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Free, Verse, Rhythm An Introduction

Article in Style · March 2015

DOI: 10.5325/style.49.1.0001

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 Free, Verse, Rhythm
An Introduction

Roi Tartakovsky
New York University

Fr e e V e r s e v er s u s Rh y t hm

Take this very sentence, for example. Read it a few times. Read it again. Does
it have rhythm? Or, put differently, is there a (legitimate?) way to read it that
can expose the rhythm that it has, or give it rhythm? Does it come down to
performance? Could the act of lineating this sentence grant it rhythm? Could
some other linguistic or cultural context used to frame this sentence give it
rhythm? If we knew that it was taken from a poem deemed to be metrical,
would we be more inclined to find or make it rhythmical? Of course a large
part of the answers to these questions would come down to our definition of
rhythm, rightly described in a parenthetical aside by T. V. F. Brogan as “surely
the vaguest term in criticism” (1068).
Taking the road most travelled by, we would probably focus on syllables;
given that the sentence is in English, we would be attentive to the distri-
bution of stressed and unstressed ones. Although any sequence of words
can technically be scanned for stresses and slacks, one is often searching
for some recurrence or patterning. Indeed, a typical description of rhythm
refers to things such as regularity, repetition, expectations, and pattern.1
Finding such recurrences, under certain conditions which themselves are
subject to debate, can salvage the line (is this a line?) from nonrhythmicity
or arrhythmia. When the recurrence is palpable and recognizable enough,
we would probably place the line within metricity, and therefore certainly
within rhythmicity.
In fact, rhythm and meter, at least within literary prosody and pedagogy,
are so commonly linked, and the focus of prosodic study on the cases of
meter is so dominant, that it is not a trivial matter to think of rhythm outside

Style, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2015. Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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a metrical context. Take, for example, Philip Hobsbaum: “Metre is a blue-

print; rhythm is the inhabited building. Metre is a skeleton; rhythm is the
functioning body. Metre is a map; rhythm is a land” (7). These metaphors
convey both the connection and the distinction between the two terms:
whereas the metrical pattern is a deep-structure defining feature of the verse
line, rhythm is what is fleshed out in the phenomenology of the specific
line. Yvor Winters makes the same point when he writes that, though the two
terms are often confused, “Meter is the arithmetical norm,” and “rhythm is
controlled departure from that norm” (133).2
G. S. Fraser writes that a “succession of lines of the same metrical pattern,
a succession of iambic pentameters, for instance, is rather like the succession
of waves breaking on the shore. Each has a similar pattern . . . but none is
absolutely identical with any other” (2). Two lines of iambic pentameter, then,
are identical metrically, but may still differ rhythmically. Traditional foot-sub-
stitution approaches capture part of the flexibility and enormous rhythmic
variations between the two lines of iambic pentameter (e.g., trochaic sub-
stitution, truncated foot, extrametrical syllable).3 Variation is also elegantly
captured by generative prosody, which aims to delineate the contours of
the boundary between the metrical and nonmetrical. The number and loca-
tion of in-line pauses (caesuras and other breaks), as features not captured
by simple scansion, also contribute to rhythmic variation. In addition, the
difference between the two iambic pentameter lines could reside in relative
degrees of stress, since “iambic” typically means any foot in which the first
syllable is somehow less stressed than the second. Using a more elaborate
system of degrees of stress (like Trager and Smith’s system that utilizes four
such degrees) would expose other differences between the two iambic lines.
Thus, in much of the thinking that is represented by the foregoing, rhythm
and meter are interdependent. Understanding meter as a case of rhythmic
regularity, or rhythm as a controlled departure from a metrical base, offers a
conveniently simplified way to discuss rhythm and to combat its daunting
vagueness. But this way of understanding rhythm assumes that there is an
underlying meter to the line, an assumption that is not always valid when we
shift to talk of some of the freer kinds of the likewise vague “free verse.” So
what would be the rhythm of free verse?
If we understand free verse as verse that is nonmetrical, and rhythm as
contingent, if not on meter, then at least upon some kind of recurrence or
regularity or patterning, we recognize how free verse and rhythm may seem

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incompatible. If we take a free verse poem and find that it has underlying
or manifest patterning, and tie that patterning to rhythmicity, have we not
voided the poem’s status as free verse? This kind of “free verse versus rhythm”
conundrum is a difficulty at the heart of the attempts to define the rhythm of
free verse. When taken to extremes, one may conclude that a text can either
be free or have rhythm. Eliot’s famous voiding of the very descriptor “free”
for verse comes quickly to mind: “no verse is free for the man who wants
to do a good job” (31). In this context, we may tweak it and say: no verse
can be free of rhythm. This type of thinking also informs the attempts to
disprove the freeness of free verse. Martin Duffell, for example, insists that
“much modern verse that has been called ‘free’ is better categorized as either
flexible pentameters or five-ictic dolniks” (204). One can always suspect that
there is some prosodic principle lurking in free verse, the ghost of accentual-
syllabic meter, or ghosts of other, or nonce, metrical patterns waiting to be
discovered (and unfreeing the verse in the process).
Nevertheless, not everyone understands rhythm as summarily tied to
meter in this way. Richard Cureton views rhythm as multicomponential. In
his Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, Cureton argues against the “‘metrifi-
cation’ of rhythm” and to meter he adds grouping and prolongation, the two
components of phrasing (432). Though “poetic rhythm . . . often contains all
three,” for an experience to be deemed rhythmic, Cureton says, it can con-
tain any of the three components (123). This has the advantage of taking us
beyond syllables and meter, and Cureton’s groundbreaking work also reveals
the interaction between the different components of rhythm. However, if a
dynamic of phrasing suffices for a text to be deemed rhythmic, is there no
risk of collapsing the difference between verse, even free verse, and prose,
which would presumably also have rhythmic phrasing? There is also the risk
of losing touch with the materiality of the signifier, arguably a crucial com-
ponent of poeticity itself, if not necessarily a prerequisite for rhythm. If we
expand the understanding of rhythm beyond linguistic concretes such as
syllables and beats, we may lose touch with the palpability of the signifier,
where much of our understanding of rhythm seems located. On the other
hand, if we insist on the materiality that traditional prosody celebrates, and
on rhythm demanding some patterning on that level, we cannot find it in
much of free verse.

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Harvey Gross offers illuminating rhythmic analyses of a wide range of free

verse poets. For him, the difference between meter and rhythm is the differ-
ence between relative simplicity and complexity: “The notation of scansion
defines with comfortable accuracy metrical structure; the rhythms of even the
simplest poem are too complex to be ever completely analyzed” (39). Simi-
larly, Robert Pinsky writes that describing a rhythm is “impossible” (55). For
Gross, the difference is also one between the “more objective” (meter) and the
“subjective and interpretive” (rhythm) (41). The inevitability of the subjective,
which is often perceived as less rigorous, is particularly strong in free verse
because it lacks the reassurance a metrical context gives the words them-
selves. The same syllable within the same word can realize an ictus in one
line, and not realize it in another, demonstrating Seymour Chatman’s succinct
statement: “Position is all” (126). When the poem is nonmetrical, we have no
recourse to “position” in this sense. We are playing tennis with the net down.
Then again, there is also the troublesome question of the definition of free
(or freer) verse. Chris Beyers reminds us that Eliot and Williams denied the
existence of free verse as such (14), and provides a book length historically
informed detailing of various types of free verse. The sheer variety of free
verse genres, if we know what free verse is, stands opposed to an attempt to
clearly define its rhythm. Eleanor Berry reviews earlier attempts at classify-
ing free verse and suggests a multidimensional, five-axes “mapping tool” to
help navigate the tremendous diversity of free verse prosodies, but even that
classification does not exhaust free verse’s rhythmics. For example, Berry
writes that “it is essential to consider the contribution of the syntax to the
rhythm,” an aspect that is not explicitly part of her five axes that comprise
the form and prosody of free verse (887). Marjorie Perloff extends what we
normally think of as free verse to introduce a nonlinear, page-based poet-
ics, which would entail a far more radical stretching of the very concept of
rhythm if we wanted to include it (99, 102).
So as we draw away from meter, and wish to discuss rhythm, the terrain
is murky though much valuable work has been done. Charles Hartman’s
now classic Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody demonstrates the attractive
­possibility of perceiving lineation as a prosodic and rhythmic element in
the working of free verse. Hartman extends the principle of counterpoint-
ing beyond the tension between a metrical grid and an actualization in the
line, and shows it to be a rhythmic play between two systems, such as syntax
and line. Burns Cooper looks at various levels of the linguistic operations
of free verse poems, like recurring patterns of stresses and slacks that do

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 Roi Tartakovsky 5

not create a meter, but are dominant enough to bear a rhythmic stamping.
He also ­tallies the percentages of nouns, adjectives, or monosyllabic words
in a text, and the recurrence of words, phrases, sounds, syntactical structures
or prepositions, or whole intonational patterns.
Some compelling work treats metrical and nonmetrical verse as
­continuous. Donald Wesling, for example, highlights the mutual ­“scissoring”
between grammar and meter, but as the metrical rank includes the line,
the stanza, and the entire poem, there is room for nonmetrical poems to
participate in this dynamic (Wesling offers the term “grammeasures” as an
equivalent to “grammetrics,” for nonmetrical prosodies [78–79]). Similarly,
Derek Attridge supplies three practical types of analyses to gauge free verse’s
rhythm: metrical analysis (when the line or poem approximates a meter),
rhythmic analysis (following stresses and nonstresses when no meter
emerges), and phrasing, for which “the distinction between metrical and free
verse is relatively unimportant” (Poetic Rhythm 172–80, 202). These analytic
tools bring much of the rigor and insights of traditional prosody to bear on
nonmetrical verse. And, once again, Richard Cureton’s emphasis on phras-
ing is an elaborate exemplification of how rhythmic analysis can be as rich
and rewarding for free verse as it is for metrical verse.

The Es s ay s in T his I s su e

The essays in this special issue attempt to continue to advance our approach
to rhythm in and of free verse. Natalie Gerber makes a compelling, detailed
case for intonation as an important structural building block in the dynamic
and rhythm of different types of free verse poems. Borrowing from linguis-
tics, Gerber explains intonation as having three components, tonality, tonic-
ity, and tone, and demonstrates each in terms of its poetic force. While it has
often been recognized that part of the drama of free verse is the play of line
against syntax, Gerber brings out the audible, phonological, indeed the into-
national features of this play. Reuven Tsur too shows that free verse can be
“for the ear.” Tsur continues his work of analyzing the performance of verse
by actual readers, and in the current essay conducts a mini-analysis of the
reading of two lineation versions of a text. The performer is put in the posi-
tion of needing to indicate at once the continuity demanded by the syntax,
and the discontinuity demanded by the line break. Tsur demonstrates and
explains, both practically and theoretically, how a change in lineation results
in a change in rhythm, and, in the case of these lines, the level of irony.

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Both Clive Scott and Richard Cureton show how any discussion of free
verse rhythm necessitates a challenging shifting, or expanding, of our
comprehension of rhythm itself. Scott understands rhythm to be “read-
erly,” operating in and through the paralinguistic and performative, as
opposed to the linguistic site of meter. With this, Scott posits an essential
tie between rhythm and free verse, as free verse crucially engenders the
freeing of rhythm precisely to these experiential, readerly realms. Free
verse is thus an ideal tool for translation, if translation seeks to reproduce
the improvisatory ­phenomenology of reading. In his own creative transla-
tion of poems, Scott has recourse to various visual effects, bringing to the
fore the activities of both a writing and a reading consciousness, which
free verse has been instrumental in making visible. Cureton presents a
portion of his rhythm-centered ­temporal poetics, and focuses on free
verse rhythm as manifested in the component of theme, which he adds to
the three components of rhythm discussed earlier: meter, grouping, and
prolongation. Cureton not only offers a theory of the rhythm of free verse
but also embeds that theory in his larger theory of rhythm, and the poetic
paradigm, which for him reaches from syllables to biology, history, and
culture. His insistence on dealing with poetic form, via rhythm, within
a “theory of everything” is as important and challenging to this special
issue as it is to the entire field. Finally, in my own contribution, I advance
the notion that attention to pace can be a productive way to engage in
rhythm. Pace is an umbrella term for the ways the language of a text can
either cause or otherwise cue the attentive reader to accelerate or deceler-
ate the reading. While any text can theoretically be performed at various
speeds according to the inclinations of the performer, there are aspects
of pace that are indicated differentially by elements of the text such as
the distribution of its stresses, punctuation, and even syntactic complex-
ity. Taken together, we hope that these essays will contribute to what is
undoubtedly an ongoing, productive “problem,” or set of problems: free,
verse, and rhythm.

Not es
1. See, for example, Attridge’s entry on “Rhythm” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics. See also Chatman who traces rhythm back to Aristoxenus’ defini-
tion and treats rhythm in terms of a recurrence of time-intervals in a “proportionate
sequence” (18). Auer, Couper-Kuhlen, and Müller use the same terms for discussing

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 Roi Tartakovsky 7

rhythm in conversational language: recurrence of events “perceived to occur at a con-

stant rate” (23).
2. An interesting reversal of terms is suggested by Clive Scott, who, with Bergson,
understands rhythm as the earlier and deeper structure and meter as its simplified,
shared, and communicative surface structure (94). Still, in this formulation too, the two
terms are bound.
3. Valuable work in historical and cultural prosody shows that prosodic and literary
terms are far from innocent, and carry rich cultural associations and meanings that inter-
mesh with, and also transcend, the ways they are used in standard prosodic literature. On
the term “foot” from this perspective, see Meredith Martin.

Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.
———. “Rhythm.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Roland Green,
­Stephen Cushman, and Clare Cavanagh. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Credo
­Reference. Web. 29 Aug. 2014.
Auer, Peter, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Frank Müller. Language in Time. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Berry, Eleanor. “The Free Verse Spectrum.” College English 59.8 (1997): 873–97. Print.
Beyers, Chris. A History of Free Verse. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2001. Print.
Brogan, T. V. F. “Rhythm.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex
Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. 1066–70. Print.
Chatman, Seymour. A Theory of Meter. The Hague: Mouton, 1965. Print.
Cooper, G. Burns. Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
Print.
Cureton, Richard. Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse. London: Longman, 1992. Print.
Duffell, Martin J. A New History of English Metre. Leeds: Legenda, 2008. Print.
Eliot, T. S. “The Music of Poetry.” On Poetry and Poets. New York: Farrar, 1957. 17–33. Print.
Fraser, G. S. Metre, Rhyme and Free Verse. London: Methuen, 1970. Print.
Gross, Harvey. Sound and Form in Modern Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1968.
Print.
Hartman, Charles O. Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. Print.
Hobsbaum, Philip. Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Martin, Meredith. “Prosody Wars.” Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth
Century. Ed. Jason David Hall. Athens: Ohio UP, 2011. 237–61. Print.
Perloff, Marjorie. “After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries.” Close Listening. Ed.
Charles Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. 86–110. Print.
Pinsky, Robert. The Sounds of Poetry. New York: Farrar, 1998. Print.
Scott, Clive. The Poetics of French Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Print.
Wesling, Donald. The Scissors of Meter. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Print.
Winters, Yvor. “The Audible Reading of Poetry.” The Structure of Verse. Ed. Harvey Gross.
Greenwich: Fawcett, 1966. 131–49. Print.

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