The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition - Softcover

Roland Greene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691154910 ISBN 13: 9780691154916

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Through three editions over more than four decades, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics has built an unrivaled reputation as the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for students, scholars, and poets on all aspects of its subject: history, movements, genres, prosody, rhetorical devices, critical terms, and more. Now this landmark work has been thoroughly revised and updated for the twenty-first century. Compiled by an entirely new team of editors, the fourth edition--the first new edition in almost twenty years--reflects recent changes in literary and cultural studies, providing up-to-date coverage and giving greater attention to the international aspects of poetry, all while preserving the best of the previous volumes

At well over a million words and more than 1,000 entries, the Encyclopedia has unparalleled breadth and depth. Entries range in length from brief paragraphs to major essays of 15,000 words, offering a more thorough treatment--including expert synthesis and indispensable bibliographies--than conventional handbooks or dictionaries.

This is a book that no reader or writer of poetry will want to be without.

• Thoroughly revised and updated by a new editorial team for twenty-first-century students, scholars, and poets
• More than 250 new entries cover recent terms, movements, and related topics
• Broader international coverage includes articles on the poetries of more than 110 nations, regions, and languages
• Expanded coverage of poetries of the non-Western and developing worlds
• Updated bibliographies and cross-references
• New, easier-to-use page design
• Fully indexed for the first time

About this title

About the Author

Roland Greene is the Mark Pigott OBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Stephen Cushman is the Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Clare Cavanagh is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. Jahan Ramazani is the Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Paul F. Rouzer is Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15491-6

Contents

Preface...........................................viiAcknowledgments...................................xiTopical List of Entries...........................xvBibliographical Abbreviations.....................xxiiiGeneral Abbreviations.............................xxviiContributors......................................xxviiiEntries A to Z....................................1Index.............................................1555

Chapter One

A

ABECEDARIUS, abecedarian (med. Lat. term for an ABC primer). An alphabetic *acrostic, a poem in which each line or stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet. The abecedarius was often a spiritual or meditative device in the ancient world, used for prayers, hymns, and prophecies, but it also has an inveterate role as a tool for teaching children language. In divine poetry, not only the word but even letters and sounds, given pattern, bear mystical significance and incantatory power—as do numbers (see NUMEROLOGY). The abecedarius, only one of several such forms, has had a special appeal as a literalization of the alpha-omega trope.

The earliest attested examples are Semitic, and abecedarii held an esp. important place in Heb. religious poetry, to judge from the dozen-odd examples in the OT. The best known of these is Psalm , which is made of 22 octave stanzas, one for each letter of the Heb. alphabet, all lines of each octave beginning with the same letter. The more common stanzaic type, however, is that used by Chaucer for his "ABC," where only the first line of the stanza bears the letter (cf. the ornate initials of illuminated mss.). Psalms 111–12 represent the astrophic type, wherein the initials of each successive line form the alphabet. In the comparable Japanese form, Iroha mojigusari, the first line must begin with the first and end with the second character of the alphabet, the second with the second and third, and so on. A number of abecedarii are extant in cl. and Alexandrian Gr., but they were also popular in Byzantine Gr. and are copious in med. Lat.: St. Augustine's well-known abecedarian psalm against the Donatists (Migne, PL 43.23 ff.) is the earliest known example of med. rhythmical verse.

As a mod. instructive device for children, the abecedarius has seen many familiar forms. In Eng., the best-known abecedarius is the song "`A'—You're Adorable," by Buddy Kaye, Fred Wise, and Sidney Lippman (1948).

K. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen litteratur, 2d ed. (1897); C. Daux, Le Chant abécédaire de St. Augustin (1905); H. Leclercq, "Abécédaire," Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne, ed. F. Cabrol (1907); Meyer, v. 2, ch. ; F. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, 2d ed. (1925), sect. 14; R. Marcus, "Alphabetic Acrostics in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 6 (1947); Raby, Secular.

T.V.F. Brogan; D. A. Colón

ABSORPTION. A term for the process of a reader's deep engagement with a poem, marked by a lack of self-consciousness about the materiality of the reading process. Poetic rhythm is often used to enhance the experience of deep absorption in a poem; this is most marked in such hypnotically rhythmic poems as S. T. Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," but the condition is also achieved by a range of representational and material devices that pull the reader into a poem. Absorption typically works by unifying the sound, form, and theme of a poem into a construct that the reader perceives as seamless. Absorption may extend to such effects as a heightened sense of the poem as fiction and an identification with the *persona.

Various modernist modes, incl. *collage, parataxis, and *cacophony, are often understood as disrupting the readability of poems. Such modes may seem to make the reader self-conscious about negotiating the compositional structures of the poem and, by so doing, theatricalize (in Fried's term) the experience of reading. Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effect" (verfremdungseffekt), a term he first used in the 1930s, provides a useful model for breaking the identification of the spectator with the spectacle under *modernism, esp. as this term relates to the Rus. Formalist Viktor Shklovsky's discussion of ostranenie or *defamiliarization. Both verfremdungseffekt and ostranenie are antiabsorptive devices.

Neither absorption nor its converses—impermeability, unreadability, disruption—are inherent poetic values; rather, they suggest approaches to reading and listening. The difference is not as much an essence as a direction: a centrifugal (projective) poetic field versus a centripetal (introjective) one. Poems that attempt to be conventionally absorbing in form and content run the risk of becoming tedious and boring—that is, highly unabsorbing—esp. when they rely on traditional forms and themes that may seem outmoded to historically conscious readers. In contrast, many seemingly antiabsorptive gestures, incl. discontinuity, cut-ups, and opacity, may create rhythmically charged, hyperengaging poems. Moreover, the active use of linguistic materiality—the reader's or listener's acute awareness of the verbal materials and structures of the poem—may contribute to multilevel, supercharged poetic absorption. It seems evident that absorption is historically conditioned: for some readers and listeners, depending on the period and particular poems, *dissonance will be more absorbing than *consonance or *euphony. Indeed, lit. hist. might be seen as incl. cycles of change in readers' affective responses to emerging acoustic, structural, and thematic dimensions of poetry. The shock of the new for some is the invigorating tonic of the contemporary for others. Modernist and avant-garde poetics that emphasize fragmentation, discontinuity, visual materiality, incompleteness, boredom, or noise often do so in order to open new possibilities for "verbivocovisual" (James Joyce's word from Finnegans Wake) engagement of all the senses. Such poetics often explore the chordal possibilities that result from incommensurability, rather than unity, among the levels of form, rhythm, and content; under the sign of overlay and palimpsest, discrepant and impermeable elements of a poem can be recognized as pleats and folds. Temporal, thematic, and stylistic disjunction may form, dissolve, and reform into shifting constellations (to use Benjamin's term) that are open possibilities for a reader's or a listener's absorption into the newly emerging force field of the poem.

See AVANT-GARDE POETICS, DIFFICULTY, LANGUAGE POETRY, PRESENCE.

* B. Brecht, "Brecht on Theater," trans. J. Willett (1977); C. Bernstein, "Artifice of Absorption," in A Poetics (1991); V. Shklovsky, "Art as Device" (1917) in Theory of Prose, trans. B. Sher (1991); Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" in Art and Objecthood (1997); W. Benjamin, "The Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), trans. R. Livingstone, Selected Writings, ed. M. W. Jennings et al., v. 2, (1999); R. Tsur, "Kubla Khan"—Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality, and Cognitive Style (2006).

C. Bernstein

ACCENT. In Eng., accent is the auditory prominence perceived in one syllable as compared with others in its vicinity. Accent and stress are often treated as synonymous, though some literary scholars and linguists distinguish the two terms according to a variety of criteria. Disagreements persist about the source and acoustical nature of syllabic prominence—loudness, volume, *pitch, *duration, or some combination of factors—but they are arguably of peripheral relevance to the understanding of accent within Eng. poetics.

The phenomena of accent vary among langs. and the poetics associated with them. The Eng. lexical contrast between convict as noun and as verb has no parallel in Fr. (Sp. resembles Eng. in this regard, while Finnish resembles Fr.) For Fr. speakers, stress contours are perceived on the level of the phrase or clause, and learning Eng. entails acquiring the ability to hear contrastive accent in words, just as a Japanese speaker learning Eng. must acquire the distinction between the liquids l and r. A consequence is that, while Fr. *meters count only *syllables, Eng. meters conventionally also govern the number and distribution of accents.

In Eng. speech, accent operates in various ways on scales from the word (convict) through the sentence. As the units grow larger, accent becomes increasingly available to choice and conscious use for rhetorical emphasis. One step beyond the accents recorded in dicts. is the difference between "Spanish teacher" as a compound (a person who teaches Sp.) and as a phrase (a teacher from Spain). Eng. phonology enjoins stronger accent on "Spanish" in the compound and "teacher" in the phrase.

These lexical accents and differences in accent between compounds and phrases are "hardwired" into the Eng. lang. Beyond those, speakers exercise more deliberate choice when they employ contrasting accent to create rhetorical or logical emphases that are intimately entwined with semantic context. In the opposition Chicago White Sox vs. Chicago Cubs, it is the variable rather than the fixed element that receives the accent. Consequently, the question "Are you a fan of the Chicago Cubs?" accords with what we know about the world of baseball, while "Are you a fan of the Chicago Cubs?" implies a Cubs team from some other city. This kind of contrastive stress, so dynamic in Eng. speech, also plays a variety of important roles in the poetic manipulation of lang., perhaps esp. in how written poetry contrives to convey the rhetorical and intonational contours of speech. When a line break, for instance, encourages the reader to place an accent on some word where it would not normally be expected, the emphasis may suggest an unanticipated logical contrast. This foregrounding of accent may have rhetorical implications: "The art of losing isn't hard to master; / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster" (emphasis inferred; Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"); "The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter [not Actaeon to Diana] in the spring" (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land).

Within the specific realm of traditional Eng. metrical verse, words are treated as bearing an accent if they are short polysyllables (whose stress can be looked up in a dict.) or monosyllables that belong to an open class (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection). Other syllables tend to be unstressed. Yet several factors can alter this perception. One is the kind of rhetorical force created by contrastive stress, esp. in the volatile case of pronouns. Another, more pervasive influence arises from the complex interaction between the abstract, narrowly constrained pattern of meter and the concrete, highly contingent *rhythm of the spoken words. This fundamental distinction—meter and rhythm are related similarly to "the human face" and "a human's face"—crucially conditions how we perceive accent; it accounts for some difficulties that an unpracticed reader of metrical verse, though a native of Eng. speech, may have in locating the accents in a line.

Some of the confusion surrounding the term may be reduced if we recognize that accent names phenomena on two different levels of abstraction, the acoustical and the metrical. There is an analogy with phonemes. Speakers of Eng. unconsciously insert a puff of air after the p in pan, but not in span. The difference can be detected by using acoustic instruments or by holding a palm in front of the mouth, yet is not detected by speakers in the absence of exceptional attention. The p in both cases represents the same phoneme, the same distinctive feature in the Eng. phonetic system—a system that does not merely divide the continuous acoustic stream of speech but abstracts from it a small set of three or four dozen discrete items. Similarly, various acoustical phenomena (pitch, loudness, etc.) give rise to an indefinitely large number of degrees and perhaps even kinds of accent; yet within a metrical context, the accustomed reader—analogous to a native speaker— reduces this continuum to an abstraction of (usually) two opposed values, stressed vs. unstressed. (The analogy fails to capture how the reader is simultaneously aware of a continuum of stress weights in the speech rhythm and a binary feature in the metrical pattern, both embodied in a single set of words.)

Differences of accent between compounds and phrases, or introduced for the sake of rhetorical contrast, which operate prominently within the larger manifold of rhythm, make no difference on the level of meter. "Spanish teacher" in either sense would be scanned as two *trochees, and the stronger stress on one word or the other has no specifically metrical effect. The four degrees of stress adopted by Chatman and others from Trager and Smith, while useful in the phonological analysis of Eng. and in the poetic understanding of rhythm, are unnecessary in the specifically metrical treatment of accent. The "four levels" represent an intermediate abstraction, as does the more traditional compromise of secondary stress or the hovering accent of Brooks and Warren. "Trager and Smith ... demonstrated that stress and pitch are much more complex and variable phenomena than could be accounted for by the binary unstress-stress relation of traditional prosody" (Bradford 1994)—but this important truth should not mislead us into trying to weld speech rhythm and metrical pattern into an unwieldy whole, rather than hearing their interplay.

Readers are sensitive to a far wider range of rhythmic phenomena in poetry than those that are encoded within a metrical system. The nuanced stress patterns of speech, though they are foregrounded in nonmetrical or *free verse, do not disappear from the reader's awareness in metrical verse with its two-valued feature of accent. Rather, the give and take between the claims of meter and rhythm become a major source of auditory richness. Syllables may be heard as stressed either because of their prominence in speech or because of their position within the metrical line.

Any of the kinds of speech accent—lexical, phrasal, rhetorical—may coincide with a stressed position within the metrical line (as in the even-numbered positions within an *iambic *pentameter); or the speech and metrical accents may be momentarily out of phase. Within the accentual-syllabic system of Eng. metrics, these possibilities give rise to a repertoire of more or less common or striking variations. When speech accents occur in metrically unstressed positions, they give rise to metrical *substitutions of one foot for another, such as the trochee or the *spondee for the iamb:

/ x / / Singest of summer in full-throated ease

When metrical accents occur where no speech accent is available to embody them, the syllable receives "promoted" stress. The conjunction in the middle of W. B. Yeats's line, "We loved each other and were ignorant," which might pass unstressed in speech, exhibits this kind of promoted accent. It may render the verse line different from and semantically richer than its speech equivalent. The metrical expectation of accent in this position in the line is presumably the initial cause of the promotion; whether the rhetorical point— that love and ignorance are not at odds as one might think, but inextricable—is an effect or another kind of cause would be difficult to decide.

The phonological and metrical understandings of accent can sometimes even be directly at odds. In a compound word like townsman, the second syllable is not unstressed (its vowel is not reduced to schwa). Phonologically, then, the syllable sequence "townsman of" presents three descending levels of stress. In A. E. Housman's line, however, "Townsman of a stiller town," the reader hears "of" with an accent created or promoted by the underlying metrical pattern of iambic *tetrameter; and in comparison, the syllable "-man" is heard as unstressed. The case is complicated by the copresence of other details: because the line is headless, e.g., we know not to scan the initial compound word as a spondee only once we get the following syllables ("a still-"); the unambiguous accent on the last of those syllables (confirmed by the final alternation, "-er town") anchors the whole iambic matrix and retrospectively clarifies the metrical role of "Townsman of." Complications of this kind are typical in the interaction between metrical pattern and speech rhythms and constitute a primary reason for apparent ambiguities of accent in lines of Eng. verse.

See DEMOTION, PROMOTION.

G. L. Trager and H. L. Smith Jr., An Outline of English Structure (1951); W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, "The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction," PMLA 74 (1959), Brooks and Warren; Chatman, chaps. 3, 4, appendix; N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (1968); M. Halle and S. J. Keyser, English Stress (1971); R. Vanderslice and P. Ladefoged, "Binary Suprasegmental Features and Transformational Word-Accentuation Rules," Lang 48 (1972); P. Kiparsky, "Stress, Syntax, and Meter," Lang 51 (1975); M. Liberman and A. S. Prince, "On Stress and Linguistic Rhythm," LingI 8 (1977); E. O. Selkirk, Phonology and Syntax (1984); B. Hayes, "The Prosodic Hierarchy in Meter," Phonetics and Phonology, ed. P. Kiparsky and G. Youmans (1989); R. Bradford, Roman Jakobson (1994).

C. O. Hartman

ACCENTUAL-SYLLABIC VERSE. In Eng. poetry that is not written in *free verse, the most common and traditional metrical system is called "accentual-syllabic" because it combines a count of *syllables per line with rules for the number and position of *accents in the line.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691154910
• ISBN 13: 9780691154916
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 4
• Number of pages: 1664
• Editor: Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer