Sound and Form in Modern Poetry : Second Edition (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

Rating:
Summary: good introduction to modern prosody
Review: There's a lot in this book which the reader will see repeated in other books on prosody -- an introductory chapter dealing with the relations between form and rhythm on one hand and content and meaning on the other; an analysis of the changes between Romantic versification and the modern period, beginning with the work of Dickinson, Hopkins, Hardy, and Whitman; the importance of the Imagists; the opening shots by Pound and Eliot in the Modernist revolution; and a few other topics.

Most of the book is handled very well. It's refreshing to see an analysis of Browning's pentameter style which emphasizes not his "colloquial" approach, as so many others do, but instead lauds the extent to which he moves AWAY from the colloquial style and more toward roughness and jaggedness. The Modern period is handled with finesse as well. The drawbacks to the book, in my opinion, begin with the period closer to the present. Some of the analyses on free verse do not make as much sense as similar analyses in Paul Fussell's "Poetic Meter and Poetic Form," despite the more recent volume's indebtedness to the former. As D. H. Lawrence said, it is no use manufacturing fancy laws for the governing of free verse. Too much weight is given to some poets who are clearly minor, such as Maxine Kumin, and too little to poets whose craftsmanship is unquestioned, such as Robert Lowell. Most oddly, there is no attention given to two of the finer formal craftsmen of recent history, James Merrill and Derek Walcott; these two use free verse but also expand the boundaries of traditional metrical approaches, and their efforts here should not go unnoticed. And I might take issue with the expanded coverage given to the most recent trend in prosody, the New Formalists, simply because, as I noted in my review of "Rebel Angels" for Amazon, they aren't that good and they haven't ADVANCED metrical techniques that much.

Aside from these qualms, "Sound and Form" is a good survey of prosody of the ! last century.