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.
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