Sherry Chandler

On the nature of meter

Some snippets from a classic on the subject of meter, Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

“Rhythm must have meaning,” Ezra Pound insisted in 1915. And he is right. The empirical study of poetry will convince us that meter is a prime physical and emotional constituent of poetic meaning.

…

Which is to say that regardless of the amount and quality of intellectual and emotional analysis that precedes poetic composition, in the moment of composition itself the poet is most conspicuously performing as a metrist. And the same principle holds for the reader: at the moment of his first apprehension of the poem he functions less as semanticist than as a more or less unwitting prosodist.

…

When Boswell asked Johnson, “What is poetry?” Johnson answered: “Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.” In the same way, everyone knows what meter is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.

…

Civilization is an impulse toward order; but high civilizations are those which operate from a base of order without at the same time denying the claims of the unpredictable and even the irrational. The impulse toward the metrical organization of assertions seems to partake of the more inclusive human impulse toward order. Meter is what results when the natural rhythmical movements of colloquial speech are heightened, organized, and regulated so that pattern—which means repetition—emerges from the relative phonetic haphazard of ordinary utterance. Because it inhabits the physical form of the words themselves, meter is the most fundamental technique of order available to the poet. The other poetic techniques of order—rhyme, line division, stanzaic form, and over-all structure—are all projections and magnifications of the kind of formalizing repetition which meter embodies. They are meter writ large. (pp. 3-5)

The mark of a great poem is not just how it establishes its rules of order but in how it breaks those established rules. Too much order, an order too strongly imposed, is the mark of doggerel. Great poems, like great civilizations, strike a balance between order and the chaos from which creativity springs.

And just as an aside, because all roads lead to politics, democracy is like poetry in that it requires order — people must be safe to go about their daily lives — and also a certain amount of chaos. A people overprotected are not free. So Congress may think in passing this latest totally unnecessary FISA bill, they are protecting us from the dangers of external attack. That is I suppose the most generous interpretation. More cynical is the thought that it’s the telecoms they’re protecting. Be that as it may, what they actually seem to be doing is creating a daddy state and imposing order, thus destroying the essence of our democracy from within.

1. On the politics of meter
2. On Meter and Patience
3. No such thing as formless poetry
4. More on the politics of meter
5. Form is to Content

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