Enjambment is the main way of going beyond the focus on the single line of verse. Enjambment leads to complexity, etc...
The paradox is that enjambment leads to prose poetry, in which there are no divisions at all. But, then, the effect of enjambment is lost, because the reader doesn't see or hear those divisions any more.
The paradox I'm trying to get to is this:
Extremely complex and varied metrical structures, transcending the individual line of poetry, tend toward prose, or the absence of discernible regularity.
It's only a paradox if we think of prose as not rhythmic, or rhythmically inert.
."... I do not think that it is by such means that we gain an appreciation of the peculiar rhythm of a poet. It seems to me also that Milton's verse is especially refractory to yielding up its secrets to examination of the single line. For his verse is not formed in this way. It is the period, the sentence and still more the paragraph, that is the unit of Milton's verse; and emphasis on the line structure is the minimum necessary to provide a counter-pattern to the period structure.
It is only in the period that the wave-length of Milton's verse is to be found : it is his ability to give a perfect and unique pattern to every paragraph, such that the full beauty of the line is found in its context, and his ability to work in larger musical units than many other poets -- that is to me the most conclusive evidence of Milton's supreme mastery. The peculiar feeling, almost a physical sensation of a greatness leap, communicated by Milton's long periods, and by his alone, is impossible to procure from rhymed verse. Indeed, this mastery is most conclusive evidence of his intellectual power, thrul is his grasp of any ideas that lie borrowed or invented.
To be able to control so many words at once is the token of a mind of most exceptional energy.
It is interesting at this point to recall the general observations upon blank verse, which a consideration of Paradise Lost prompted Johnson to make towards the end of his essay.
'The music of the English heroic lines strikes the ear so faintly, that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together; this co-operation can only be obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme.
The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critic, seems to be verse only to the eye."
"The descent beckoned, / as the ascent beckoned." We know WCW thought he had come to a prosodic breakthrough with this poem, the "variable foot." But the language is oddly abstract. I have affection for the poem despite it not being Williams' best.
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Oddly, metrics seems sterile in most applications. For example, I would begin with the idea of a gestalt, and then point out that the final part of a line is going to be more constrained that the beginning, and the accents stronger there. Take the 11 syllable line in Spanish:
(uuuu) uXuuuXu
Accents can fall on any of the first four syllables, but not on 5, 7, 9, where they would be extrametrical stress clashes. So we could see it as a group of freely organized syllables (4) followed by a more distinctive concluding cadence. Another way of thinking about it that we don't know what it is until it is over, so the ending is going to be more significant than the beginning.
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We can think of a collection of lines, or the lines all together adding up to something more, a verse paragraph, where the real mastery comes. Yet if the line itself is devalued too much, then it becomes ... prose. The extreme is JRJ writing out all non-rhyming his poems in prose paragraphs.
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I wrote this as an article once and had it rejected because it was too "pedagogical."
Here are mine:
birdwatching
piano playing and choral singing
memorizing poems
running
crossword puzzles
I am looking at a recently published book on Spanish versification. It seems solid, but very little discussion of enjambment or metrical structures based on verse paragraphs (not just strophes). In other words, the line is the relevant unit, not the relation between lines.
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I composed a tune that has 64 bars, say. The basic structure is 32, repeated twice. Each of those units is composed of question and answer units of 8 bars, which in turn are based on four measure phrases that also answer each other, etc... It is a piece that I improvised and recorded. I am not claiming that is is particularly good, but I am thinking that what this means is that this structure is intuitive to me. That I could structure my improvisation in that form by knowing what it feels like, as a gestalt.
