse as in poetry. Metaphor involves language in an unbalancing of perceptions of reality and is more closely allied to the experimental character of poetry.SYNTAX, DICTION AND VOCABULARY The terms poetic diction and poetic syntax should be treated with caution. all word, clause, phrase, grammatical habit or locution used in non-poetic la nguage can be used in poetry. But their presence within the poem will subtly alter their familiar non-poetic function. For example, in Donnes The Flea the speaker reflects upon the likely objections to his proposal to the woman Though parents grudge, and you, we are met And sequestered in these living walls of jet. We might explain the use of the phrase and you as a result of hurried and improvised speech. Though you and your parents grudge would be a more correct form. ) But the fact that the placing of the phrase maintains the movement of the iambic metre and the symmetry of the two lines of the couplet shows us that the speech is anything but improvised. The metrical structure of a poem can conciliate the apparent hesitations and spontaneities of ordinary speech, but at the same time heal them as parts of a carefully structured artefact. Consider what happens when syntax crosses the space between two poetic lines, an effect known 28 TEXTUALISM I POETRY s enjambment. A classic example of this occurs in the opening lines of Miltons Paradise Lost Of Mans first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste The implied pause at the line ending might suggest, on Miltons part, a slight moment of indecision is he thinking of the figurative fruit (that is, the result and consequences) of mans disobedience, or the literal fruit of the act of disobedience? He chooses the latter. The placing of the word might also be interpreted as the complete opposite of fleeting indecision.The tension between the actuality of the fruit and the uncertain consequences of eating it is a fundamental theme of the poem, and Milton encodes this tension within the form of the poem even before its narrative begins. In non-poetic language the progress of syntax can be influenced by a number of external factors an act or verbal interruption by someone else, the uncertainty of the speaker or the fraught circumstances of the speech act known in stylistics as the prag matic or functional registers of language.For example, conversations often consist of broken, partial syntactic units because both speakers are contributing to the same discourse, which will also involve a shared non-verbal frame of reference Look at this, its Well, its big enough, Whoa, sorry. Its OK, itll clean up. In poetry apparent hesitations or disturbances of syntax are a function of the carefully planned, integrated structure of the text. The ability of poetry to absorb and recontextualize the devices and registers of non-poetic language is evident also in its use of diction, vocabulary, and phrasing.The social or local associations of particular words or locutionary habits TEXTUALISM I POETRY 29 can be carried into a poem but their familiar context will be transformed by their new structural framework. In Tony Harrisons V (1985) the poet converses in a Leeds cemetery with an imagined skinhead whose hobbies include the spraying of graffiti on to gravestones Listen cunt I said, Before you start your jeering The reason why I want this in a book s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing A book, yer nitwitted cunts not worth a fuck.The diction and idiom of both speakers is workings class and Northern, but this specific, locative resonance is itself contained within a separate language, with its own conventions each constituental idiomatic flourish is confidently, almost elegantly, conciliate to the demands of the iambic pentameter and the quatrain. The realistic crudity of the language is juxtaposed with the controlled irony of Harrisons formal design the skinheads real presence is appropriated to the unreal structure of the poem, involving the internal and external rhymes, book and fuck.In a broader context, the language of confinement Leeds is integrated with the same stanzaic structure used by Gray in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in which the poet similarly appropriates the voice of a hoary-headed fellow. Haply some hoary-he aded swain may say, Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn brushwood with hasty steps the dews away To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.Grays and Harrisons language and experience are centuries and worlds apartthe diction of the hoary-headed individual is rather more delicate than that of his skinheaded counterpartbut their differences are counterpointed against their bound within the same ahistorical stanzaic framework. 30 TEXTUALISM I POETRY This mark for poetry to represent and at the same time colonize the habits of non-poetic discourse is a paradox that has taxed poets and criticsmost famously in Wordsworths say to Lyrical Ballads (1798).Wordsworth rails against the stultifying poeticization of ordinary language, of how the conventions and style of eighteenth-century verse had dispossessed poetry of the real language of men. But while he advocates a new kind of poetic writing he concedes that poetry must announce its difference in a way that will entirely separate the co mposition from the vulgarity and familiarity of ordinary life. In short, although poetry should be about ordinary life it must by its very nature be separate from it. D. H.Lawrences poems in the Nottinghamshire dialect, Robert fires and Hugh MacDiarmids use of Scots idiom, grammar and diction emphasize region and very often class, but no matter where the words come from or what social or political affiliations they carry, they are always appropriated and acted upon by the internal structures of poetry. Wordsworths desire to separate poetry from the Vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life sounds suspiciously elitist and exclusive, and there is evidence of this in the work of a number of our most celebrated poets.In Part II of The chase away Land (1922) Eliot represents the speech patterns and, so he assumes, the concerns of working-class women Now Alberts coming back, make yourself a bit smart. Hell want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. We will be expected to note the difference between this passage and the sophisticated summons of metre and multicultural references of the poems principal male voice, Tiresias. With whom would we associate T. S. Eliot? Tiresias or the women?The sense of poetry as carrying social and political allegiances (principally male, white, English, marrow class, TEXTUALISM I POETRY 31 educated) has prompted acts of stylistic revolution. William Carlos Williams in the free verse of Spring and All and Paterson (194658) effectively discards those conventions of rhyme and metre that restrict his use of ordinary American phrasing and vocabulary (see pp. 1547 for examples). Linton Kwesi Johnson makes the structure of his poems respond to the character of his language. But love is just a word give it MEAN IN thruHACKSHAN. MEANIN and HACKSHAN are words appropriated from standard English by West Indians, and the fact that Johnson has used poetry to emphasize their ownership is significant. The pre posterous concentrations and foregroundings of poetry can unsettle just as much as they can underpin the allegiances and ideologies of diction and vocabulary. CRITICAL METHODS So far I have considered three principal characteristics of poetry and the