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A Prosody for Whitman?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Roger Mitchell
Roger Mitchell*
Affiliation:
Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wis.
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Abstract

A prosody has four characteristics: predictability, continuity or wholeness, basis in a prominent feature of the language, and flexibility. Given such a definition, Whitman took significant steps toward developing a prosody that vies with accentual and accentual-syllabic prosodies in its subtlety and in its relative freedom from arbitrariness. Based on the rhythms of grammar, Whitman's poetry is constructed of groups rather than stresses, though stresses are here used to measure the size of groups. He is skillful both in arranging these groups and in controlling their relative size so as to reinforce his meaning. Whether measured in groups/line or stresses/line, his most consistent rhythmic form is the parabola. His use of it occasionally shows a formality and intricacy which are never attributed to him.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 6 , October 1969 , pp. 1606 - 1612
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 Sculley Bradley, “The Fundamental Metrical Principle in Whitman's Poetry,” AL, x (1938–39), 437–459.

2 Roger Asselineau, L'Evolution de Walt Whitman (Paris, 1954); Paul Fussell, Jr., “Whitman's Curious Warble: Reminiscence and Reconciliation,” The Presence of Walt Whitman, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (New York, 1962), pp. 28–51; Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964).

3 Gay Wilson Allen, American Prosody (New York, 1935). See also G. W. Allen, “Biblical Analogies for Walt Whitman's Prosody,” Revue Anglo-Américaine, x (1933), 490–507.

4 “On Free Rhythms in Modern Poetry,” Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass. 1960), p. 185.

5 P. 181.

6 “Linguistics and the Study of Poetic Language,” Style in Language, pp. 77–78.

7 Andreas Heusler, Deutsche Versgeschichte (Berlin, 1925); John Collins Pope, The Rhythm of Beowulf (New Haven, Conn., 1942).

8 See the discussion of stress in Seymour Chatman, A Theory of Meter (The Hague, 1965), Ch. iii.

9 All quotations from Whitman's work will be from Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley (New York, 1965). Page references will appear parenthetically in the text.

10 E. C. Ross, “Whitman's Verse,” MLN, xlv (June 1930), 363–364.

11 The scansion of poems by groups rather than feet has attracted a number of prosodists. For instance, see Cary F. Jacob, The Foundations and Nature of Verse (New York, 1918); J. C. LaDrière, “Prosody,” Dictionary of World Literature, ed. J. T. Shipley (New York, 1943); Sister M. Martin Barry, An A nalysis of the Prosodie Structure of Selected Poems ofT. S. Eliot (Washington, D. C, 1948); Sister M. M. Holloway, The Prosodie Theory of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Washington, D. C, 1947).

12 The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, 1963), p. 131.

13 Collected Poems of Edwin A rtington Robinson (New York, 1937), p. 82.