One of the unexpected pleasures of the recent Louisville
Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, for me, was running across
Anthony Madrid in the corridors between sessions. I hadn’t seen him for months, not since he pressed
a collection of Edward Lear’s verse into my hands in a tiny used bookstore
under the Metra tracks in Evanston, and was glad to let him pull me into a
nearby room where he was about to join other members of the Wallace Stevens
Society in a panel on Stevens and rhyme.
Madrid spoke first, beginning with a general précis of his
argument about the trajectory of rhyme in English verse. I’d heard this before, when Madrid joined Don
Share and Lea Graham on a panel on the poetry of Michael Robbins I chaired at
the Midwest MLA a year ago, but it’s such an intriguing argument I was happy to
hear it rehearsed again. The gist of it
is that after the Elizabethan period, whole categories of rhyme are,
essentially, decommissioned from English verse, or become far less common
(critics of Madrid’s theory love to find exceptions, but a full reading of his
doctoral work in The Warrant for Rhyme
reveals a strong case for a general trend of the kind he describes). Rhymes that involve strong semantic
links—semantic similarities, or opposites, or rhymes from the same semantic
category—greatly diminish over the course of the seventeenth century. So me/thee, mine/thine, he/she, berry/cherry,
and the like become far less common.
Madrid makes much of this: the link between rhymes becomes less
rational, he says, and more a matter of mystery, as if the poet wills the
rhyming words to belong together for reasons unknowable to the intellect.
The anti-semantic nature of rhyme becomes a norm in the
eighteenth century, and it is only with Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an
antiquarian’s selection of old ballads and other poems, that the older style of
rhyme begins to return for the Romantic era.
A Romantic like Byron, when he is serious, as in Childe Harold, rhymes like an eighteenth century poet, but when
he’s comic, as in Don Juan or Beppo, he makes rhymes that go out of
their way to draw attention to themselves, and appear as stunts (as Butler’s
comic rhymes in Hubridas did). The rhyme becomes something deliberately
original, frame-breaking and winking.
And this sounds the death-knell for rhyme, since over the nineteenth
century rhyme becomes less a holistic part of poems and more of an
attention-grabbing device, until in the modern era it is all-but abandoned.
This brings us to Wallace Stevens, whose poetry only rarely
rhymes—11 early poems are consistently rhymed, and after that rhyme occurs as
an occasional grace, like alliteration.
When it does rhyme, it almost always uses the classical rhyme of the eighteenth
century, which does not seek to draw attention to its cleverness (an exception
being “übermenschlichkeit/ word soon
come right”). There is rarely a semantic
quality to the rhyme, and Madrid argues that this is aligned with Stevens’
belief in the mysterious powers of the imagination—the rhymes are convened only
by the power of imagination, not on some rationally apprehensible basis. Stevens rhymes less and less over time, too,
as the poetry becomes less overtly musically-driven and more liturgical.
After Madrid, Eugene Vydrin of NYU took the stage to speak
about rhyme and the adherence of the poem to reality in Stevens, and was
followed by Joon Soo-Bong of Seoul National University, who spoke about schematic
rhyme as essentially antithetical to Stevens’ aesthetic of flow. All very interesting, but I was particularly
fascinated by Roi Tartakovsky, who turned to empirical linguistic research to
explain rhymes and other sonic effects in Stevens’ poetry.
Tartakovsky noted that one of the most important recurring
patterns in Stevens’ poetry is that of the recurrent pair of sonically similar
words—as in the “sea” and “she” that come up at the start of the first and
second stanzas of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Linguists have told us that acoustically
similar words are actually less well reproduced in the memory than other words,
and tend to become confused—but that rhyme words are, in fact, remembered
well. So Stevens works with a
combination of words that aid in the recollection of argument or thesis, and
words that actually blur rational or argumentative distinctions. I’d be very interested in seeing a
fully-worked out analysis of Stevens drawing on this insight.
Of course there was much more to see and hear (and eat and
drink and argue over) at the conference, but I’m glad I was pulled into the
little demimonde of the Stevensians, and I’m glad to see rhyme returning as a
category of serious critical analysis.
