FICTIONS OF RHYTHM Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poetsâ Investments of Belief in Sounds
Natalie Gerber
In an essay entitled âThe âFinal Finding of the Earâ: Wallace Stevensâ Modernist Soundscapes,â Peter Middleton argues that â[s]ound is secondaryâ and noncognitive and finds Stevensâ and other modernist American poetsâ investment of belief in sound to be âutopian.â1 Of course, such investment was not limited to the American modernists. The romantic poet William Wordsworth speaks of the âpower in sound/ To breathe an elevated mood,â2 and fellow romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge qualifies a legitimate poem as one that, âlike the path of sound through the air,â3 carries the reader forward. Likewise, the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet StĂ©phane MallarmĂ© aspired toward a musicalized language for poetry that would make the poet capable ânot just of expressing oneself but of modulating oneself as one chooses.â4 Paul ValĂ©ry, Stevensâ contemporary, believed, as Lisa Goldfarb writes, that âthe poet must perceive the primacy of sound over meaning.â 5 Hence American modernist poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams could not claim uniqueness but rather obstreperous insistence upon both the primacy of sound and its value beyond the semantic.
These poetsâ willingness to believe that linguistic sound offers transparent access to our innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotions ought to be startling;6 it certainly has been challenged and problematized by scholars pointing to both the constructed and the socially, historically, and politically situated contexts that produce both the poem and the poetâs subjectivity.7 Yet cognitive research proves that rich phonological representations are activated early in our processing of silent reading;8 this so counters Peter Middletonâs assertions about the nature of sound that we should reconsider these poetsâ appeal to prosody as a primary ground as perhaps not merely utopian or impressionistic, even if we recognize their statements to exaggerate the importance of sound over meaning.9 While a full correlation of psycholinguistic findings in relation to some modernist poetsâ investments of belief in sound will have to wait for another essay, this one will prepare that ground by disentangling competing claims regarding sound among three particular American modernists (Stevens, Williams, and, especially, Robert Frost) and by offering a novel solution why Frostâs claims have fared worse than these contemporariesâ, all of which are equally predicated upon the sound structure of a poem.
Stevens and Frost
As two preeminent American modernists writing metrical verse, Stevens and Frost might well share a limited legacy of formal innovation; and yet Stevens has been granted greater stature as a prosodic innovator and theorist. It is tempting to attribute this difference in reception to Frostâs adamant rejection of newer modes of poetic rhythm, while Stevens practices free verse alongside metrical composition. Nonetheless, the difference is more likely attributable to the specific nature of their prosodic innovations, which differ significantly in the level of phonological representation involved, a difference that matters to the reception of their legacy.
As in his well-known remark in âThe Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,â Stevensâ comments about sound focus on the sounds of individual words: âAbove everything else, poetry is words; and . . . words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds.â10 Rarely, if at all, does he speak of larger linguistic units, such as the phrase, sentence, or line. Throughout Stevensâ letters and his prose, we find statements such as âI like words to sound wrong,â11 or âA variation between the sound of words in one age and the sound of words in another age is an instance of the pressure of reality.â12
Likewise, as I have shown elsewhere,13 much of Stevensâ early and mid-career metrical innovations turn upon an inventive yet strictly rule-governed play with lexical stress, that is, with how words sound depending upon their linguistic, syntactic, and, of course, metrical environments. Stevensâ placement of words into the meter in such a way that they âsound wrongââi.e., altered from normative realizationsâdisplays quite a sophisticated awareness of factors influencing lexical phonology; these run the gamut from historical pronunciations and cross-linguistic difference (particularly between French and English) to quite supple realizations of English stress rules (for lexical, compound, and phrasal stress). For example, when Stevens writes,
he is echoing usages of an earlier age, as in the second line of Robert Herrickâs couplet from 1647, and John Clareâs line from 1819:
And when Stevens writes lines like those below, he is drawing on the use of French stress patterns, to motivate an alternate pronunciation:
In stark contrast, the next examples display Stevens self-consciously forcing a bungled Anglicization of a foreign word, a rhythmic tactic that contributes to the comic portraiture of the young poet:
Supple auditor of French that he is, Stevensâ use of the rhythm rule to retract stress from the second syllable of amour to the first to avoid a stress clash with shrink displays a virtuosic multilingual wit, one echoed in the prior examples.
Were these examples not enough, one could examine Stevensâ existential play with the stresslessness of nonlexical words to unmoor any certain meaning, and thus destabilize what otherwise ought to be a triumphant declaration: for example, in response to the question âWhat am I to believe?â in âNotes Toward a Supreme Fiction,â the twelve-syllable, entirely nonlexical iambic-pentameter line âI have not but I am and as I am, I amâ16 winkingly refuses our desire to impose certain iambs and shapes on belief. Or we could look to evidence in âSea Surface Full of Cloudsâ of Stevensâ masterly orchestration of the full variety of circumstances that produce disyllabic words with initial stress. As the poem renders its serial, modulating impressions of the sea âIn that November off Tehuantepec,â the image brought to mind shifts from ârosyâ to âchop-house,â âporcelain,â âmusky,â and, finally, âChinese chocolate,â as in âAnd made one think of chop-house chocolate.â17 Thus, within the metrical baseline âAnd mĂĄde one thĂnk of [ / x] chĂłcolĂĄte,â we find activated supple rules for ââfitting . . . a selection of the real language of man in a state of vivid sensationââ to the meter:18 these range from phonological rules governing segments (i.e., consideration of vowel length and its influence on stress [e.g., the underlying vowel length and lexical rhythm of rosy and musky are comparable to the vowel length and lexical rhythm of Mary, not Marie] and the reduction of sonorant sequences [porcelain]), to stress rules involving larger entities (e.g., compound stress [chop-house] and the rhythm rule, whose domain is the phrase [Chinese chocolate]).
In summary, we can isolate the word as a significant locus of Stevensâ innovative metrical effects, discerning how his virtuosic meter intensifies our awareness of the variable rhythms that come from wordsâ shifting relationships in linguistic context, grammar, syntax, and metrical placement.
In contrast with this exacting play with words by Stevens, Robert Frost treats words as plastic elements within larger compositional units, rather than individual lexical entities. Frost once remarked, âThe strain of rhyming is less since I came to see words as phrase-ends to countless phrases just as the syllables ly, ing, and ation are word-ends to countless words.â19 Clearly, Frost came to regard words, for poetic purposes, as functionally equivalent to morphological adjuncts in languageâthey may be essential, but they are not the base.
That base, for Frost, lies in larger prosodic units like phrases and, especially, sentences, which Frost presents as the domain generative of meaning: âI shall show the sentence sound saying all that the sentence conveys with little or no help from the meaning of the words.â20 Indeed, when Frost speaks of words, he speaks of them as âother soundsâ that may be strung upon the sentence sound, suggesting that, for him, sentence sound is primary: âA sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.â21
As we might expect then, unlike Stevens, Frost rarely invites us to attend to individual words, to modulations in their stress accents or even finer adjustments in linguistic rhythm occasioned by their changing syntactic functions or metrical placement. Instead, Frost invites us to hear the possible shifts in either the nature or location of melodic accentâa higher-level accent that falls across sequences of words and reflects a speakerâs or readerâs sense of what holds the greatest informational, contextual, or emotional value.
Frostâs acclaimed âHome Burialâ exemplifies how his scaffolding of speech rhythms within the metrical template focuses attention on the intonational contours (that is, both on the possible locations of the tonic syllable and the potential for shifts in pitch height and direction on the tonic) and thus on the range of interpretive stances associated with the charactersâ statements. Its opening lines, with multiple possibilities for melodic accent,22 mirror the poemâs subject matterâa mobile and latently violent power struggle between the husband and wife. Whether we place melodic accent on either or both members of the contrastive gender pair (he and her, she and him) or upon the preposition before makes a tremendous difference to our interpretation of the poemâs unfolding drama: âHe saw her from the bottom of the stairs / Before she saw him.â23 That all of these decisions are enabled by the poemâs metrical rhythm, a muted blank verse, means that readers must struggle with decisions regarding melodic emphasis as essentially matters of interpretation. The multivalent possibilities for pitch height and direction on the phrase âbefore she saw himâ are essentially inferential: any single prosodic change also involves meaning....