The poem’s heartbeat : a manual of prosody

160 Pages·2003·3.134 MB·English

by  Corn, Alfred

The
Poem's Heartbeat
SLP WRITERS' GUIDE
The Poem's Heartbeat
A M A N U A L OF P RO SODY
Alfred Corn
STORY LINE PRESS
1 997

© 1997 by Alfred Corn
First American Printing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including
information storage and retrieval systems without permission
in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer.
Published by Story Line Press, Inc.,
Three Oaks Farm, Brownsville, OR 97327
This publication was made possible thanks in part to the gen­
erous support of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation, and our individual contributors.
Boo^ design by Chiquita Babb
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
—pending—

Acknowledgments
Excerpt from “His Excellency” from IV.H. Auden: Collected Poems,
edited by Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendel­
son, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate
of W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
“If I Could Tell You” from W.H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by
Edward Mendelson. Copyright © 1945 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by
permission of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from “California Hills in August" by Dana Gioia, from Daily
Horoscope. Copyright © 1986 by Dana Gioia. Reprinted by permission
of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Exerpt from “The Persian Version” by Robert Graves, from Complete
Poems. Copyright © 1975 by Oxford, renewed 1988. Reprinted by per­
mission of Carcanet Press, Ltd., England.
Excerpt from “Going Back to the River” by Marilyn Hacker, from
Going Bacl{ to the River. Copyright © 1983 by Marilyn Hacker.
Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from “The Sunlight in the Garden” by Louis MacXeice, from
Collected Poems. Copyright © 1967 by Faber & Faber, England.
Excerpt from “Ballad of Maritime Mike” by Robert McDowell, from
Quiet Money. Copyright © 1987 by Robert McDowell. Reprinted by
permission of the author.
VI THE POEM S HEARTBEAT
Excerpt from “The Steeple-Jack”, copyright 1951 © 1970 by Marianne
Moore, © renewed 1979 by Lawrence E. Brinn and Louise Crane,
Executors of the Estate of Marianne Moore, from The Complete Poems of
Marianne Moore by Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking
Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Excerpt from “My Father’s Gun” by Elise Paschen, from Infidelities.
Copyright © 1996 by Elise Paschen. Used by permission of Story Line
Press.
Excerpt from “The Man Against the Sky” from The Collected Poems
of Edwin Arlington Robinson, copyright © 1937 by Edwin Arlington
Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.
Excerpt from “Forcing House” by Theodore Roethke, from Collected
Poems. Copyright © 1966 by Theodore Roethke. Reprinted by permis­
sion of Bantam Doubledav Dell Publishing Group.
Excerpt from “From the Hand of Thomas Jefferson” by Mary Jo Salter,
from Sunday Skaters. Copyright © 1994 by Mary Jo Salter. Reprinted by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf.
Excerpt from “Georgia Dusk” by Jean Toomer, from Cane. Copyright
© 1923 by Boni 6c Liveright, renewed 1951 by Jean Toomer. Reprinted
by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Excerpt from “A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” by
Richard Wilbur, from Ceremony and Other Poems. Copyright © 1950
and renewed 1978 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Har-
court Brace 6c Company.
“Tree and Sky” and an excerpt from “The Dance” by William Carlos
Williams, from Collected Poems /939-/962, Volume II. Copyright ©
1953, 1944 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp.
Contents
Preface ix
Introduction i
1 Line and Stress 7
2 Accentual-Syllabic Verse 24
3 Metrical Variation 38
4 Phonic Echo 65
5 Stanza 78
6 Verseforms 89
7 Refrain 100
8 Quantitative Verse 109
9 Syllable-Count Verse ” 4
10 Unmetered Poetry I23
Selected Bibliography *4 3
Index r45
Vll

Prefa ce
I sometimes teach prosody in graduate or undergraduate courses
and have been perplexed by the problem of finding a textbook to
assign for them. Many good books on meter and rhyme have been
written but most are out of print. Of those in print, some provide
only an introduction to the subject (or treat only one aspect of it),
some are spoiled by misinformation, and others begin immedi­
ately at a level too advanced for the beginner. What’s really needed
is a study that assumes no knowledge of meter on the part of
the reader but then provides accurate information. An advanced
subcategory of the study of prosody is verseform (for example,
the sonnet and the villanelle), and two excellent introductions to
verseforms are already available, John Hollander’s Rhyme's Rea­
son (Yale Press) and Lewis Turco’s The New Boo/{ of Forms (New
England Press). This book doesn’t, therefore, deal with verse-
forms exhaustively, but it does introduce the concept and discuss
at length verseforms that poets writing in English have most
often used.
My project is to introduce traditional English-language pros­
odic practice and then progress to fairly advanced levels of com­
petence in it. The bibliography will offer readers a chance to carry
their investigation of the subject farther—after all, you can spend
a lifetime exploring prosodic questions in English-language poetry
alone. The goal here, though, is to provide answers to questions
most often asked about prosody, not only for the reader uncertain
ix