Introduction

This book explores what seems like a simple question: why are poems usually written in lines? This small puzzle turns out to be connected to larger mysteries. When we read a poem, more of our being is engaged than when we read an instruction manual or an editorial. We feel that poems are a use of language distinct from other uses of it - that in poems words work on us in uncanny ways. How might the power of poems' language be linked to the custom of printing them in lines, that is, as verse?

Suppose for a moment that you had never learned to read silently. (Nobody did until the Middle Ages, thousands of years after writing was invented.) Every word on the page would pass not only before your eyes but through your mouth and ears. Poetry remembers the time when reading always meant reading aloud. Most of the writing that deluges us every day - newspapers, business letters, emails, tweets - can be read silently with no great loss and with a gain in speed. But in ways we'll examine throughout this book, the meaning of a poem depends on its sound at least as much as on ideas that it may convey. A poem needs the time to be heard.

If you're reading aloud, what happens when the text is divided into units that are (usually) larger than a word and smaller than a sentence - that is, into lines? Isolated this way, a short stretch of language is easier to hear. The visual fact of lines paradoxically encourages us to listen to the sounds of the words. Whether or not we can specify exactly what you do at the boundary between lines, and whether or not we can be sure that every reader will do the same thing, you're bound to take the line breaks as signals for some kind of shift in your almost-internal performance of reading. They're cues in a script.

One name for all the aspects of language that silent reading jettisons for the sake of speed, a name that emphasizes how the complex auditory action of words distributes itself through time, is rhythm. All language performances - conversation, singing, recitation - have some kind of rhythmic character, but in poems there is a tendency for rhythm to be noticeably organized in various ways. (Lines are most often the basic units of organization.) Some of these rhythmic arrangements are based on counting, and we call them meters. Others are not. A term that covers all these kinds of rhythmic organizations and focuses on the ways they're shared by poet and reader and therefore become available for the making of meaning is prosody. (Linguists use "prosody" in a different though related way. See the Glossary at the end of this book.) All poetry makes use of some kind of prosody, some means by which the poet controls the reader's experience of rhythm. These chapters examine the kinds that poets in English have used.

Formal arrangements of language such as meter and rhyme aren't merely devices or decorative patterns. Like all prosodic controls, they help us hear the poem as a speaking voice. Considered from one odd angle, a poem is a miracle of bandwidth. The poet imagines a whole speaking, gesticulating person, complete with a tone of voice and a situation, and compresses that living being into a stream of data only a few bits wide: a few dozen letters and punctuation marks. This stream (after traveling for a day or for hundreds of years, a mile or thousands of miles) reaches a reader who, perhaps without being aware of the process, from this impoverished text imaginatively reconstitutes the voice and the speaker, as alive again as at creation. What we call poetic techniques are methods of supporting this marvel of recovery. They often work subliminally on us while we think we're paying attention to what's merely being said by the poem.

If the reader doesn't need to be aware of the details behind the work of reading, what use is a book like this? Even as children, after all (or especially as children), we respond to language arranged for the sake of its sounds. Yet the image of transmission I just gave - a poem-channel with a writer and reader at the two ends - is incomplete. There is not one reader but many, perhaps widely distributed in space and time, who read not one but many poems. These expansions change the process. We read as communities and these communities evolve elaborately over time. Just as native speakers of English don't confine themselves to the few hundred words required for a barter language, so readers and writers of poetry in English have built up rich and varied frameworks of assumption and reference. This book introduces and explains the core elements of those traditions of reading that have to do with rhythm. Rather than cataloguing formal devices as an encyclopedia would, it aims to connect the forms with the meaning and movement of the poetry at as many points as possible.

For a long time - at least from the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth - poets, critics, and teachers assumed that readers shared knowledge of the traditional poetic norms and terms. Now, for a variety of reasons, people who want to discuss how poems work can no longer count on that widespread, more or less unified understanding. Though this doesn't render all poetry alien, it makes a great deal of English poetry from the past millennium only half-audible to many readers. At the same time, the many school and college courses that introduce students to poetry have too much material to cover - history, biography, cultural background, interpretive techniques, and so on - to give the study of verse as verse the class hours it requires. This book tries to fill that gap in as self-contained a way as possible. I've tried to make the book readable for advanced secondary-school students but accurate and detailed enough for a graduate student brushing up on the fundamentals. There's no reason why combining these goals should be especially difficult. After all, my premise is that meter and other formal properties of poems operate as common ground among poets and readers. They aren't in the poem so much as in the context we bring to the reading of the poem. It should be possible to explain them in terms available to everyone. There's nothing in this territory so abstruse as to prevent a motivated person from learning it even without classroom help.

I also mean the book both for people who want to learn more about reading poems and for those learning to write them. Again, I can't think of this as a difficult combination. Poetry is a reciprocal act. As poets we read other people's poems as well as our own - otherwise the communities of reading would disintegrate. As readers we're continually recapitulating the poet's act of speaking and hearing the poem as its sound unfurls in time. Reading poems and writing them are, on the most fundamental level, impossible to distinguish.

Though the six chapters in this book sometimes refer to each other, to some extent you can pick and choose. Everyone will want to read the first chapter, "The Iambic Pentameter Line," because it introduces the process of scanning a metrical line and the terminology necessary to talk about this process. We start with the iambic pentameter not because it's the simplest metrical line, but rather because it's the most dominant historically and the most fully elaborated over time. Even if you've already learned about scansion, you'll want to skim this chapter to see how its approach may differ from those you've encountered before. While introducing metrical reading, the chapter fills in some theoretical and historical background as needed.

The next chapter, "Other Meters," extends the methods of Chapter 1 to lines of different lengths and with different metrical bases. These first two chapters concentrate almost exclusively on what happens within a line of verse, the basic unit that poems are usually made of. Chapter 3, "Beyond the Line," examines the ways in which lines are combined - by rhyme, by the groups of lines called stanzas, and by sentences - into larger structures and ultimately into poems.

Chapter 4 deals with what has become a dominant mode in poetry in the past hundred years, nonmetrical or "Free Verse." It asks how this modern mode resembles the metrical verse that predates it and continues alongside it, as well as how the two modes differ. Chapter 5 is devoted to a topic not as commonly included in discussions of poetic form: "Songs." In our experience of poetically formed language, songs may be even more prevalent than free verse, and their prominence goes back much farther.

Chapter 6, "Advanced Topics," will interest a different group of readers. The approach to poetic meter that this book takes as its foundation and develops is not the only one available. The first two sections of this chapter compare it to a couple of the systems developed by linguists and by other literary critics. Different approaches to meter embody different assumptions about how poetic language works rhythmically, and those assumptions suggest different ways of reading. The chapter ends by describing a computer program that can perform a certain kind of metrical scansion and asking what its limitations say about the nature of meter.

Technical terms are printed in bold face at a principal point of...