One of the disadvantages of my unusual relationship with academia is that I often don’t really know what’s going on in a field I’m researching. Thus, when I began reading Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, I had no idea that it was considered a classic within English departments in colleges across the country. But a classic it is and a classic it deserves to be. It doesn’t have the grand sweep of a cyclopaedia like Lewis Turco’s taxonomicon, but it serves a different purpose, and serves it well: Instead of getting caught up in the minutiae of prosody, it explores meaningfully the subduction zone where prosody is drawn under poetics. What happens when you substitute a spondee for an iamb? Why is pentametric verse generally so much more emotive than tetrametric? Why does the Shakespearean sonnet tend to be wittier or more sophomoric than the Petrarchan? It’s a good, good book.

For the first seven chapters, Fussell writes in a tone that reminds me of no one’s more than Geertz’. He writes with wit, with charm, with thought, and with that calm that comes from surveying a deep tradition from Olympian heights. But in chapter eight, ‘The English Stanzas’, snoot takes the reigns: the ‘exotic’ haiku is ‘reputedly exquisite’ (emphasis mine); after critique, a poem by Ted Hughes is ‘very nice’; and of a particular rhyme scheme — ‘All we can say about this is that if a poet wants his five-line stanza to fracture into two parts each time, this is the structure to use.’

But this is academia — most dons have their diva moments, and the first seven exquisite chapters allow me to forgive Fussell a little ‘tude toward the end of the book — especially since he’s still right! But what gives me pause is a section on five-line stanzas where I think he’s wrong. Fussell quotes a stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell‘:

Beneath the clear blue sky he saw
A little field of meadow ground;
But field or meadow name it not;
Call it of earth a small green plot,
With rocks encompassed round

In speaking of the stanza’s abccb rhyme scheme:

This is essentially the In Memoriam stanza [abba tetrameter] with an additional line at the beginning. The four lines which constitute the enclosure action of the structure grip together nicely, but the first line, for whose echoing rhyme unconsciously we look in vain, tends to drift away, to separate itself from that to which the typography tells us it is structurally indispensable. We end with feelings of a vague structural uneasiness: we are not satisfied and fulfilled as we are with Sidney’s five-line arrangement [ababa].

Pas d’accord, bra! I don’t have the knowledge or experience of Fussell, but I knows what I likes, and to me, ‘Peter Bell’ is exquisite. From where I read, each stanza seems to composed of two well-melded sections. The first, composed of two or three lines, does not rhyme, while the second, composed of three or two, does, usually begins with a conjunction or preposition, and usually expands upon the first. Beyond the semantic level, rhyme binds the two segments together: The second line of the first section rhymes with the ultimate line of the second (and of the stanza), while assonance and occasional consonance tie the first line of the stanza to enclosed couplet — saw-not-plot, roaring-ears-fears, I-strive-dive, &c. This last does not occur in every stanza of ‘Bell’, but is present in more than half.

I’m kvetching, I’m kvetching… God forbid there should be disagreement in matters of taste, right? So Fussell and I disagreed for a paragraph. But I think this brings to light an important point: This ain’t science. Fussell isn’t wrong, per se — he just sees things in a way that prevent him from enjoying something I do. But that’s what taste is — we aren’t all going to wander around in gurgling bliss, loving every experience of our lives.

The problem comes when we mistake taste for nature, something that happens far too often in discussions of prosody and poetics — the components of good poetry may be tied to biological processes, or universal perception of rhythm. Though Fussell is aware of the historic and linguistic reasons that modern English poetry is accentual-syllabic rather than syllabic, accentual, or quantitative (chapter four), he still makes this mistake, and like many other writers, conflates not only nature and taste, but morality:

As we saw at the outset, no element of a poem is more basic—and I mean physical—in its effect upon the reader than the metrical element, and perhaps no technical triumphs reveal more readily than the metrical the poet’s sympathy with logical and psychological uniformity—which exists outside his own, and to which the fullest understanding of his own is the key. The poet whose metrical effects actually work upon a reader reveals that he has attained an understanding of what man in general is like. It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.

Whoa. Heavy.

It’s this confusion of acculturated taste and universal concepts that prevents us so often for appreciating other poetries. Take, for example, rap: Rap, as a spoken or sung, rather than print form, has no need for your scansion. Alliteration does not over-stress syllables. Substitution can happen anywhere, and doesn’t necessarily mean what it traditionally means. Normative metres are hardly normative, and are abandoned or converted rapidly and, at the tongue of a good artist, with ease. Check the following Lauryn Hill lyrics from the Fugees song ‘Ready Or Not’¹:

I play my enemies like a game of chess, where I rest,
No stress
If you don’t smoke sess, lest.
I must confess, my destiny’s manifest
In some Goretex and sweats I make treks like I’m homeless
Rap orgies with Porgy and Bess,
Capture your bounty like Elliot Ness, yes
Bless you if you represent the Fu
But I’ll hex you with some witch’s brew if you’re Doo Doo
Voo Doo,
I can do what you do, easy, believe me
Frontin’ niggas give me hee-bee-gee-bees
So while you’re imitating Al Capone
I’ll be Nina Simone
And defacating on your microphone.

There are some pretty obvious aspects of what is widely considered to be good rap that don’t come into play for other poetries that are fully manifest, here (the punning, the contemporary cultural references), but I’m interested, for the moment, solely in a metrical matter: If you have an ear for hip hop or rap, and if you’ve listened to this song, you know that what Hill does here (and what Wyclef Jean does in a previous verse) is metrical magic. But if you haven’t heard the track, good luck sussing out what’s going on from the text alone. The poetic tradition that Fussell represents has very little that it can say to this poetics (and vice versa), but that doesn’t make what the Fugees did (and are now doing again!) bad poetry.

When we deal with the poetics and prosodies of various poetries, we are dealing not with elements of human nature, but of (ever-changing) cultural traditions. De gustibus non est disputandum is a motto that every indie hipster, every tortured tweed academic, and every sixty-something nostalgiac should get tattooed on her or his pained, furrowed brow.

¹ I’ve used a transcription of the lyrics that I found in several places on-line. Unfortunately, I don’t have the liner notes for this album, and I don’t even know if these notes contain the lyrics. The Fugees’ site is not helpful. I used the transcription on-line, figuring it was closer to the Fugees’ intentions that my lineation would have been.

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