In search of lost lines

Whitman to me was an instrument... he started us on the course of our researches 

into the nature of the line by breaking finally with English prosody. After him there has been 

for us no line.   --W. C. Williams

    J. Kruse (2012), who cited the Williams passage above, has observed that one main reason for the lack of technical terminology for enjambment, despite the noted fact of its presence in the classical languages, is the distinction held in linguistic typology between analytic and synthetic languages. Enjambment would then be a feature more noticeable in analytic languages like English where sense depends heavily on word order. But is enjambment really noticeable without the aid of the visual dimension of the written or printed page? Can I hear an enjambed line in the microsecond it occupies as a prosodic boundary between words or phrases? In the delivery instance of a text without canonic phonic markers such as stichs, rhymes, caesuras, or alliterations, won’t it be more likely that the utterance would be prosodically parsed following either the speaker's pacing or the listener's sense of syntactic order? Enjambment would then seem to be of a different order. It is  not bound by canonic phrase groupings or junctures and even by standard orthography (e.g., E. E. Cummings). No necessity binds it to the physiological rhythms characteristic of actual human breathing either. We can probably say for enjambent, as much for free verse, that its dynamic overflows that of the metrical, the grammatical, and the phonological. 

    This argues, then, for the visual nature of enjambment, a device that, for analytic languages, is highly dependent on its recognition as a graphic feature scanned during silent reading. Following Bradford’s statement about enjambment in his Graphic Poetics, we can then look at this scriptural device as an axis that serves as the contrapuntal play between the Eye and the Ear, implying the crucial involvement of the visual (written or printed) dimension in its mechanics. An enjambment would be like an “eye pause” because it is more readily perceived by the eye than by the ear. To take account of this mechanism, we will need what Kruse observed as lacking in the study of this device: technical terms for its discussion, terms which we can mine from today’s studies in typography, graphematics, and grammatology. From a canonical point of view, the modulation in the configuration of the line in verbal and visual terms is interpreted as a movement bending toward or away from the axiomatic orders of grammatical syntax, metrical line, and phonological structure. This canonic triangulation needs to imagine the ground of perception and the  "celestial" frames as highly-determined systems (immobile points) so that we can draw any discursive trajectory as an isomorphic mapping among various semiotic subsystems. 

    Free verse would be that motion where complete information or totality is absent, and where the trajectory is not guided by fixed stars but by the projected mapping motion of those posited frames of reference in relation to an imagined stable ground of discourse. That map would be based on previous cultural memory that is constantly being redrawn or revised on-the-fly (cf. D. Davidson’s “radical interpretation”), and poetic discourse would be the laboratory where all these moving references are being tested and probed. The oscillatory Gestalt of poetic discourse comes from the metalinguistic play it stages in the invocation of those projected structures in memory, either satisfying our deepest desire for a confirmation of a hidden but complete Order (a theological canvas), or upsetting this desire by delaying or dislocating the imaginary coherence of the “line” as a utopian mapping among linguistic, typographic, and semantic planes (or structural, vehicular, and referential bundles).

    This delay is all the more made operational by the semiotic and technological reflexivity it imposes upon the reader by forcing a comparison between her expectations of linguistic order (or “deeper” meaning) and the unusual reconfiguration of the poetic text, thereby reopening the field to a perceptual crisis that brokers the return of the aesthetic via the ascendancy of asymmetry, incongruity, and anisomorphism. The diagrammatic map, invested on the utopia of equivalences, would barely hold the parts together in the absence of the whole. The whole is exactly what is delayed or suspended, whose horizon is posited or imagined as somehow already attained or circumscribed. We can repeat here what Derrida has said about Saussure’s langue: no one has yet encountered the whole in its totality. In the infinitely slow arrival of the whole, free verse would primarily operate as a metaprosodic trajectory tracing the echoes of ideal systems as distant allegories.

Prosodic notes on free verse

    From one of the best works on historical metrics, we can read:

Whereas a caesura represents a line-internal pause caused by a syntactical juncture in the text, enjambment represents the lack of a syntactical juncture at line ends. Speaking in the most preliminary of terms, enjambment occurs whenever a line break does not coincide with a syntactical juncture in the text, and enjambment therefore constitutes one extreme of a scale whose opposite extreme is constituted by an end-stopped line. (Jesper Kruse, 2012)

    Under a post-essentialist view of prosody, the bi-play between syntax and the metrological line can only be posed in absolute terms if the knowledge of syntax as a grammatical system is already complete. Such a status is possible only if the subsystems that it needs to work are themselves already transparent or fully-known systems. In other words, a transparent syntax presumes all other subsystemic variables to be fully established and available for co-reference or corroboration. The thresholds that are crossed constantly--via the dialectical rapport between a notion of standard syntax and the metrical frame which tests both itself and the linguistic and mediatic forms at its disposal--could be recast as cognitive mapping operations through which aesthetic objects (like "line" and "foot") could be overmarked for material reference and informational salience. The bracketing of orthodox metrologies that scan for markedness in terms of prominences and boundaries in favor of the displacement of the abstract poetico-linguistic line, and the shift in the level of analytical generality toward a metaprosodic dimension where equivalence rules are perpetually negotiated in a solution space, would disentangle us from the undeclared essentialisms of the binary oppositions between natural and formal aspects of language and media (i.e., the cognitive pairing of one ideal object with another, e.g., line+syntax). 

    From this reformulation, and extending from R. Bradford’s work on graphic poetics, the virtue of free verse is staked less on the construction of a new metrological mode that it may have afforded, than on its capacity to open the way toward the foregrounding of the metaprosodic biases of the metrological imagination (the axis between the eye and the ear). Approached this way, poetic composition under a metrological scheme is an operation of transposition where the sum total of the unknowns of language and communication (cf. the notion of lalangue in Lacan) is purified to a rational frame of binary rules and exception. In short, it is a prosodic laboratory where the limits of what can be known about the medium can be tested, an ideal environment in which the constraints imposed on the use of signs act like referential frames against which semiotic objects could be abstracted and measured (Cf. Jean-Claude Milner's For the Love of Language).

    Wouldn’t the concept of verse design, say for an accentual-syllabic meter, presume the self-evidence of the structural presence of stresses? We need to invoke the current empirical notion of stress and prosodic features as purely pragmatic variational elements; that is, as metadiscursive features of emergent script acts. The binarism of verse design vs. verse instance in Jakobson needs to be re-examined, especially since they mirror the langue/parole dichotomy in Saussure. Useful as it may seem in separating the application of the verse design from its status as a formal framework, it nonetheless presumes that its formal elements are universally accessible givens without themselves needing to be resituated in the cycle of pragmatic interpretation (and history). Usually, the formal elements are presumed to be self-evident properties of the language, analytically extracted from its indefinite mass, then fed back into it in the guise of an art form that raises that language to its aesthetic potential, as the acme of its incarnation. 

    Needless to say, as a privileged mode of commodified discourse whose value depended on such aesthetic promotion, poetic discourse is a means of gaining cultural capital in a society where such process is sanctioned and validated. It is also the reason why it can easily be co-opted by the discursive technologies of the State and bodies of power. As avant-garde counter-traditions have shown us in the history of poetics, there is nothing apolitical about poetic discourse, even if it downplays such possible affiliations in its form or content. Despite its capacity to open the way toward metaprosodic interrogation, free verse, because of its conceptual grafting to expressive individualism, retains a nostalgia for transcendental agency grounded on Romantic humanist thought. In its association with the Romantic voice and common "natural" speech, free verse's radical potential is contained, recuperated once again by its alliance with a prevailing poetic model. 

    At the same time, however, the critique of Romantic ideas and the originary notion of the Author produced a post-hermeneutic condition (F. Kittler) which pried language away from such a metrological anchoring. (The Futurist parole in libertà points the way in a manner more radical than free verse, opening the door toward the technological horizon of metamedia in the prosodic laboratories of the avant-garde.) By the time Formalism entered the picture, the shift from formal metrologies toward the ideal of organic unity marks the moment of a new development: the institution of Criticism and the establishment of Literature as an autonomous object. Without formal metrologies at the center of modernist poetic discourse--having been reduced to the status of the ghost of meter, free verse represented not the arrival of a new metrology but the index of the crisis of form, a crisis addressed later on by the emergence of formalist New Criticism. New Criticism, in effect, saved poetic discourse and provided it a new-found metaprosodic base.