The Third Way of Syllabic Verse

The Third Way of Syllabic Verse

There is an online poetic community called “Eratosphere”. You can go there, post a poem, and have it critiqued by some high-powered, knowledgeable, poets. I’ve seen A. E. Stallings, for example, participate. You can find the Eratosphere Forums here: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/

The Forums at Eratosphere are divided into “Metrical” and “Non-Metrical”. Note that Free Verse and Syllabic poetry are put in the same forum while Metrical poetry has its own forum. I find this interesting.

Syllabic poetry is new to the English speaking culture. It is the smallest of the three main approaches to contemporary poetry. The largest, and historically the most significant, is the Accentual/Syllabic, or what Eratosphere refers to as Metric. It is the poetry of iambic pentameter. It is the approach that has been used for centuries, it is how Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Frost wrote. Easily 70% of English poetry is of this type.

The second great stream of English poetry is Free Verse. Most people think of Free Verse as new or modern. Strictly speaking, though, that is not true. The oldest collection of Free Verse in English culture is the King James rendering of the Psalms; these have influenced many poets since they were first published. In spite of this, it is true that in the early twentieth century Free Verse became a self-conscious movement, with a dedicated program, and became an approach to poetry that large numbers of poets adopted.

For the purposes of this essay, the distinction between Free Verse and Metrical Verse is that Free Verse lacks a regulated line. By regulated line I mean that in Free Verse the line of the poem is not controlled by counting. In Metrical Verse the line of the poem is regulated by counting the accents, stresses, and/or the number of syllables. In the context of this essay the “Free” of “Free Verse” means a type of poetry that is free of the constraints of counting.

The third type of poetry in English culture is Syllabic Verse. Syllabic Verse is the dominant form of poetry in such cultures as France, China, and Japan. It is not surprising that these cultures have exerted a strong influence on the development of Syllabic Verse in English.

Briefly, Syllabic Verse is that type of poetry that regulates the line of the poem by counting the number of syllables in the line. Whereas Metrical Poetry counts stresses, Syllabic Poetry counts syllables only; stresses are not taken into consideration in the regulation of the line.

Syllabic English Verse is new; I would date it to the early twentieth century and specifically the work of Adelaide Crapsey. She is the first English speaking poet that I know of to suggest a strictly syllabic poetic form; the Cinquain, a five line form with a syllabic count of 2-4-6-8-2.

From a Metrical Verse point of view both Free Verse and Syllabic Verse are non-metrical because neither uses stresses, or poetic feet, to regulate the poetic line. Hence Eratosphere, whose founders seem to be metrical poets, put them in the same forum while placing Metrical Poetry in its own forum.

From a Free Verse point of view both Metrical Verse and Syllabic Verse are non-Free because both of them regulate their lines of poetry by counting, in contrast to Free Verse where the poetic line is unregulated and uncounted. From a Free Verse point of view it would make sense to place Metrical and Syllabic Verse in a shared forum, while having a separate forum for Free Verse.

It all depends on your starting point, where you stand determines how you are going to group these various approaches.

As I said, Syllabic Verse in English is new and in some ways it is still untested third way. I think it is fruitful to explore why a Syllabic approach to poetry would emerge in English culture at this time.

First, I think one reason is that English has become a world language. When English was confined to the British Isles, its accentual nature was clear to everyone and contrasted with languages, such as French, which were non-accentual in nature. But the emergence of English as a world language means that there is greater variance in how English is pronounced and that has implications for how a poet goes about constructing a poetic line in regulated verse.

Here is an example. In the U.S. the word “brochure” is accented on the second syllable – broCHURE. I was watching a British spy series once and a woman in the episode pointed out a BROchure – accent on the first syllable. An Australian friend of mine confirmed that in Australia broCHURES are BROchures. There are many examples like this.

The point here is that the metrical poet can no longer depend on readers placing a stress on the same syllable that the poet intends or that is common among the dialect the poet finds natural. As my Australian friend put it, “It’s safer to count syllables.” It is safer to count syllables because even though different English speaking dialects will stress a word like “brochure” differently, they both agree that the word has two syllables; so that syllable count is the same in Britain, the U.S., and Australia.

In modern metrical prosody that I have read this difficulty is ignored, as if it has no significance. But I think it is a problem for metrical approaches to English verse that can undermine a poet’s metrical efforts. For example, if a metrical poet is writing iambic lines, and they want the word “brochure” to instantiate an iambic pattern, not all speakers of English will read it that way. Some will read/hear it iambically and some will not. This undermines the basis for metrical construction.

There are today large communities of English speakers for whom English is a significant second language, or whose native language strongly permeates the manner in which their English is pronounced. In India alone there are millions of English speakers; the patterns of the native Hindi, or other language from the sub-continent, affect how their English is pronounced, stressed, and patterned. The same is true of a country like South Africa.

Another difficulty is that the metrical approach oversimplifies the stress patterns of English. Basically metrical verse divides syllables into stressed and unstressed. But the actual patterns of English are far more complex; there is a whole range of stresses from very strong to lightly touched. In addition there are patterns of elongation and diminution (where a vowel, for example, is drawn out, or clipped). These stress patterns are affected by the words surrounding a given word, by the emotional context when the word is spoken, by the dialect and region. It simply isn’t true that the syllabic nature of English can be reduced to just these two.

This observation has been met by some metrical poets by creating complex patterns of semi-stresses. Timothy Steele, the most articulate contemporary spokesman for metrical verse, uses these kinds of schemes in his book “All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing” (highly recommended). Though Steele’s presentation is nuanced and articulate, I find myself ultimately not convinced. I’m not convinced that the intermediary stress patterns actually constitute stress patterns that map onto classical poetic feet. Rather, it seems to me, that there are a wide variety of patterns which cannot be collapsed into the two categories of “stressed” and “unstressed”. An example is the phrase, often spoken by mothers, “Johnny, come in now.” It is in two beats, but the rhythm is jazzy, syncopated, and it is a rhythm that I have observed in numerous other contexts for five syllable statements. I don’t think it can be conflated to a simple stressed/unstressed pattern.

For the syllabic poet all these considerations are simply laid aside. The syllabic poet, by opting to count syllables instead of stresses and poetic feet, simply allows the variant stress patterns their free reign. The syllabic poet expects different stress patterns and therefore different pattern readings to be superimposed on the syllabic line. In reading a syllabic line the syllabic poet might alter the stress pattern deliberately at different readings in order to bring out different emotional nuances.

I think there is a third reason for the slow emergence of syllabic poetry in the English speaking world. This is speculative, but I have the feeling that the English language is undergoing a profound change. Because we are embedded in this transition it is difficult for us to hear it. But my suggestion is that the English language is becoming “flattened out”. I mean by “flattened out” that the dialects of English that are most strongly stressed are either disappearing or are being marginalized. Part of this is the influence of mass communication. Television tends to offer a type of English that is, relatively speaking, lacking in dramatic stress patterns. I think the idea behind this is that a relatively unstressed type of English can be understood by a broader audience than a dramatically stressed dialect, such as Scottish.

An additional factor, alluded to above, is the emergence of large communities of English speakers whose native languages are not strongly stressed. These communities have tended to carry that pattern of pronunciation into their English, creating an English which, compared to some English dialects, is only lightly stressed. I believe this has had an influence in what I refer to as a “flattened out” English.

I suspect that some early twentieth century English poets were intuitively aware of this shift in how English is spoken. Poets such as Adelaide Crapsey, Elizabeth Daryush, Richard Wright, Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, and others, all of whom wrote significant syllabic verse, intuited, I think, that English is ready for this approach.

Syllabic Verse is a third way for English poetry and still somewhat unsure of itself. It is neither Metrical Verse nor Free Verse. In my opinion, the early results of English Syllabic verse are indicative of great potential.