By Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.
A revised second edition of a late 1960s text, Sound and Form in Modern Po-etry refutes the claim that modernism, as a poetic movement, abandons proso-dy. Author/editor Robert McDowell inherits this claim from the late Harvey Gross, the volume's original author and editor. McDowell does revise the treatment of some poets originally included in the text and adds an epilogue concerned with contemporary poets of the decades since the first edition, but throughout, McDowell holds true to the volume's central claim—prosody is an essentially meaningful element of 20th-century poetry in the modernist tradition, a tradition in which the authors set Robinson Jeffers prominently. Jeffers is treated at some length with both Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost; of these three, who stayed in their home country while other contemporaries like Eliot and Pound worked abroad, McDowell notes that they "have both possessed and given voice to the American sensibility." Jeffers's work, in particular, is presented as the "most dramatic paradox in modern American poetry," as McDowell notes that its "very consistency runs counter to the critical storms that seemed always to be swirling around [it]" (202, 225). After a brief, though well-considered, history of Jeffers's early life and work, McDowell delves into Jeffers's prosodic skills as he does for each of the other poets he treats in turn.
Differing in approach from critical texts like The Norton Introduction to Poetry or To Read Poetry, Donald Hall's critical volume of the early 1980s, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry never becomes an anthology. Though individual poets are introduced for the reader who may be unfamiliar with them, individual poems are never used except as building blocks in instructionally toned arguments made by the authors. As such, the printing of the full poem is often unnecessary. Excerpts suffice to exhibit a metrical pattern's continuance or alteration. For this and other reasons, the text seems best suited to a reader who has advanced beyond a preliminary interest in poetry, beyond reading widely to establish his or her own arenas of poetic interest, beyond identifying easily with certain poets and struggling to find the sense of others. Some fluency in the technical language of scansion is assumed; in the chapter "The Scansion of the English Meters," metrical definitions of individual feet—i.e., "trochee," "spondee," "iamb," etc.—are not provided. Instead, a reader who has been previously schooled in these details is assumed. They even rely on the currency of "The Poetry Wars," assuming readers will refer to the battles waged over canonization through various anthologies since the 1950s. Given the audience the book implies, the text might make a fine instructional resource for an upper-level university course in 20th-century poetry or even for a creative writing seminar focusing on poetic craft.
The volume begins its analysis of particular poets' prosodic methods by stepping into the Modernist era with poets who continued working very directly in handed-down metrical forms. "Modern Poetry in the Metrical Tradition" focuses on Hardy, Yeats, Robert Bridges, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edwin Muir, John Crowe Ransom, and, notably, Langston Hughes. Hughes is not smoothly incorporated in a text that doesn't exactly cast down, but certainly begrudges, some of modernism's movements away from "the tradition." Imagism's prioritizing of visual over aural is called "a prosodical heresy," a term not quite evaluative. Free verse is considered a revolution "come and gone," and the sneer is obvious in the tone of the following passage from a chapter on new poets:
By the mid-1970s, Ginsberg seemed almost to lose interest in poetry. His manic travel schedule seemed only to intensify; his new poems read more and more like self-parodies of his earlier, powerful work. In the 1980s Ginsberg accepted an academic chair. The Outsider had voluntarily joined the Insiders for keeps. (304)
Hughes's work, then, seems like that of an outsider brought in by the insiders as a gesture. The authors do not even apply their scanning method, which they apply to most of the other poets in the volume, to the meters Hughes brings from jazz and blues.
Still, the volume's attention to meter fills a space in poetry studies. After "Modern Poetry in the Metrical Tradition," the authors take a step back to consider "Nineteenth-Century Precursors" Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, and Browning. The tracing of prosody from these writers into the work of modernists shows a bridge where there is often only a chasm noticed. And the careful attention to the work of Eliot and Pound—each gets a chapter—is more than a simple stamp of modernistic import. Gross and McDowell reaffirm the im-portance of their individual works by attending not to their themes but to their prosodical richness. Ultimately, this detailed attention to meter, syntax, and sound comprises the great strength of the volume. Through a chapter on Frost, Crane, Jeffers, and Stevens, another that considers Auden, Louis MacNeice, Patrick Kavanagh, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke, Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Bishop, and Weldon Kees, and a final chapter on contemporary writers, the book's attention to the rhythmical element of verse establishes its importance as a critical instructional text. It is vital to witness the orders that apply within a movement that is sometimes basely considered an explosion of order. Robinson Jeffers's situation within the text is a prime example of why this is important, as McDowell illustrates why Jeffers has once again begun to demand the attention of mainstream poets and critics. McDowell opens the section on Jeffers by recounting the young poet's move to the then-remote Monterey peninsula, where "Jeffers, encouraged by his wife, worked every morning on poems, creating what must finally be recognized as one of the most original oeuvres of our age" (224). This work, McDowell notes, was shaped by the uncompromising asceticism which stamped Jeffers's life, a life lived out "deep in the grain and flux of a dramatic landscape" (225). Jeffers's early success and fame are noted as well as his decline during the late 1930s, as America drew closer to a war which Jeffers vehemently opposed. Noting that postwar American critics and poets have largely em-braced Yvor Winters's negative evaluation of Jeffers's technique as crude and his philosophy as overbearing and fraudulent, while failing to carry out their own reevaluations, McDowell points to writers in the 1990s as responsible in large part for something of a rebirth. He goes on to say this about Jeffers's place in studies of literature and environment:
Jeffers is one of our first great environmentalist poets. His doctrine of inhumanism, frequently misinterpreted as a bitter, antihuman vision, is in fact a doctrine of humility and acceptance. Jeffers sees the eventual destruction of civilization and the obliteration of humankind as inevitable, not as good. His unnerving perspective acknowledges the primacy of sea, sky, rock, and tree, and the small part humans play in the cosmic drama. (225)
McDowell then proceeds from this point to stress Jeffers's versatility of style, which is expressed in a wide range of prosodic skills. He notes:
Though known best for his long narratives in long lines, in which his training in the classical languages, use of Whitman's pattern of recurrence, and mix-and-match variations of metrical and prose patterns similar to those practiced by Pound are evident, Jeffers is also capable of writing exquisite lyrics in traditional forms. (226)
After this comment, McDowell goes on to look at both sound and form in Jeffers's work, beginning with an examination of the passage from "Cawdor" in which the caged eagle is shot, and continuing with a close reading of large sections of "The Inhumanist." While McDowell's approach to these passages seems at first dry and pedantic, the thoroughness with which he applies his analysis of sound and form and the connections he draws between Jeffers's work and the work of other poets leave us with a clear and eminently useful insight of both Jeffers's work and how this work stands in relation to the wider critical world. McDowell leaves little doubt as to why he considers Jeffers's latest reconsideration most valid. Of "The Inhumanist," McDowell notes:
The list making, the accumulation of evidence amid anapestic and spondaic substitution, the carefully spaced line endings, the boldly shortened third line bringing us to full rest after the minor Ionic of the first foot, and the last line's suspension and conclusion leading off the next section may be lost on the careless or indifferent reader who cannot recognize the flowering of a traditional prosody into one of highly original syntax. We must go back to Whitman, or move laterally to Eliot, to find appropriate parallels. (229)
McDowell concludes his specific discussion of Jeffers with this final comment: "In finding speech patterns to accommodate his apocalyptic vision, Jeffers accomplishes what the greatest poets of all historical moments manage to do—he creates anew the verse line and the perspectives of poetry; at the same time, he confirms the importance and power of story in verse, story told in measured, versatile patterns of speech" (230). Certainly, in terms of how Jeffers is discussed in relation to other American poets, this text goes far beyond what the community of Jeffers scholars has grown used to in recent years as concerns most anthologies. McDowell's treatment of Jeffers's work is sincere and thorough, placing Jeffers in a critical context which is consistent with the best of past and current Jeffers scholarship. Prior to considering any particular writers, though, the book spends its prologue and first chapter defining prosody and justifying, in a notable way, a prosodical approach to modernist verse. Rightly, it seems, the authors specify the need for readings which focus on the specific affects of rhythm and meter in poetry. "The full meaning of a poem involves a great deal more than its paraphrasable conceptual content. This is a truism of contemporary poetics, yet little critical attention has been paid to rhythmic structures that are the direct conveyors of feeling" (15). It is in framing their own particular approach to prosody where McDowell and Gross attempt to occupy some new territory. They set themselves against John Crowe Ransom and Yvor Winters, both of whom viewed meter and rhythm as a "phonetic surface independent of the poem." Opposed to an approach based on surface features, the authors present their conviction that the rhythms of poetry correspond not only to the physical rhythms of life (an iamb's obvious similarity to a heartbeat, for instance) but also to the cognitive rhythms of temporally lived experience:
Rhythmic structures are expressive forms, cognitive elements, communicating those experiences that rhythmic consciousness can alone communicate: emphatic human responses to time in its passage. Our view does not contradict the theories of Ransom and Winters but supplements them. Prosody, as meter, does offer a texture, an "aesthetic surface"; meter unquestionably brings into special prominence words and ideas. But neither theory stresses that it is through rhythmic structure that the infinite subtleties of human feeling can be most successfully expressed. (10)
No meaning of a poem can be postulated independent of the poem's "aesthetic surface," the rhythms of which spring from cognitive reality and appeal to the cognitive reality of the reader. Problems arise, of course, in the arena of measuring these cognitive affects. McDowell and Gross do not attempt to crack open the "black box" of cognitive information processing with any reader-response oriented research. And when they move to describe the cognitive process of a writer who skillfully crafts the rhythms of existence, they can do no more than say "it may be the rhythm existed in Jane Austen's mind even before she fully worked out the ideas; the feeling of a thought may take shape in consciousness even before the thought can be adequately formulated" (10–11). That life has physical and cognitive rhythms is no point of contention. But by saying that the rhythms of poetry are connected to cognitive rhythms, the authors imply not only that they can name those cognitive rhythms but that they can see the connection, that they know how poetry taps into those rhythms. How could the authors show this? And they don't try. The claim is asserted in the introductory chapter as a means of establishing the authors' presence in uncharted critical space, but is not em-ployed as a concern of their textual analyses. The claim is one better suited for a journal article in psychology than a critical poetry text. Ultimately, though the argument for poetry's cognitive element occupies several pages at the front, the book establishes its importance in spite of its claim, through its attention to the same rhythmical surface which Ransom and Winters attended to previously.
Bill Stobb and Steve Adkison are in the Department of English, University of Nevada, Reno.