by Timothy Morris

STYLE, Fall 1994

The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993. x + 178 pp. $34.50 cloth.

Is meter meaningful in itself, or is it just a package for poetic meaning? Many of the traditional moves to connect meter and meaning now ring pretty hollow. Neoclassical theories of decorum seem arbitrary to modern readers, and New Critical ideas about enactment or closure often involve such ad hoc local invocations of the special appropriateness of a certain formal move to a particular meaning that they are useless for the purposes of theory. In the face of this theoretical impasse, Annie Finch's The Ghost of Meter is an unabashed argument for the metrical encoding of meaning. It is a watershed in the study of the relation of form to meaning. Finch's theory of the "metrical code," which "implies that meter in a metrically organic poem can function like a language" (12), enables her to argue that meter enacts meaning not just situationally or tactically, but at the larger relational level of cultural intertextuality. Finch's key insight is that iambic pentameter, which carries such a heavy baggage of patriarchal institutions in education and the high tradition of English poetic diction, can best be studied at the moment of early free verse in English, when the grip of pentameter on verse was becoming unclenched.

One can study the metrical code of the pentameter best, in fact, in verse which is not itself pentameter­based. In nineteenth­century verse, this is the work of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Because their typical forms are iambic (Dickinson) or prosaic (Whitman), they can revert to the pentameter at key moments (think of "I am the man.... I suffer'd.... I was there" or "First Chill then Stuporthen the letting go"). Dickinson and Whitman challenge the pentameter by refusing to make it the basis of their work. But they can also acknowledge, ironically or seriously, their readers' ingrained expectations that pentameter represents the only pure form that poetic diction can take.

Finch notes Dickinson's use of the pentameter to highlight crises of power that are often and uncoincidentally crises in gender as well, as in "A Loss of something ever felt I." Dickinson rarely uses full pentameter lines, but many of her iambic stanzas can be scanned into pentameters across line breaks-one more insight into how with this poet things are and are not what they seem to be. In fact, pentametrical paradoxes are a central theme of Finch's readings of Dickinson and Whitman. As one might expect, pentameter for both poets can represent bounds and constriction, can be read "As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow." But since pentameter is also the meter historically associated with poetic sublimity (particularly through its associations with Milton), it is a double­voiced form. Whitman sets his pentameters against his dactylic lines, and his dactyls can encode a rougher, more organic voice by contrast to the constraint of pentameter. But the relation between pentameter and dactyl is not merely situational or relational in Whitman, because as a classical meter the dactylic form also bears historical associations to "high" poetic genres. Both dactylic and iambic rhythms are set against the prosaic matrix of Whitman's work, and both bear double, historically situated connotations when they appear in that work. Finch argues very effectively that for Victorian readers, historical associations of rhythm and meter constrained the early reception of these poets and made their break with traditional prosodies both perceptible and, often, unintelligible (see especially her citations of early Whitman critics, 32­35).

Elizabeth Bishop's point about travel, then, is as true of poetic rhythm: "The choice is never wide and never free" (94). The expectations of real historical readers combine with the constraints of natural language to produce metrical codes. Stephen Crane's free verse was so uncategorizable in the 1890s that even he hesitated to call his own works poems, and he uses full pentameters even more sparingly than Dickinson does. But Finch perceptively argues that in Crane's work the Whitmanic tension between iamb and dactyl moves to the level of the individual foot within the line. Iambs and dactyls, as vestiges of historical traditions of meter, enact their old battle within Crane's lines between purity (or constraint?) and ruggedness (or classicism?). Crane reserves true pentameters only for moments of supreme terror or irony: "But some had opportunity to squeal."

Poetry even as eccentric as Crane's is still within the gravitational pull of the metrical codes of traditional English verse. The free verse of the 19lOs is even more so. Finch notes how quickly early twentieth­century vers libre became, for its contemporary readers, a metrical code in itself, losing its revolutionary potential as it became a new orthodoxy. Finch's exploration of the controversies over the free­verse movement (83­97) is perhaps the best example of her authoritatively researched approach to establishing the social context of the reception and readership of metrical forms. Then, for an extended case study of Modernist uses of meter, Finch turns to T. S. Eliot, himself an influential theorist as well as a practitioner of free­verse form. Free verse was the new orthodoxy when Eliot began to publish in the mid­1910s, meaning that he had more choices of coded metrical varieties open to him than any previous English poet and, as an American, maybe more choices than his British contemporaries. In fact, Eliot may have had more truly meaningful formal options than many later poets for whom earlier metrical forms have begun to lose their resonance. Finch reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for its horrifying descent into the clutches of the pentameter at the end, a descent which stifles the speaker's imagination: "I do not think that they will sing to me." In The Waste Land Eliot moves toward dactyls (especially in "What the Thunder Said") and in Four Quartets he reconciles iambic and dactylic meters. Throughout, the matrix for Eliot's manipulation of the metrical code is his confident deployment of the Modernist free-verse idiom.

In poetry since Eliot, neither poet nor reader can assume a strong community of consent about the connotations of metrical codes-which is why it takes such a perceptive and aurally literate reader as Finch to recover the codes of earlier verse. But (again paradoxically) poets like Audre Lorde and Charles Wright can reenergize the very iambic and dactylic meters that have lost so much of their historical association since the early part of this century. Finch reads their work with a genuinely good sense of rhythm. One can only reckon that hers is a talent both inborn and cultivated through wide and relentless reading of verse. I am guessing at this, but I am not guessing at the remarkable potential of her metrical code readings to become a paradigm for the formal study of nineteenth­ and twentieth­century verse.

It often seems as if there is not much meaningful to say about free verse. Studies based on breath units, variable feet, and organic scansion are usually unreplicable from one critic to the next. But Finch's argument that free verse is always relational even when it seems most unbounded (or alternatively, most idiosyncratic) is a potentially comprehensive approach to "open form" poetry. The best acknowledgment one can make to The Ghost of Meter is to say that after reading it one literally cannot ever read a free­verse poem again without hearing the interplay of iambic, dactylic, and prosaic forces. I will certainly not unlearn the ways that Finch has taught me to hear poetry. I would bet that a whole generation of critics will learn from Finch how to hear the poems they read.

Timothy Morris
University of Texas, Arlington

Other Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. "Questions of Travel." The Complete Poems 1927­1979. New York: Farrar, 1983.