This chapter studies H.D.’s translations of choruses from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis (1915) and Hippolytus (1919). Tracing her shifting concern from image to sound, the author argues that her work mirrors Eliot’s and Pound’s preoccupations of that period; her play Hippolytus Temporizes (1927) – abstract and formalist, yet rooted in the specific circumstances of its time – especially reflects this. More specifically, she show that the “Choruses from Iphigeneia” are a first attempt to compose, on the one hand, a long Imagist poem and, on the other, to write a “poem including history.” She then homes in on H.D.’s treatment of Euripidean rhythm and meter in the Hippolytus plays, through which H.D. questions the relationship between “antiquity” and “modernity” as well as the possibility and value of writing poetry itself. H.D. engages with discourses on Greek antiquity, which are woven into her translations and play; unlike Pound and Eliot’s mostly rhetorical engagement, H.D. measures out in her work how to translate Greek poetics into English, and yet is almost as ambivalent as Pound about the value of Greek.

In the two loci classici about Roman satire, Quintilian and Diomedes famously draw a bifurcation of the history of the genre into two strands, which often comes in handy for modern scholars. This chapter argues that this bifurcation is the result of a stratification of, and compromise between, at least two different views: a communis opinio held by most authors of satire of the Republican period and their readers, and the single but ‘authoritative’ view of Horace, who established meter as a formal criterion to define satire. This chapter traces the origins of both views by discussing the relevant sources, and shows how Horace’s Satires appropriated pre-existing ideas about the nature and history of the genre, innovated on key aspects of them, and became a source of original ideas in turn. A similar scheme applies to Quintilian and Diomedes too: their perspective combines previous stances, but this combination itself represents an innovation which influences our own view of Roman satire in turn. Thus, while focusing on Roman satire, this chapter discusses a more general dynamic in the creation of literary histories.

Introducing the concept of verse history and adapting Roman Jakobson's distinction between verse design and verse instance, this chapter considers a sequence of brief case studies drawn from the work of multiple writers: the Beowulf poet, William Langland, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Willis, Victoria Chang, and André 3000. The chapter proposes that, even after free verse, reading poetry historically still must involve a consideration of the relationship of rhythm to meter. The potential for friction between verse instance and verse design, and more broadly between poems and poetry, implies a need for relations of supplementarity. Moments of rhythmical disturbance disclose how what one had located outside the lone poem – a metrical template, a political ideal, or a historical event – comes rushing into it and through it.

This chapter reviews how verse and prose romances in French and other Western European vernaculars developed through formal experimentation. Emphasizing the skill with which verse writers negotiated formal choices, the chapter analyses in detail the octosyllabic rhyming couplet that became the most common verse romance meter in several languages, before outlining the surprising variety of forms that distinguished Middle English romance. The complex relationship of form to genre – romance, epic, and lyric – in different linguistic and cultural contexts is also discussed, as is the virtuoso practice of inserting lyrics into verse romance narratives. The second half of the chapter describes the genesis and spread of romance writing in prose, now so ordinary as to seem a nonform, but once radically innovative and carrying a particular ideological freight. It analyses the “myth of prose,” which allowed prose romance writers to claim a truthfulness and objectivity for their form that they denied to verse. In spite of such claims, verse romance was nevertheless preferred in some languages and cultural contexts.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

Chapter four investigates archaic inscriptions and the interplay of song and stone in the poetry of Simonides. The tradition of Simonides gives us both epitaphic inscription and choral epinician, two poetic genres whose means and methods might be seen as so widely divergent as to be unrelated. However, I will explore how the substance of song and the fixity of objects are both in play on both sides of the song and stone divide, through a situatedness that allows Simonides to make claims that memories of the past will endure into the future.

The chapter begins with a section on the Egyptian Marxist Louis Awad’s radical modernist poetic project Plutoland from 1947. The chapter engages Awad’s critical intervention to lay out the transnational roots of Arabic poetry from the premodern period to the twentieth century before moving on to address the intricacies of the Arabic prosodic rules he wanted the modernists to break. In the second section, I give technical details about how I represent poetic meters throughout the rest of the book and explain the science of Arabic prosody. Next, the chapter covers critical approaches to modernist poetry in both Arabic and Persian, paying particular attention to the critics’ positions on the possibility of composing politically committed poetry. I then transition into a long section on the history of literary commitment, its philosophical foundations, and the role it played in Arabic and Persian poetic criticism. In a brief conclusion, I suggest a way out of the debates that took shape around literary commitment and offer further details on my balancing of formalist and contextual analytical approaches to the poetry I read in the later chapters.

Metrical patterns reveal that in Roman Comedy music and memory worked closely together. Roman audiences had distinct and clear memories of music they had heard in the theater. Plautus and Terence, in patterning the music of their plays, relied on spectators’ memory of earlier music in the play they were watching, musical conventions of the genre, and specific musical moments in earlier plays, and they employed music in ways reminiscent of the reprises and other techniques of musical repetition in American Musical Theater. The importance of musical memory is particularly evident in Plautus’ Amphitruo, where metrical repetition reveals four different musical motifs, surrounding, respectively, the play’s iambic senarii, trochaic septenarii, iambic octonarii, and bacchiacs. Each motif works because spectators would remember music from plays they had seen before and from previous scenes in Amphitruo itself. In each case Plautus’ play with musical memories contributes to the generic uncertainty surrounding this unique tragicomoedia, helping to make clear that in fact Amphitruo transcends all the generic categories with which its audience would be familiar.

Elizabeth Bishop observed the central tensions in mid-century American poetics from a distance, which allowed her the space to resolve them in her own work in idiosyncratic and shifting ways. This chapter thus looks to her correspondence as an archive of an ad hoc poetic theory. There we see Bishop developing unique constellations of, first, the formality of accentual-syllabic verse and the flexibility of free verse and, second, a residual commitment to modernist impersonality and an emerging aesthetics of confessional disclosure. The chapter draws primarily on letters between Bishop and both Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton to advance its argument and offers readings of Bishop’s poems “Song for the Rainy Season” and “Poem” as evidence of their author’s unique engagement with mid-century poetics.

In recent years, the poetry of Wallace Stevens has begun to attract the attention of scholars in cognitive literary studies as well. Starr’s chapter offers a cognitive analysis of two aesthetic modes in Stevens’s poetry. The first of these is disruption, in which Stevens violates metrical expectations or creates perceptual or cognitive disorientation. The second involves the manipulation of pleasure (either that represented in the poem or that which might be generated in readers) to call attention to formal features of a poem, and at times to help new formal features emerge from a disorderly formal background.

This chapter details two types of drumbeats used by drummers when playing irregular-meter grooves based on large repeating spans (ten or more beats or pulses). The types – punctuated and split – differ with regard to the subdivision of the repeating cycle. In punctuated irregular grooves an established meter is interrupted at regular intervals by isolated measures in another meter. In split irregular grooves, the cycle is divided into two or more subsections of approximately balanced lengths. The drums play a critical role in decoding these subdivision patterns. Many irregular-meter drumbeats can be related directly to the familiar common-time backbeat, and the ways that an irregular-meter drumbeat diverges from that regular-meter archetype provide a ready guide for metric analysis. At deeper metric levels, drumming conventions such as fills serve as structural landmarks. The theory of punctuated and split metric structures demonstrates the centrality of drum-kit syntax to the performance, perception, and analysis of metrically irregular rock music.

In 1912 Ezra Pound set himself in opposition to one particular sonic form: ‘the sequence of a metronome.’ With its symmetrical ticking or beating, the metronome became for Pound and some of his contemporaries an apt figure for a metrical tradition, often equated with an outmoded Victorian versification based on a regular succession of beats. In fact, the figure of metronome had been structuring debates about the appropriate sonic form of poetry for roughly a century before Pound issued his pronouncement about it. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Johann Maelzel’s musical chronometer began to offer a standard of temporal measurement for musical and vocal compositions, the metronome and practices attuned to its ticking featured regularly in elocutionary and prosodic literature. From the first tick of Maelzel’s machine to the modernism of Pound, a dispute about the practice of reading and reciting verse, as well as composing in it, found an apt correlate in the figure of the metronome. This chapter suggests that Pound’s anti-metronome modernism belongs to an evolving debate about a culture of sing-song and deliberately repetitive prosody.