Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

303 Pages·2020·8.267 MB·English

by  Ben Glaser

Modernism’s Metronome
HSM HHopkOinsP StKudIieNs inS M odSerTniUsmDIES IN MODERNISM
Douglas Mao, Series Editor
HSM HOPKINS STUDIES IN MODERNISM
HSM HOPKINS STUDIES IN MODERNISM
Modernism’s
Metronome
Meter and Twentieth-
Century Poetics
Ben Glaser
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2020
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Glaser, Ben, author.
Title: Modernism’s metronome : meter and twentieth-century
poetics / Ben Glaser.
Description: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. |
Series: Hopkins studies in modernism | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020011217 | ISBN 9781421439518 (hardcover ;
acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781421439525 (paperback ; acid-free
paper) | ISBN 9781421439532 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature)—United States. | American
poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | Modernism
(Literature)—Great Britain. | English poetry—20th century—
History and criticism. | Poetics—History—20th century. | English
language—Versification. | Rhythm in literature.
Classification: LCC PS310.M57 G57 2020 | DDC 811/.509112—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011217
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
The “Metronome” 6
Meter and Modern Aurality 14
Meter as Vestige 21
1 Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost’s Distorted
Vernacular 30
Frost’s Theory of Meter and Practice of Scansion 33
The “Hen Dekker Syllables” of “For Once, Then,
Something” 44
The Late Meter of “Directive” 53
2 Penty Ladies: T. S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender
of Modern Meter 56
“Too Penty” Ladies 60
Meter after Satire: The Waste Land 67
Formal Sensibility for a Post-metrical Culture 75
3 “No Feet to Walk On”: Pound’s Late Victorian
Prosody 81
Late Victorian Pound 82
“Anima” Meter: Bare-Foot and Stub-Toed 87
The Riposte against Meter 92
Pan, Syrinx, and Sappho: Pound’s Editorial Control
and H.D.’s HERmione 98
vi Contents
4 Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale,
Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise Bogan 107
Sara Teasdale and the Labor of the Line 111
Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Metrical Bars 114
Louise Bogan’s Precise Pentagon 123
5 The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and
James Weldon Johnson 135
Spirituals after the Victrola 138
Cane as Collection 144
Kabnis’s Unheard Blues 152
James Weldon Johnson: Re-scanning the
Anglo-American Tradition 156
Rhythmic Exegesis 167
6 Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown’s Outline for the Study
of the Poetry of American Negroes 181
“Black” Rhythm’s Double Audience 182
Brown’s Outline and Johnson’s Book of American Negro
Poetry 188
“When de Saints Go Ma’ching Home” 192
Conclusion. Prosody after Form 207
Appendix. Scansion and Metrical Notation 219
Notes 225
Works Cited 259
Index 281
Acknowledgments
This project began in graduate school at Cornell University, a decidedly
encouraging place to pursue my interests in meter, poetics, and theories of
genre. For my sense of the linguistic richness of poetry and the value of
generative approaches, I am indebted to John Bowers. Debra Fried’s unpar-
alleled feeling for prosodic form and poetics across many periods was always
humbling and provocative. Roger Gilbert helped me map out twentieth-
century poetry, and Jeremy Braddock introduced me to modernist studies
and its diverse perspectives on poetry and its institutions. Jonathan Culler,
my chair, has been a steadfast supporter for fifteen years, sharing work,
coediting an essay collection, and honing my style and argumentation.
I owe my sense of academia at its best to an exceptional graduate com-
munity. For our ongoing conversations about life and work, my thanks to
Alexis Briley, Becky Colesworthy, Bradley Depew, Sean Franzel, Adam
Grener, John Hicks, Aaron Hodges, Rob Lehman, Alex Papanicolopoulos,
Seth Perlow, Sarah Pickle, Danielle St. Hilaire, Sarah Senk, Robin Sowards,
Cecily Swanson, and Audrey Wasser. My thinking about poetry is filled with
the memory of Alan Young-Bryant, one of my first and best friends at Cor-
nell. I treasure our time together.
This book began and finished with the wonderful hospitality of Sarah and
Justin Harlan-Haughey. It progressed during my time at Skidmore College
thanks to my generous chair, Mason Stokes, and with the excellent com-
pany of Steven Millhauser, Steve Stern, Rachael Nichols, and Scott Enderle.
Yale has afforded me the necessary time, collegial environment, and fi-
nancial assistance for this project. I want to first thank my junior colleagues
for their consistent geniality: Tasha Eccles, Marta Figlerowicz, Alanna Hickey,
Cajetan Iheka, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Joe North, Jill Richards, and Sunny
Xiang. The Poetics Working Group—with past and present members includ-
viii Acknowledgments
ing Michael Abraham, Greg Ellerman, Clay Greene, Tim Kreiner, Chelsie
Malyszek, Jessie Modi, Lukas Moe, Tessie Prakas, Justin Sider, and my cur-
rent co-organizers, Naomi Levine and Lacey Jones—has been my favorite
place to think alongside colleagues and graduate students. I’ve learned a
tremendous amount from reading brilliant dissertations on poetics by Edgar
Garcia, Rebecca Rush, Josh Stanley, and Eric Weiskott. My thanks to Jordan
Brower and Paul Franz for ongoing conversations about our discipline and
poetry, and to Kassidi Jones for fact checking my work on Georgia Douglas
Johnson. The amazing participants in my graduate seminars on historical
poetics and modernism provided me the opportunity to test and refine my
theories of modern poetics and contemporary methods. I have benefitted
immensely from the formal and informal mentorship of Ardis Butterfield,
Langdon Hammer, and my current chair, Jessica Brantley. For long conver-
sations about poetic form, I thank my former Yale colleagues Ian Cornelius
and Anthony Reed. I relish both past and future opportunities to think with
Leslie Brisman, David Bromwich, Paul Fry, Jacqueline Goldsby, David Kastan,
R. John Williams, Stefanie Markovits, Stephanie Newell, Cathy Nicholson,
John Durham Peters, Emily Thornbury, and Caleb Smith. Outside the En-
glish Department, I have been glad for discussions of family and work with
Marijeta Bojovic, Robyn Cres well, Robin Dembroff, Dan Greco, Pauline
LeVen, Meghan O'Rourke, Dixa Ramirez, and Anna Zaruznaya.
The individual chapters of this book developed in diverse colloquia, pan-
els, and conferences. I thank Jason David Hall and the organizers of “Metre
Matters,” a fantastic 2008 conference at Exeter (UK) for showing me early
on how rich the field of prosody could be. My gratitude to Dorothy Wang
for an invitation to speak at Williams College about my Frost materials and
to share my ideas about Sterling Brown with students; to Lauren Kimball,
Meredith McGill, Nick Gaskill, and the Rutgers poetics group for discussing
a very early version of chapter 4; to Brian Kane, J. D. Connor, and the Sound
Studies Working Group at Yale for an invitations to share work in progress;
to the same and Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center for joining me in co-
organizing a multiday interdisciplinary symposium on techniques of listen-
ing; to Natalie Gerber, David Nowell Smith, Ewan Jones, Tom Cable, and
Peter Elbow for having me join a discussion of rhythm and intonation at
UMass Amherst; to Carmel Raz, Rick Cohn, and Roger Grant for inviting
me to present a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthet-
ics in Frankfurt; and to the many panel organizers, coparticipants, and visi-
tors of Yale’s poetics working group, including Max Cavitch, Harris Feinsod,
Acknowledgments ix
Ryan Heuser, Walt Hunter, Erin Kappeler, Noelle Morrissette, and Justin
Tackett, who have sustained a growing conversation about modern poetics
and prosody.
I received crucial financial and research assistance from Yale’s Morse
Fellowship, the Whitney Humanities Center’s Griswold Research and Hilles
Publication Funds, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for
funding a colloquium to develop my manuscript. I am grateful to the re-
search librarians and staff at the Huntington Library, the Harry Ransom Cen-
ter at the University of Texas at Austin, Yale’s Beinecke and Sterling Libraries,
and the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center, which
also granted me a Robert L. Platzman Fellowship. I feel a special obligation
to T. V. F. Brogan for his lifelong work producing an annotated bibliography
of thousands of prosodic documents, and to the Princeton Prosody Archive
for extending that work and giving it a beautiful online presence.
My scholarly life and work began in Jennie Jackson’s undergraduate
courses in popular poetry and lyric theory, grew with her guidance of a
sprawling honors thesis on James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover, and
continue thanks to more than a decade and a half of her support and intel-
lectual provocations. She inspires me to reimagine the field not just in my
writing but in my own teaching and mentorship. In graduate school I read
Yopie Prins’s work, then met her, and have benefited from her generosity
and brilliance ever since. Neither my career nor this book would be possi-
ble without Meredith Martin’s investments in historical prosody and in me;
the breadth of her knowledge, sense of method, and drive are constant
inspirations.
Many readers directed the development of the manuscript, especially
James Longenbach, Aldon Nielsen, my generous and thorough press review-
ers, and my incredibly supportive series editor Doug Mao. My editor, Cath-
erine Goldstead, is a model of responsiveness and clarity. My copy editor,
Carrie Watterson, dealt magisterially with varying systems of scansion and
my varying prose tendencies. The marketing team and cover designer let
me see the book from the outside, finally, after so many years inside its
covers. Thanks also to my indexer, Alexa Selph. I am deeply appreciative of
the entire team at the press for substantially developing and improving this
book with me.
I hope the rhythmic babbling and rhyming my research encouraged is
some compensation to my little songsters, Margaret and Alan. They delight
me with their hard poets’ work of building language. Their caring teachers