Rhythmic Counterpoints

Abstract

Various approaches to rhythm or poetry have presented impediments to the theorisation and study of poetic rhythm. These include choices regarding the etymology of rhythm, the dismissal of relations between music and poetry, and the tendencies to see rhythm either as contrary to metre or conflated with it. This essay explores options and alternatives that enable understandings of rhythm in accord with our experience of music and poetry. A consideration of the affinities and comparability of both arts reveals viable entryways into poetic rhythm, including the practices of early modern poetry, particularly in Spanish.

Keywords:

• poetic rhythm
• ruthmós
• music
• temporal arts
• metre

Notes

1 Francisco de Quevedo, Poesía varia, ed., con intro., de James Crosby (Madrid: Cátedra, 1982), 178–79.

2 Quevedo, Poesía varia, ed. Crosby, 179.

3 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poesía lírica, ed., con intro. & notas, de José Carlos González Boixo (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000), 114. For a highly insightful essay on rhythm in Sor Juana, see Emilie L. Bergmann, ‘Dancing to the Dactyls, Listening to Sor Juana’, Aztlan. A Journal of Chicano Studies, 44:2 (2019), 187–94.

4 Émile Benveniste, ‘The Notion of “Rhythm” in Its Linguistic Expression’, in his Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, with a foreword by Émile Benveniste (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971 [1^st French ed. 1966]), 281–88 (p. 282).

5 Benveniste, ‘The Notion of “Rhythm” ’, 285.

6 Benveniste, ‘The Notion of “Rhythm” ’, 285–86.

7 Benveniste, ‘The Notion of “Rhythm” ’, 286–87.

8 For a study of the scholarly debates surrounding ruthmós, as well as an exploration of the importance of rhythm derived from music, see Jesús Luque Moreno, ‘El ritmo del lenguaje: conceptos y términos’, Rhythmica. Revista Española de Métrica Comparada, 9 (2011), 99–144, an article which interestingly takes as its point of departure Aristides Quintilianus’ fundamental treatise on music from the late third or early fourth century CE.

9 See David Nowell Smith, ‘What Is Called Rhythm?’, in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form, ed. Ben Glaser & Jonathan Culler (New York: Fordham U. P., 2019), 40–59 (pp. 47 & 48).

10 Vincent Barletta, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2020), 1.

11 Barletta, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession, 3; emphasis in the original.

12 Barletta, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession, xiv.

13 ‘The word “revenge” is said so quickly it almost seems as if it could contain no more than one conceptual and perceptional root. And so one continues to strive to discover it: just as our economists have not yet wearied of scenting a similar unity in the word “value” and of searching after the original root-concept of the word. As if every word were not a pocket into which now this, now that, now several things at once have been put. Thus revenge, too, is now this, now that, now something more combined’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Ebook [Cambridge, MA: Cambridge U. P., 1986 (1^st German ed. 1878)], section 33).

14 For a lexicographic history of ritmo and rima, two closely intertwined words in Spanish and other Romance languages (as well as English), see Francisco Abad Nebot, ‘Ritmo y rima: música y poesía’, Signa. Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica, 22 (2013), 23–32.

15 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. & intro. by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1453–87, sections 1447a–1448a.

16 Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans., with an intro., by Paul A. Kottman (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2005 [1^st Italian ed. 2003]), 1–7.

17 Johanna Drucker, ‘Not Sound’, in The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff & Craig Dworkin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), 237–48.

18 Barry Ife, ‘When Don Quixote Starts to Sing What Are We Supposed to Hear?’, 4 (unpublished paper given at the symposium ‘Sound Politics: Somatics and Semantics in the Early Modern World’, University of Southern California, 8 May 2021). I am grateful to Professor Ife for his consent to cite this passage.

19 Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 33.

20 Peter Groves, Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare: A Guide for Readers and Actors (Clayton: Monash Univ. Publishing, 2013), xx.

21 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans., with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974 [1^st German ed. 1882]), 138–40, section 84; emphasis in the original.

22 Other remarks on rhythm by Nietzsche include The Gay Science, trans. Kaufmann, 324–25, section 368; Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), 372–73, section 246; and Twilight of the Idols (1889), in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. & ed., with intro. & notes, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 519–20.

23 See Nowell Smith, ‘What Is Called Rhythm?’, 41.

24 See Thomas Cable, ‘How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 174–96 (p. 184).

25 See Ben Glaser, ‘Introduction’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 1–17 (p. 6).

26 Cited in Natalie Gerber, ‘Beyond Meaning: Differing Fates of Some Modernist Poets’ Investments of Belief in Sounds’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 223–46 (p. 223).

27 Cited in Glaser, ‘Introduction’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 1 & 7.

28 Virginia Jackson, ‘The Cadence of Consent: Francis Barton Gummere, Lyric Rhythm, and White Poetics’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 87–105 (p. 99).

29 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Rhythm?’, in Critical Rhythm, ed. Glaser & Culler, 21–39 (p. 21).

30 Culler, ‘Why Rhythm?’, 21.

31 Diego García Rengifo, Arte poética española [published under his brother’s name, Juan Díaz Rengifo] (Salamanca: Miguel Serrano de Vargas, 1592), 22.

32 Victor Zuckerkandl (from his Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask, 2 vols [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956]), cited at length by Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 77.

33 As cited in Barletta, Rhythm: Form and Dispossession, 64; his translation.

34 Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 76–78.

35 See Martin J. Duffell, ‘The Iambic Pentameter and Its Rivals’, Rhythmica. Revista Española de Métrica Comparada, 1 (2003), 61–85.

36 Groves, Rhythm and Meaning in Shakespeare, 49–50 & 26–27.

37 See, for example, Andrés Bello, Principios de la ortología y métrica de la lengua castellana [1835], in Obras completas de Andrés Bello, 26 vols (Caracas: La Casa de Bello, 1981–1984), VI (1981), 174–87; Tomás Navarro Tomás, Métrica española: reseña histórica y descriptiva (Syracuse: Syracuse U. P., 1956), 177–78; Antonio Quilis, Métrica española (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975 [1^st ed. 1969]), 69–70; and Pablo Jauralde Pou, Métrica española (Madrid: Cátedra, 2020), 190–216.

38 Esteban Torre Serrano, ‘La perfección de algunos endecasílabos “imperfectos” de Garcilaso de la Vega’, Rhythmica. Revista Española de Métrica Comparada, 10 (2012), 187–204 (pp. 203–04).

39 Quevedo, Poesía varia, ed. Crosby, 345.

40 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española. An earlier version of this book, Manual de métrica española (Madrid: Castalia, 2005), lists co-authors Elena Varela Merino and Pablo Moíno Sánchez.

41 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 116–17 & 151–90.

42 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 118 & 190–216.

43 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 79–80.

44 Borja Navarro Colorado, ‘Hacia un análisis distante del endecasílabo áureo: patrones métricos, frecuencias y evolución histórica’, Rhythmica. Revista Española de Métrica Comparada, 14 (2016), 89–118 (p. 113).

45 Quevedo, Poesía varia, ed. Crosby, 214.

46 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 21–22.

47 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 43.

48 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 47.

49 Jauralde Pou, Métrica española, 29–31.

50 Reuven Tsur, Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance. An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics (Brighton/Portland/Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).

51 Navarro Tomás, Métrica española, 8–14.

52 Navarro Tomás, Métrica española, 180.

53 Cable, ‘How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper’, 175.

54 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as quoted in Gerber, ‘Beyond Meaning’, 223.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.