Vibrant Meter: Periods, Pulsations, and Prosody in Blake’s Milton

ABSTRACT

Milton is known for its unorthodox treatment of time; however, scholarship tends to overlook one temporality of central importance: meter. This article argues that Milton’s metrical experiments are essential for understanding the poem’s strange temporal frameworks. Meter marks the intersection at which Milton’s primary concerns—poetry, physiology, and time—converge, a nodal point articulating poetry’s connection to living bodies, evolution, and history. Meter is patterned words, sound, and time, and Milton deploys it to map out a world that organizes itself according to interacting rhythmic patterns, casting meter as an ecological force that bridges interior and exterior life, as both meter and ecological processes are made legible through the interplay between expectation and deviation, repetition and variation, regularity and contingency. This article puts Blake in dialogue with anthropologist Gregory Bateson, an avid Blake reader whose Steps to an Ecology of Mind posits mind as a system of interdependent pathways that are irreducible to a bounded individual. Blake and Bateson’s affinity lies partly in their reputations as system thinkers but more so in their kinship as ecological thinkers who privilege pattern over substance as a framework for understanding our relationship with the external world.

Notes

1 All references to the text of Milton and other works by Blake refer to the newly revised edition of The Complete Poetry, edited by David V. Erdman. Page numbers are preceded by “E.” When not referring to Milton, standard abbreviations of Blake’s work are given, such as “J” for Jerusalem.

2 The term “ecology” would not have been available to Blake. Its modern sense first appears in Thoreau in 1858. The term is not firmly established until Ernst Haeckel used it in the 1870s to describe relations between plants and animals in a habitat (Williams 110–11).

3 Bateson’s father, William Bateson, a prominent English scientist who coined the term genetics, read Shakespeare and Blake to his sons (Ecology of Mind). For Bateson’s allusions to Blake, see G. Bateson, Steps 27–29, 49, 188, 265, 303, 306, 469, and 470; Mind and Nature 103–04, 122, and 219; and Angels Fear 18, 36.

4 See the Historical Poetics reading group, whose members consist largely of Victorian and American poetry scholars. They describe their project as the “intensive reading of poems in relation to multiple discourses around, about, and in poetry, including (but not limited to) histories of genre, form, format, medium, prosody, parody, performance, circulation, translation and transmission” (“About”). In their introduction to a special issue of Essays in Romanticism, Julia S. Carlson, Ewan J. Jones, and D. B. Ruderman address the critical neglect of prosody in Romantic studies, asserting that Romantic studies can contribute to, benefit from, and test the theoretical limits of Historical Poetics (3–4).

5 Wheeler cites several examples of this phenomenon: T. S. Eliot’s claim that new art reconstitutes our understanding of previous works; Freud’s concept, Nachträglichkeit, sometimes translated as “afterwardness”; the recent biological concept, “downward causation”; and epigenetics are all examples of the “interference of the present in the past” (187).

6 Jesper Hoffmeyer notes that “what was not too long ago characterized as the self-replicating and deterministic entity of the genome has increasingly become understood to be a changeable and flexible point in an ongoing process” (122).

7 Saree Makdisi has stressed the importance of distinguishing “Blake's form of materialism … from that other kind of materialism, which Blake associated with Bacon, Newton, and Locke” (263).

8 For Blake, states are distinct from individuals: “Distinguish therefore States from Individuals in those States / States Change: but Individual Identities never change nor cease” (32:22–23, E 132). Not only does the distinction allow individuals to redeem themselves from being shackled by error, it also allows them to grow and change over time. That “Memory is a State Always, & the Reason is a State” (32:34, E 132) allows Blake to carry out Milton’s aim of altering the way we comprehend the past, a past that includes Paradise Lost.

9 From Blake’s annotations to Bishop Watson’s Apology for the Bible.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.