The Written Poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English

The Written Poem

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The Written Poem Semiotic conventions from Old to Modern English

Rosemary Huisman

CASSELL London and New York

Cassell Wellington House 125 Strand London WC2R OBB England 370 Lexington Avenue New York NY 10017-6550 USA First published 1998. Reprinted in paperback 1999 © Rosemary Huisman 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN

0 304 33999 7 (hardback) 0 304 70734 1 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huisman, Rosemary, 1941The written poem: semiotic conventions from Old to Modern English/Rosemary Huisman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-304-33999-7 (hardcover) ISBN 0-304-70734-1 (paperback) 1. English poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. English poetry—Old English, ca. 450-1100—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 3. English language—Old English, ca. 450-1100—Versification. 4. Commonwealth poetry (English)—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 5 American poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 6. English language—Written English. 7. Semiotics and literature. 8. Literary form. 9 Poetics. I. Title. PR502.H75 1998 821.009—dc21 97-48708 CIP Typeset by York House Typographic Ltd Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookcraft (Bath) Ltd, Midsomer Norton

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

Part One Contemporary Poetry Chapter 1 Poetic Discourse and Genre Chapter 2 The Seen Poem and Its Semiosis Chapter 3 The Semiotic of Art and Music

7 33 41

Chapter 4 The Semiotic of the Body Chapter 5 The Semiotic of Language

58 70

Part Two

From Old English to Contemporary Poetry

Chapter 6 The Origin of the English Line, 1100-1300 Chapter 7 The Transition to a Literate Subject, 1500-1800 Chapter 8 The Reading Subject and the Writing Subject, 1800-1990 Epilogue The Postmodern Subject and the New Media Poem

99 127 143 160

Bibliography

167

Index

179

V

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Acknowledgements

A major part of the research for this book was done in 1994 on study leave from the University of Sydney in France and England, and my grateful thanks go to the staff of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the British Library, London, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for their kind assistance at that time. I must also thank the Department of English at the University of Sydney for their assistance, though necessarily small from hard-pressed research monies, which enabled me to travel to England briefly in 1995. And finally researchers must eat, and my daughter Penny Huisman and her friend Rod Drayton have sustained me in good food, good wine and good cheer through the last months of relentless writing. I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: University of California Press, for the English translation of the Preface to Un Coup de Des from Stephane Mallarme, Collected Poems of Stephane Mallarme, trans./ed. by Henry Weinfield, copyright © 1994 The Regents of the University of California. Joanne Burns, for 'reading' from 'Pillows' from Compass (1984). Also published in Joanne Burns, blowing bubbles in the 7th lane (Sydney: FAB Press, 1988). Oxford University Press, for Derek Mahon, 'Girls on the Bridge', from Selected Poems (1991). Simon & Schuster and Faber and Faber for Marianne Moore, 'The Fish', from The Collected Poems of Marianne Moore, copyright © 1935 by Marianne Moore, copyright renewed © 1963 by Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot. ETT Imprint, for Gwen Harwood, 'The Present Tense'. This version of the poem was first published in Island (1989). The complete and final poem appears in Gwen Harwood, The Present Tense (Watsons Bay, New South Wales: ETT Imprint, 1995). Geoff Page, for 'Decalogue in Double Voice', from Westerly (1992). Heather Cam, for 'How I Come to Own a Black Leather Jacket with Studs, Zippers, Snaps and Pockets Galore', from The Moon's Hook (Poetry Australia 125/South Head Press, 1990). Katherine Gallagher, for 'Nettie Palmer to Frank Wilmot ("Furnley Maurice")', from Southerly (1989). David Herkt, for 'Standing in the Shadows', from Meanjin (1989). Carol Novack, for 'The Staircase', from Susan Hampton and Kate vii

Acknowledgements

Llewellyn (eds), The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986). Anne Kellas, 'Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg, 1988', from Island (1989). Subhash Jaireth, for 'About words (a journey into the world of Alzheimer's disease)', from LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland) (1992). Stephen Mallick, for 'First Kill' from Overland (1993). This poem was published under the pseudonym of Stephen Anthony. I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents, Doris Isabella (nee Thompson) and Keith Lowe, great readers both of them.

VIII

Introduction

The idea, the question to which this book attempts an answer, came, as many ideas do, from an emotion. I had submitted a poem to a newspaper; it was published, but oh! the indignation when I first saw it in print. The poem had four stanzas, of four lines each. For reasons of space, or inadvertently, the literary editor omitted the line space between the third and fourth stanzas, so that eight lines of verse followed continuously. I was furious! This was not my poem! though the words were exactly the same on the page. Some textual feature, satisfying to me as the logo/egocentric poet, had been lost. But what? My original personal interest in reading contemporary poetry had led me to a research interest in Old English poetry, poetry written before about AD 1100, in Anglo-Saxon England. This was because, separated by a thousand years of 'Romantic imperialism' in which English poetry was usually written in syllabic metres, contemporary poetry (for the most part) and Old English poetry both based their versification on the rhythm of conversational English, a rhythm based on the regularity of stress not syllable. A native speaker of English does not need any theory of metrics to identify such rhythms - the stress beat is felt in the pulse in the chest (accompanied or not by vocalization) as well as cognitively perceived in the word interpreted as most important in its textual context (whatever any measuring device of loudness, etc., actually registers). So the similarity between poetry in Old and twentieth-century English, separated by such a period of social and historical change, was of great interest to me. As well as a greater understanding of the two periods themselves, such study can give one more insight into the subtle 'music' of traditional syllable-counting poetry in English, where the metrical regularity of, say, an idealized iambic pentameter is necessarily spoken in the stress-based rhythm of English. But an interest in Old English poetry also gave me an awareness of a great difference between then and now - the Old English manuscript text of a poem looks nothing like the twentieth-century poem printed on the page. The Old English text is written continuously across the page, filling the valuable vellum from left to right margin, without lineation or stanza spacing. So I knew that my emotional reaction, described above, to my poem's printed layout was a socially situated one, not a 'natural' or inevitable one. It 'made sense' only in a social context in which poems appeared on the page in lines and stanzas, where language/textual conventions for 1

Introduction

poetic discourse could be seen as well as spoken. Thinking about the 'seen poem' led quickly to a concern with lineation, for from the fourteenth century (the time of Chaucer) at least the most immediate sign of poetry has been its graphic display in lines. Thus the first question of this study became: what is the origin and development of the line in English poetry? And what kinds of semiosis, or meaning-making, have been associated with the line, or with spatial arrangement on the page generally? Part One of this book is primarily concerned with the second issue, and Part Two, Chapter 6 with the first. But studying the spatial display of the text alone is not enough to explain my indignation over a lost line space. It is not just the generic features of the textual object, the possibilities for the 'seen poem' in the twentieth century, which need to be explained. For patently I felt some sense of 'ownership' of the visual display of the poem, that indeed the appearance, as much as the words and grammar, was a realization of my writing (both writing down and composing) of the poem. Again, such an attitude is historically and socially produced; it assumes at least that the poet equates composing and writing and that the text is fixed and reproducible. To explain such attitudes you need to study the subject of poetic discourse as it is socially produced in the context of, at least, contemporary conditions of literacy and language technology. So a second set of general questions emerged: what changes can we describe in subjectivity or habitus, that is in dispositions to interpret or to produce meaning, and how are these changes in relation to poetic discourse also related to the larger social context, especially to changes in that context? Part Two, Chapters 7 and 8 make some suggestions on these issues. Because my work on the line emerged from questions about twentieth-century poetry, I was particularly concerned to examine the development of twentieth-century subjectivity (I do not of course wish to imply some totalizing 'subject position' at any one historical time, for the individual habitus is socially as well as historically positioned), so Chapters 7 and 8 lay particular emphasis on changes from the sixteenth century to the present day. A brief summary of the contents may be helpful, as this work brings together material and methods more commonly isolated in different academic discourses. To the reader who thinks, 'this is not my field', as they begin this chapter or that, I would suggest that, rather than abandon the text, they turn initially to a chapter whose contents are more compatible with their own immediate interests. True, the first two chapters introduce terminology which will be used in the remainder of the book, but I have tried as much as possible to write an interdisciplinary text; the corollary is that I hope those expert in a particular field will forgive whatever solecisms I commit when paraphrasing the language of their discipline. In a work of rather panoramic ambition it has been inevitable that some parts primarily record my own research while others are more deeply 2

Introduction

indebted to the writing of other scholars. Chapter 5, 'The Semiotic of Language', and Chapter 6, 'The Origin of the English Line', offer the most original contributions. The meta-text of endnotes, recorded at the end of each chapter, both records the great contribution of other scholars to this text and serves, I hope, as a guide to further exploration of those issues particularly interesting to the individual reader. I would like also to record the pervasive influence on my thinking of the work of M. A. K. Halliday in systemic functional linguistics, whose way of talking about language first showed me a way of talking about texts as social practices. Chapter 1, 'Poetic Discourse and Genre', discusses the meanings given to genre and discourse in literary, linguistic and cultural studies. The modelling of social context by sociologist Basil Bernstein (in his study of pedagogy) is described as particularly helpful. Lineation as the dominant visible sign of poetic discourse is exemplified, and the generic contravention of the prosepoem discussed, with particular reference to the writing of the Russian semiotician, Jurij (also Juri) Lotman. Chapter 2, 'The Seen Poem and its Semiosis', gives a short account of the semiotic complexity possible in the visual realization of poetry, introducing the topics which will be discussed in Chapters 3 to 5. Chapter 3, 'The Semiotic of Art and Music', Chapter 4, 'The Semiotic of the Body', and Chapter 5, 'The Semiotic of Language', discuss the different possibilities of meaning-making which have been attributed (consciously or not) to the seen poem, making close reference to the writing of individual poets both in their poems and in their writings on poetry. Most examples are taken from the twentieth century. Chapter 6, 'The Origin of the English Line, 1100-1300', discusses the phenomenon of doubly transferred literacy, from Latin to Anglo-Norman to English texts, and includes a detailed discussion of British Library manuscript Cotton Caligula A.ix (which contains texts of Lasamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale). Chapter 7, 'The Transition to a Literate Subject, 1500-1800', describes the relations of poets to their handwritten and printed texts after the advent of printing, and traces the late transition to a literate subject associated with poetic discourse. Chapter 8, 'The Reading Subject and the Writing Subject, 1800-1990', reviews, very briefly, the history of reading, discusses disjunction in the reading and writing subject and suggests a role this disjunction has played in the generation of new writing practices for poetic discourse. The Epilogue, 'The Postmodern Subject and the New Media Poem', describes the advent of the immaterial seen poem through late twentiethcentury technologies. The answers which I finally give myself to that initial question - what textual features had been lost? - turned out to depend on the conjunction of social writing/reading practices which emerge from two widely separated 3

Introduction

periods of English poetry - the development of the poem in the twelfth century as a visual object, and the development of a highly literate subjectivity for interpreting that visual object in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

4

Part One Contemporary Poetry

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1 Poetic Discourse and Genre

A traditional term for grouping literary texts, by various criteria, is that of genre. Thus Alastair Fowler calls his 1982 book-length study Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes.' The word genre has been used in various ways, but initially I want to use it to make two broad generalizations. Studying the meanings of a genre in its historical situation, any genre, involves the study of two related practices. First, one must study the practices of production and interpretation (how it is made and how it is read) through which a text is recognized as an instance of that genre. Secondly, one must study those practices of production and interpretation which are invoked (by the speaker/writer or listener/reader) once the genre has been acknowledged. No, there is no absolute meaning associated with a text, but yes, there are certainly predictable meanings. This book is specifically concerned with texts which have been called 'poems' and grouped together in the traditional literary genre 'poetry', so the two generalizations above may be paraphrased more pertinently. A text will be recognized, or not, as a poem according to practices which are historically and socially contingent. Once recognized, the text may be read/spoken according to practices for reading/speaking 'a poem' which, again, are historically and socially contingent. A banal example may be helpful. To my students I hold up a small packet and ask, 'What's this?'. They look at the object, note its material features and answer, 'A packet of seeds'. We look at the words on the back of the packet. Having recognized 'seed packet instructions', we can make predictions about the language of the text. 'Leeks grow best in a warm place with plenty of plant food added.' The grammar and words are unsurprising, but so also is the way we read the text. We are unlikely to linger over possible symbolic readings, and if we think about the graphic display of image and text at all, we will probably conclude they are designed both to advertise and inform an attractive picture of leeks, a clear and sequential layout of planting instructions. But, like the avant-garde poets of the twenties, I could take the leek instructions, rearrange them, and publish them as a 'found poem' in my book, Collected Poems. Leeks grow best in a warm place with plenty of plant food added. 7

The Written Poem

If the publisher is reputable, or if you believe book titles, that is, if you recognize a text because of some institutional authority (here those with power in the social institution of literature), then you may accept that the text is a poem and read it accordingly, noting perhaps its transfer from the everyday register of 'seed packet instructions'. Or, more immediately from the text itself, you may recognize it as a poem merely from its layout in lines, and read accordingly. This 'reading accordingly' refers to your own practices of reading, which depend on both what is historically possible now and what has been socially experienced by you. As a well-read reader, having recognized 'a poem' of twentieth-century 'free verse', you may invest its words with wider resonance (is it just leeks that need warmth and food?) and read its graphic display as meaningful (note that word 'added' enacting its meaning in the visual object of the poem - being added on its own line). And of course you may then make your own judgement - bathos? - a literary type of judgement which is scarcely relevant to horticulture. So the interpretative practices are not 'in the text', but are invoked by your prior recognition of the text's social function. It should be clear from these initial remarks that I locate this study of the semiosis (the processes of meaning) of poetry within the study of the sociology of literature. This is not equivalent to what has been called Literary Pragmatics, which 'aspires to be, at one and the same time both literary and linguistic' and which is 'grounded in a sound explanatory theory of verbal communication'.2 Rather such a study needs to be grounded in a more general account of social practice, its reproduction and change, within which language itself is theorized as a social practice. A linguistic approach compatible with such a need can be found in the functional study of language as social semiotic, as modelled by the linguist M. A. K. Halliday.3 In this approach, a culture (to use the word loosely and holistically) is constituted of semiotic acts, meaningful acts, realized in all the material possibilities of the culture (including social relations and bodily behaviour). Of these possibilities for realization, language is undoubtably the most complex. Halliday's description of 'language as social semiotic' means that, in his model of language, semantic acts, meaningful acts in language, are semiotic acts, socially meaningful behaviour. Meaning is not 'in the text', but in the social function recognized by the person for whom the language is meaningful - as in my example of the seed packet language, differing in meaning (potentially, in twentieth-century Western society) according to whether it was read within the semiotic (socially meaningful) institutions of 'horticulture' or 'literature'. At the same time, theorized consistently, a model of 'language as social semiotic' will not allow you to view language as somehow a 'lower-order' material representation of culture; rather 'language practices are social practices' and constitute, with the practices realized in other media, that which we understand by culture or 'social context'.4 The genres (as I have 8

Poetic Discourse and Genre

used the word initially) recognized in a culture, in a given place and time and social milieu, the manner of that recognition (which semiotically may be intra- or extra-linguistic, that is through relations within the text, or through relations between the text and its environment, including other texts), and the social/linguistic practices then brought into play - all of this is part of the social context of the production or interpretation of any text. Halliday himself, and Ruqaiya Hasan, who has recently published 'The Conception of Context in Text', have, unlike some other systemicists, deliberately left context relatively untheorized,5 concentrating on the task of linguistic description. Plainly, to study poetry within the sociology of literature, some more detailed theory of sociological explanation was required, specifically a theorizing complementary to Halliday's which would enable the relation of linguistic practice and social practice to be the focus of attention. Jay Lemke, in Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics (1995), gives a helpful summary of the work of those one might most profitably turn to for such theory: to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian scholar writing from the 1920s to the 1960s, to Basil Bernstein, British sociologist, publishing from the 1950s, to Michel Foucault, the French social historian, publishing from the 1960s to the 1980s, and to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, publishing from the 1960s.6 Certainly, my reading in the writings of all these scholars has had considerable influence, in a general way, on the nature of the issues raised in this book. It is, however, the work of Basil Bernstein which has particular pertinence to my need to describe poetry and the social practices associated with it. With the benefit of hindsight I write the above comment, for it was in fact some considerable time after the principles enunciated in the first paragraph of this chapter had become clear to me that I discovered that Bernstein had made very similar statements in the larger context of his work of formulating a sociological theory of pedagogy.7 His 'recognition rules' associated with 'classification' are comparable to my first principle ('one must study the generic practices of production and interpretation through which a text is recognized as an instance of that genre' - how did I recognize the same words as seed packet instructions? or as a poem?). His 'realization' rules associated with 'framing' are comparable, though with significant differences, to my second principle ('one must study those practices of production and interpretation which will be invoked once the genre has been acknowledged' - the meanings of the seed packet instructions will tell me clearly what to do in the garden. I wonder what this poem is supposed to be about?). I will return to a closer discussion of Bernstein's work. It is necessary at this point to make some detailed remarks on the word 'genre' itself. Where I have used 'genre' so far in this chapter, others might have written 'discourse' (and indeed I will qualify my own use of both words as this discussion proceeds).8 From the vantage point of this approach, located in the sociology of literature, it makes no sense to ask questions like 9

The Written Poem

'what is genre?' (or what is poetry?, what is literature?) if what you want is an absolute answer. On the other hand, it makes great sense if you want to know 'how does the word function contextually', that is historically and socially. Etymologically, 'genre' is related to the word 'gender', both coming into English from French (and derived as Old French gendre from the Latin genusy 'kind' or 'type'), 'gender' in the fourteenth century (the time of Chaucer) but 'genre' not till the nineteenth. Social/literary history is of course written into those derivations and time frames. Consider the word 'genre' in its contemporary use in English. As a lexical item (word), it typically functions to realize a Field (subject matter) of social action: 'talking about semiosis/meaning-making', especially 'talking about meaning-making in language'.9 Grammatically, it functions as a noun realizing, semantically, a participant. Its nominal role in English promotes its understanding as a 'thing', for Halliday a technical term derived from everyday understanding of semantic structure.10 This is a rather longwinded way to conclude that genre is a superordinate (general) term for talking about language as constituted by things, language things realized in the materiality of language (spoken or written) for English speakers. The American semiotician Charles Peirce, in his triadic understanding of the sign, described the mutual interdependence of the sign, the interpretant (in language, the paraphrase) and the 'known object', such that a known object is that which is represented as such, not some absolute reality, independent of its representation. The linguistic 'things', a 'genre', a 'poem', 'literature' itself, are just such known objects. Again Peirce describes this interdependence as recognized on some grounds - and the grounds for this linguistic recognition, using Halliday's model, is the social context, however theorized; 'things' in language are 'socially known objects'.11 I am labouring the understanding of 'genre', for it is a word whose semantic 'ownership' can cause dispute (whose sense of genre is the 'right' one?). As the recognition of the role of discursive formations (ways of talking) in the generation of cultural objects has itself become a known object of scholarly study, words associated with textual practices, such as 'genre', have themselves been 'reinscribed' through their use in different academic discourses.12 We could list the traditional nouns of literary genres, whether more or less inclusive, such as poetry, prose, drama, sonnet, short story, epic, with their multifarious criteria of recognition (rather like the categories of traditional grammar). We could list the usually socially qualified uses in cultural studies: detective stories, science fiction, popular music lyrics and so on - an upwardly mobile group in academe, though some categories, such as 'romance', have been recognized long enough to be situated as objects of both 'literary' and 'popular' attention.13 Finally there is the appropriation of this more traditional use of'genre' by academic discourses of linguistics and ethnography, as in genres like 'service encounters' or 'ritual insults'. Such approaches attempt to be more rigorous 10

Poetic Discourse and Genre

but can sail dangerously close to the shoals of 'unreconstructed structuralism' - a Platonic approach in which the 'underlying abstraction', typically represented in diagrams or other reductive schemata, is viewed as 'the real meaning' of the genre.14 Or the primary focus can remain on reductionist generalizations because they describe structures for an effaced 'speech community', one idealized as contemporaneous and homogeneous. What such work seems to naturalize is the interpretative behaviour of the investigator in identifying that schematic structure. In the approach favoured here, on the other hand, and as intimated in the opening paragraph of this chapter, such work - the description of texts - is an important part, but only one part, of the second area of study described, that is the study of those practices of production and interpretation which will be invoked once the genre has been acknowledged. Indeed the literary theorist Alastair Fowler, mentioned earlier, identifies literary genres with discursive practices rather than with any schematic structure of text: 'In literary communication, genres are functional: they actively form the experience of each work of literature. If we see The Jew of Malta as a savage farce, our response will not be the same as if we saw it as a tragedy .. .V5 These sentiments are similar to those expressed in the different words of linguistics by Mary Macken-Horarik, in her research on examiners' evaluation of early secondary students' responses in a public examination in English. Utilizing systemic functional grammar and Bernstein's theory, Macken-Horarik demonstrates the importance of student orientation to one pedagogic 'domain' (she identifies four) or another when reading a short literary text. Such orientation determines the student's understanding of 'salience' or 'relevance' to the task, and so the student's capacity to produce an examination text highly valued - or not - by the examiners. (The focus of Macken-Horarik's work is on the 'invisibility' of the more highly valued orientations, to many teachers as well as students.)16 The word 'genre' then cannot be used in any modern scholarship without further clarification. As earlier mentioned, I found the work of Basil Bernstein brought a particular clarity to these matters and a brief and very limited account of his work follows. In the course of this discussion I will modify my own initial use of the word 'genre'. In Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, published in 1996, Bernstein asks 'how does power and control translate into principles of communication, and how do these principles of communication differentially regulate forms of consciousness with respect to their reproduction and the possibilities of change?'.17 He begins by differentiating power from control. Power relations ... create boundaries, legitimize boundaries, reproduce boundaries, between different categories of groups, gender, class, race, different categories of discourse, different categories of agents. ... power always operates on the relations between categories. . . . in this way, power establishes legitimate relations of order. (p. 19) 11

The Written Poem

He contrasts power with control: 'Control carries the boundary relations of power and socializes individuals into these relationships; . . . control establishes legitimate communications. ... Power constructs relations between and control [constructs] relations within given forms of interaction' (p. 19). In his work, Bernstein is interested in those category relations which pertain to pedagogic discourse, and in those control relations which pertain to pedagogic practice. Translating these terms to my concerns, I am interested in those category relations which pertain to poetic discourse, and to those control relations which pertain to the practices of reading and writing poetry. Bernstein goes on to define two concepts, one for the translation of power relations, and one for the translation of control relations. For the former he uses the concept of classification, for the latter the concept of framing. In summary, 'classification refers to what, framing is concerned with how meanings are to be put together' (p. 27). For Bernstein, classification enables us to differentiate and hence identify categories, such as those of discourse, while framing enables us to produce texts of a given genre (a texttype) within a category. Classification is associated with the development of recognition rules (p. 31) - 'rules' which enable you to recognize, say, literary discourse as opposed to non-literary discourse (a poem, a seed packet text). Framing is associated with realization rules (p. 32) - rules which enable you to write or interpret an appropriate text (what kind of interpretative disposition do you bring to a poem? or to seed packet instructions?). The terms 'classification' and 'framing' can be related to the two statements in the first paragraph of this chapter. For recognition rules, 'one must study the generic practices of production and interpretation through which a text is recognized as an instance of that genre'. For realization rules, 'one must study those practices of production and interpretation which will be invoked once the genre has been acknowledged'. The word 'genre' I used there in the most traditional literary way, in which the three principal genres of literature are said to be poetry, drama and prose, a differentiation believed to derive from Aristotle's three modes of communication.18 However, to be more compatible with Bernstein's usage, I will now use the phrase 'poetic discourse' rather than 'genre of poetry' to refer to texts recognized as poetry, through their membership of the category 'poetic discourse', a category whose boundaries are clearly classified, that is differentiated, from other discourses. Just how this recognition takes place is a crucial issue for any category, and one I shall return to for poetic discourse. The terms classification and framing are worthy of further elaboration. Bernstein uses the concept of classification to examine relations between categories, whether these categories are between agencies, between agents, between discourses, between practices ... the crucial space which creates the specialization of the category [such as a discourse] is not 12

Poetic Discourse and Genre

internal to that discourse but is the space between that discourse and another [for example, the discourses of physics and geography at school, or as I shall discuss, the discourses of poetry and prose], (p. 20) This is a Saussurean-like principle of paradigmatic contrast - value assigned to a sign not by any essential attribute but by its participation in a system of contrasting terms. However this is no fixed structuralist paradigm. Bernstein asks 'what preserves the insulation?' [of one category from another] and answers 'power'. 'The arbitrary nature of these power relations is ... hidden by the principle of the classification, [which] comes to have the force of the natural order.' The degree of insulation between categories can vary, with strong classification associated with strong insulation and weaker classification with weaker insulation, as 'with less specialized discourses'. Implicit in this account is the possibility of change: as Bernstein says, 'if [the] insulation changes its strength, then the classification changes' (p. 21). I will return to these questions of 'authority' and 'naturalness', of strong and weak classification and of change of classification when discussing prose, poetry and the prose-poem. I have not here laboured Bernstein's own principal concern, in which he equates the principle of the relation between categories, such as discourses, to the principles of the social division of labour, but it is certainly not difficult to construct, from this correlation, theories concerning the political role of avant-garde art, including avant-garde poetry, whether it is viewed as a political threat to the established social order by conservative readers, or as a politically disruptive gesture by its producers. Bernstein further suggests a role for insulation within the individual as well as between individuals; it becomes a system of psychic defences against the possibility of the weakening of the insulation, which would then reveal the suppressed contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas. . . . However these psychic defences are rarely wholly effective and the possibility of the other, the unthinkable, the yet to be voiced, is also rarely silenced, (p. 21) So in this Eden of paradigmatic meaningfulness, the post-structuralist serpent of deconstruction always lurks. (Bernstein had been criticized for his 'structuralist' alignment, which seems scarcely fair in the light of such comments as I have quoted here.)19 Bernstein uses the concept 'framing' 'to analyse the different forms of legitimate communication realized in any pedagogic practice' (p. 26). For my study, the focus of interest is the 'legitimate communication realized in the practice of poetic discourse'. At different times and places, what is understood as 'writing a poem?' what is 'reading poetry'? The word 'genre' and 'generic practices' can appropriately be used for these 'legitimate communications', for they involve both the processes of writing and reading 13

The Written Poem

texts and the textual product, the poem, that marks the end or beginning of these processes. Bernstein speaks of two systems of rules regulated by framing, those of social order (which he calls 'regulative discourse') and those of discursive order ('instructional discourse'). The former, social order, refers to the forms that 'hierarchical relations take in the pedagogic relation' and indicates 'the control over the social base which makes this transmission possible' (p. 27). What are the relevant social relations in relation to poetic discourse? I would suggest, at least, those of writer and reader. Studies of the author (and of patronage) are the traditional literary staple, but histories of reading and of literacy (readily available for French, less so for English) are equally relevant. Also relevant is the relation of writer or reader to the means of production, what has been called the technology of language, such as printing, or even writing itself. The second of his two systems of rules regulated by framing, the rules of discursive order, Bernstein calls 'instructional discourse', as befits the field of his research, pedagogy. 'The rules of discursive order refer to selection, sequence, pacing and criteria of the knowledge' (p. 28). Bernstein's model is oriented, as I read it, to the production of text, a situation in which the student recognizes the appropriate pedagogic context (by classification rules) and produces the appropriate student text (by framing rules). The reader of poetry outside the classroom context is however usually oriented primarily to interpretation. For the writer, the rules of discursive order are realized in the text; realization rules are relevant to the production of text. What of the reader? What are comparable rules for the interpretation of text? Chapter 8 suggests some introductory answers from the history of reading. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to explore classification and framing in relation to poetic discourse with specific textual examples, making particular reference to the work of the Russian semiotician, Juri Lotman. Halliday's model of language as social semiotic uses the term 'substance' for the material/physical realization of language. What he calls the 'formal level', that of the 'lexicogrammar' of words and grammatical structures, is realized in spoken or written language. If spoken, phonic substance is the medium of realization; 'phonology' is the study of the use of phonic substance by a particular language. Similarly, if the language is written, the lexicogrammatical structures are realized in graphic substance; 'graphology' is the study of its use. The written, or more generally, the 'seen' poem is the focus of this book, so it is graphology, rather a Cinderella of linguistic studies, which is my primary concern.20 The categories of different discourses are classified, in part, by different uses of the resources of phonology and graphology. Historically, poetic discourse is one of preliterate society, and its oral origins are persistent in its generic realizations of phonic substance. Conversation is the first 'discursive 14

Poetic Discourse and Genre

formation' and poetry is the second, for in a preliterate culture poetry is the organization of the language of everyday conversation so that it is more memorable. The repetitions of rhythmic patterning and phonemic soundplay which come to be associated with poetry serve, originally, that centrally important function of transmitting accumulated wisdom.21 It was presumably a response to these typical repetitions of poetry, though without overt acknowledgement of their historical contingency, which led Roman Jakobson to formulate his famous dictum in 1958: that 'the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination', that is, that in the sequence of language (the axis of combination), we encounter repetitions (selection from a paradigm of linguistically similar items), such as rhyme or rhythmic regularity. (Jakobson includes examples of grammatical parallelism, but most of his examples of patterning are of phonic substance, features of the heard poem.)22 These heard devices of an oral culture persist into the written and later printed culture, though they acquire additional possibilities of interpretation in their literate contexts, a change in framing.23 The introduction of writing, bringing new possibilities for framing in relation to phonology and, for the first time, graphology, promoted changes in classification, with new categories of discourse. I want first to concentrate on classification and the possibilities of new categories of written discourse, which means asking the first of my two basic questions (in the introductory paragraph) in relation now to graphology. How has graphic display been related to the recognition of poetic discourse? Or, in Bernstein's terms, how has graphic display been related to the differentiation of poetic discourse as a category from other discourses? Or in semiotic terms, how, if it has, has graphic display constituted the 'signs of poetry'? Spatial arrangement in lines has been a convention associated with written texts of poetic discourse in English at least since the time of Chaucer, about 1400. For much of this time, the arrangement has been primarily a spatial metaphor for the temporal phonological realization of the poem, that is the written or printed lines and stanzas corresponded to perceived regularities of pronunciation, however conventionally these regularities were identified as choices of recognized metre or rhyme scheme. Thus the visual line-end probably coincides with some prosodic pattern, such as a regular metrical span like iambic pentameter, and perhaps coincides with the phonemic repetition of rhyme. All lines may be left-aligned on the same margin, as in most printed poetry. Or lines sharing some phonological feature may be indicated by varying the left margin with indentation, as in the five-line repetitive patterns of Browning's 'Porphyria's Lover':24 Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard.

a b 15

The Written Poem

And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!

a b b

Lines 1 and 3 rhyme (a), lines 2,4 and 5 rhyme (b). Lines 1 and 3 are aligned on the left margin, lines 2, 4 and 5 are indented, and vertically aligned. The graphic sign of indentation visually links together the heard links of rhyme. The text has gained a more coherent material 'texture' with this equating of phonic and graphic substance. The layout of Keats's poetry is particularly informative of the sound links. As printed in The Norton Anthology^ 'To Autumn' has three indentations.25 Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

a b a b c d e d c e

I have marked only the exact rhymes, but patently there are more subtle sound-plays in the line-end words - the consonance of 'fruitfulness', 'bless' and 'cease', the assonance of'bees' and 'cease', and, with 'cottage-trees', the close sound relation of all these words which end in [s] or [z], for these phonemes are identical in place and manner of articulation but differ only in voicing ([s] is unvoiced, [z] voiced). This is one poem for which we have the poet's autograph. In Keats's writing, as accurately transcribed by P. J. Croft, the layout is: Season of Mists and mellow fruitfulness Close bosom friend of the naturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless The Vines with fruit that round the thatch eves run To bend with apples the mos[t]'d Cottage trees And fill all furuits with sweeness to the core To swell the gourd, and plump the hazle shells With a white kernel; to set budding more And still more later flowers for the bees Until they think warn days with never cease For summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells-26

Here we see that the three levels of indentation of the printed version have 16

Poetic Discourse and Genre

been contracted from an original five in the handwritten autograph (this manuscript, according to Croft, is the 'only known draft' of the poem). The printed layout brings together in indentation all lines which rhyme (nearrhyme for 'bees'/'cease'). The handwritten layout, on the other hand, does not bring together what does not rhyme. Thus from line 3, we see 'bless'/ 'run'/'trees'/'coreV'shells' as the final word in lines successively indented. This apparent concern prevents the rhymed lines ending in 'core' and 'more' having the same indentation; the Norton edition does indent these two lines similarly. We cannot know Keats's exact motivation for the display of his lines; we can however infer first his poetic (not necessarily conscious) awareness of the materiality of his text in its seen as well as its heard realization, and secondly, his interrelation of the seen poem to its sound patterning. The interrelating of sound pattern and visual line is so well established that modern poetry, even when without traditional metrical regularity or rhyme scheme, may encourage us to read in a certain way according to the line breaks. Certainly some twentieth-century poets, like Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg, have theorized about the breath and the line in this way (to be discussed in Chapter 4, 'The Semiotic of the Body'). This realization rule of poetic discourse, the correlation of visual line and heard rhythm and rhyme, has been so commonly understood as framing the genres of poetic discourse that critical comment on poetry has sometimes blurred the basic distinction between seen and heard poem. Thus the Russian Boris Tomashevsky wrote early in the twentieth century, 'the breaking up of poetic language into lines, into sound units of similar and possibly equal force, is clearly the distinctive feature of poetic language'.27 Here the graphic (seen) realization of 'lines' and the phonological (heard) realization of 'sound units of similar and possibly equal force' are immediately equated. This traditional equation has enabled the graphic display of a poem, the visual or cognitive object 'a poem', to be read as transparent, as a spoken process, embodied in the aurally perceived phenomenon of speech, whether spoken out loud or 'in the head'. (In Chapter 3,1 will comment on Willard Bonn's reading of graphic display in this way.) Yet this habitual writing/ printing of poetry in lines led to the first and most pervasive 'meaning' of graphic substance. This is quite simply the meaning of'this is a poem', this text belongs to the category of poetic discourse. Recognizing the presence (or absence) of lineation has provided the basic classification/differentiation of poetic discourse from that which is not poetic. A text so identified, even at first glance before reading, will then be read, interpreted, as a poem, according to the reading practices for poetry (poetic discourse) then current and internalized by the individual reader. For example, in contemporary interpretative habits, a text once recognized as a poem is more likely to be read symbolically at the level of the lexicogrammar (that is, at the level of 17

The Written Poem

word and grammatical structure). The question of the historic origin of this graphic recognition of poetry, that is of the phenomenon of lineation, will be taken up in Part Two, Chapter 6, where the basic question of my enquiry is, simply, what is the origin of the line (non-right-justified) as the primary sign of poetry? In his influential structuralist work, The Structure of the Artistic Text, Juri Lotman clearly pointed out the socially contingent nature of the functional roles of these signs of poetry. His comments concerning the relationship of poetry and prose appear in the opening pages of Chapter 6, 'Elements and Levels of the Paradigmatics of the Artistic Text'.28 Lotman points out the illusion of equating ordinary speech with literary prose. He reminds us that, historically, poetry precedes prose.29 He criticizes descriptive literary criticism which merely observes literary devices, and asserts that a structural account of literature will always consider the device, such as rhyme or metaphor, in relation to the context of established literary conventions. The significance of the device will lie in such a relation, not in the device itself. Thus the absence of a conventional feature in the text, what Lotman calls minus-devices, can paradoxically have a strong presence, be textually more noticeable. Most of Lotman's examples are phonological or semantic but it is to his remarks about graphology, the visual display of a text, that I wish particularly to draw attention. He observes 'that in the consciousness of author and reader there is a clear-cut division between the structures of poetry and prose'. A text which does not make much use of traditional devices must provide a border between poetry and prose which is 'clearly discernible' (a means of classification) so that the 'poetic consciousness' of the reader is invoked (so that the reader identifies the category 'poetic discourse'). 'That is why', Lotman writes, 'free verse requires a special graphic construction to be apprehended as a form of poetic speech.' And further, Hrabak is incontestably right when... he stresses the significance of graphic signs in distinguishing verse from prose; graphic indicators here are not a technical means of fixing the text but a signal of a structural nature, in compliance with which our consciousness 'pushes' the text at hand into an extra-textual structure.

So the graphic line activates in the reader, familiar with the convention, the practices that the reader associates with reading poetry. Classifying the text as 'poetic discourse' activates generic expectations through which the reader interprets the text (Bernstein's rules of discursive order, I infer). It is interesting here, I think, that, as so often happens in Lotman's writing, his understanding exceeds the particular vocabulary of theory which he uses. Read from a strictly structuralist position, Lotman appears to be setting up a classic Saussurean dichotomy of la langue and la parole, that is the genre of traditionally recognized conventions, whether of poetry or 18

Poetic Discourse and Genre

prose, as the abstracted langue versus the particular poem, the particular instance of textual practice, la parole. Such a structuralist reading looks for devices, traditionally recognized generic practices, in the text. Listen. Does the text rhyme? Is it strongly rhythmic? Yes, well it must be a poem, not a piece of prose. Lotman quotes a claim from Hrabak that certain Russian poems not graphically signalled as poems, that is, not printed in lines, were none the less clear in their traditional phonological signals, with a standard verse with 'strong rhythmic elements'. So we can give up conventional graphic signals if some traditional principles of versification, some phonological regularity, can be discerned. Lotman is suggesting that the reverse is also true: that if the graphology, through the traditional generic display of lineation, signals 'this is a poem', then the text will be unambiguously poetic in 'structure' (that is, in our reading of it) even if, as with free verse, it does not fulfil recognizable conventions of phonological patterning. So to identify a text as that of a poem or a prose piece, we will consider at least the sound or the look of the text, we will consider the text as a linguistic object in order to identify what type of literary object it is, that is its extratextual structure, as Lotman puts it, or its category of discourse, in Bernstein's terms. Yet a reconsideration of Lotman's account makes it clear, I suggest, that a simple structuralist reading of that account misrepresents the complexity of his thought. Lotman has in fact taken up what we might now, post Derrida, describe as a post-structuralist positioning, that is, he has recognized the interrelation of subject and object, the observer and the observed. The historical and cultural positioning of the writer/reader will determine what is observed as significant in the text. Lotman writes, for example, 'the difference between verse and prose lies not only in the material expression of a structural edifice of some text, but also in the function of the text defined by the whole type of culture'. Lotman's comment about graphic indicators now fits into a larger context. If, as Lotman claims, graphic indicators are 'a signal in compliance with which our consciousness "pushes" the text at hand into an extra-textual structure', then graphology is functional for us twentieth-century readers in distinguishing verse from prose, that is, culturally positioned as we are, we observe graphic signs in the text and interpret them generically. But it need not be thus. Our cultural positioning is historically contingent, it changes over time. And our cultural positioning is socially contingent - different social trajectories have formed our individual habitus, which includes our interpretative dispositions.30 Thus Lotman has effectively deconstructed the objective opposition of prose and poetry, where objective differences are looked for in the text, while at the same time preserving the reality of that opposition in our subjective experience. For me, this reader of this text, such and such is meaningful now. Such a functional approach also allows one to discuss discourse dynamically, as, if you like, a 'dynamic open system' of exchange between text and textual environment.31 19

The Written Poem

Lotman's discussion makes particular use of poetry in Russian, from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and his timescale is narrow, observing a pattern of change in the poetry/prose relation over every twenty years or so. In contrast, I will briefly explore these matters, using examples of English poetry in gross cultural contrast: on the one hand, Old English poetry and early medieval poetry, recorded in manuscripts, and on the other an example of contemporary printed Australian poetry. The manuscript page of an Old English homily or sermon (from about AD 1000) looks very much the same as a page of an Old English poem. The vellum is written on until the right ruled margin; there is no lineation to distinguish the poetic discourse from any other functional use of language. True, recent scholarship has pointed out the developing conventional use of the punctus (point) to separate metrical units, but to our modern eyes this is a very faint graphic sign of 'poetry' compared to the later sign of 'short irregular lines'.32 Modern scholars, in some ways, have had an even more difficult time with Early English texts in manuscript, as, the actual manuscripts being rarely accessible to most, they are accustomed to work from facsimiles or microfilm. The punctuation contrasts of punctus are often difficult to discern. Moreover, these reproductions do not usually show colour, which in early Middle English texts is sometimes used to mark the beginning of a metrical unit in texts without lineation.33 The expense of colour reproduction is of course pertinent, but at the same time, the lack of editorial comment on the use of colour, or on graphic display generally, is partly the result of an editorial habitus, a disposition editorially not to notice, regard as potentially significant, what is not functional in one's own understanding of poetic discourse.34 As a result, scholars without access to the manuscript no longer have even the objective device as a potentially subjective sign. Thus, in my opinion, Old English and early Middle English alliterative poetry has sometimes been described as being less differentiated in written mode from other discourses than was necessarily the case for its contemporary users. Faced with written text not in lines, with the pointing barely discernible, and with the colour not reproduced, it has been easy for a modern reader to think 'In Early English, alliterative poetry was realized as a spoken genre but not as a written genre'. It is too easy then to see that generalization as functional in terms of a homogenized social context: that is, that Anglo-Saxon society was primarily oral rather than literate. This generalization may be true about Anglo-Saxon culture as a whole, but it is scarcely simply true about the environment in which the early manuscripts were produced, that is the monastic scriptorium. The situation is more complex. In the scriptoria we have a transferred, rather than a transitional, literacy from (primarily religious) Latin to Old English texts, and then from Latin to Anglo-Norman to early Middle English texts, and at the same time a parallel development of non-classical Latin poetic texts (some of these matters will be taken up in 20

Poetic Discourse and Genre

Part Two, Chapter 6). At the same time, the relations between practices of speaking and writing, listening and reading, were very different from those of our contemporary society, and it is in the context of those practices that the material facts of texts will be functional. Consider now a poem printed in the 1980s by an Australian poet, Joanne Burns. The poem, 'reading', is from a larger collection entitled 'Pillows'. from Pillows35 reading there were so many books, she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words, she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse, and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms, when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating, these resurrected books were precious to her for a while, they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms, and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance, gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough, sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept, if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried 'the poetics of space' round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey, every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there, and real, chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn, she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf, and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read The text looks like two printed prose paragraphs. Why am I calling this a poem? We recall Lotman's comment, 'that in the consciousness of author and reader there is a clear-cut division between the structures of poetry and prose', so that to invoke this poetic consciousness for texts whose language is not overtly poetic in traditional devices, the border between verse and prose 'must be clearly discernible'. In distinguishing verse from prose, graphic indicators 'are not a technical means of fixing the text but a signal of a structural nature, in compliance with which our consciousness "pushes" the text at hand into an extra-textual structure'. This 'extra-textual structure' is Lotman's structuralist language for talking about a post-structuralist 21

The Written Poem

perspective, that is, that the graphic signs are signs of a culturally constructed discourse, and that this discourse is constructed through the reading and writing practices regarded as 'natural' to it. The layout of Burns's poem, with its right-justification like modern printed prose and its paragraph indentation, is patently a reaction against the usual graphic or visual conventions of poetry. At the same time, in nice demonstration of Lotman's point that a radical gesture will become incorporated into the tradition, such a poem already belongs to a recognizable subgenre of modern poetry, the so-called prose-poem. Thus, in a no doubt deliberate oxymoron, Margueritte Murphy calls her book-length study of the prose-poem in modern English, A Tradition of Subversion.™ But if it is part of the convention of these prose-poems not to give 'graphic indicators' of their poetic status, what encourages our consciousness to 'push' the text into one to be read as a poem? The answer takes us into an area of discussion now most associated with the work of Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu, that is the area of the authority of the institution, here the institution or field of literature. To whom is authority given, who has 'symbolic capital', that is power, in this field? In its contemporary construction, in the initial dissemination of a work, most particularly the 'author', 'the editor', 'the publisher'. The author, Joanne Burns, has submitted her work as 'a poem'. The editors of the anthology in which the poem is published, The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn, have chosen the text as a poem and so publicly named it by the title of their anthology. And the well respected publisher, Penguin Books, has endorsed the authority of the editors. The reader who then refuses to read the text as a poem is her or himself making a radical gesture of rejecting such strongly established institutional authority. Ironically, the admission of contra-generic texts within the 'recognized' discourse - the suspension, that is, of generic framing rules as in the admission of the 'prosepoem' - illumines most clearly the source of institutional authority. It throws into relief the homogenized genre of conventional art, uniformly recognized, its features apparently 'in the text', effacing the source of interpreting agency, the social location of power in the production of meaning. This social fact explains the politically disruptive role of avant-garde art (though in this century it has quite a different social history from the prose-poem). It resists, while it is avant-garde, attempts to incorporate it into the institutional body, it is repressed in totalitarian regimes, for the very reason that it points to the source of power, demanding not evaluation of the text, the generic achievement, but a re-evaluation of the category, and, finally, the identification of the source of power over classification, not 'is this a good painting?' 'poem?' but 'is it art?' 'poetry?' and finally 'who says so?'. Although the prose-poem is usually described as dating from Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, published in 1842, and is most famously associated with Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, Petitspoemes en prose, 22

Poetic Discourse and Genre

a collection of 50 prose-poems published in 1869, two years after his death,37 it is not until the mid-1970s that it became prominent in the United States. From that time, according to Paul Hoover in his 'Introduction' to A Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry, 'the prose poets went in two directions: some ... wrote narratives, fables and metafictions; others associated with the budding language poetry scene ... used the form to redefine the "unit" of attention from the line to the sentence, sentence fragment, and paragraph. [Some] used the prose poem to experiment with related prose forms such as autobiography, the essay, and fiction.'38 The attempt to 'redefine the unit of attention' from line to sentence is an attempt to shift attention from the graphic realization of the poetic substance to the grammatical structure, independent of the material realization as spoken or written. It is thus a movement in the other direction from the avant-garde preoccupations at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which a concern with the materiality of the text was dominant. The shift from line to paragraph does however show a weakening of contemporary classificatory boundaries between poetry and prose. We now see clearly the social construction of the opposition between prose and poetry. Though an Old English poem in manuscript is, roughly, right-justified like the modern prose-poem, the cultural function is quite different; there is no established 'natural' tradition to subvert or react against. Thus to describe Old English poetry as 'written like prose' is misleading - for there is no layout associated specifically with prose either. Rather, to repeat, lineation does not serve to differentiate English poetry from other discourses at this time. Again, a closer look at the Joanne Burns poem would show that this particular text is as subversive of prose as it is of poetry. The graphic conventions of prose are also contravened, to produce a graphic display in some respects similar to that of an early manuscript. Burns uses lower case throughout and uses the full stop, rather like the old use of the punctus, to indicate pauses rather than sentences, though in paragraph two she does admit some modern punctuation with commas and quotation marks. Graphically, this text is not-poem and not-prose. Negative devices indeed, but present to the reader as negative devices only because of the traditional genres framed within the discourses of both poetry and prose. That such a non-genre text should find its contemporary home in the discourse of 'poetry' is appropriate, if we consider the 'poetic function' of Roman Jakobson in the broadest sense: that is, that poetry is language which draws attention to itself. Of course his structuralist observation we now can view from a post-structuralist perspective: that attention will be drawn in a particular cultural context of how it is 'natural', including how it is graphically natural, for a text to signify its discursive credentials. And indeed, now told that Joanne Burns's text is a poem, we read the text as a poem, we discover to our pleasure some of the very patternings of equivalence that Roman Jakobson told us to expect (and which Lotman goes 23

The Written Poem

on to discuss under 'repetition' in Chapter 6 of The Structure of the Artistic Text); .or perhaps what we might have called rhetorical parallelism if instead we were reading the text as prose, as we might one of the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon homilies of the priest /Elfric, noted for their rhythmical - and indeed sometimes alliterating - passages.39 If prose and poetry have been two discourses valiantly classified apart by conventional criteria, then there are clearly two directions of subversion. The one, as already discussed, is that of the prose-poem. The other is not 'poetic prose', but rather that poetry which, in the twentieth century, came to be called 'free verse'. Thus David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry, writes, 'Free verse is of innumerable kinds; some is very close to metrical verse, but so far as the rhythm goes, most unrhymed free verse would be prose if it were printed as prose' (my italics). 'This being the case, defenders of free verse could argue that there was or should be no essential difference between poetry and prose, or they could argue that lineation makes free verse poetry, even if it could otherwise be prose - because lineation compels reading habits quite different from those brought to prosed Perkins suggests that the debate has been effectively over since the 1920s, that 'most readers, poets and critics have agreed to call free verse a form of poetry'.40 This is an agreement that a text can be identified visually as an instance of poetic discourse even if it does not realize a particular poetic genre in the traditional conventions of phonology, such as metrical regularity and rhyme scheme. It is also clearly an agreement that poetry is a discourse, not a text-type or particular genre, characterized primarily not by particular linguistic features in the text, but by the productive and interpretative procedures invoked in writing and reading it. One textual phenomenon which could be produced through such an agreement was that of the found poem, language uses taken from other contexts and refrained as 'a poem' through lineation (as in my banal example of the 'seed packet instructions'). But what are we to make of the following example, described by Jerome McGann, 'When Yeats tried to summarize modern poetry in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), he made a famous gesture to modernism's aesthetic and pre-Raphaelite inheritance. He printed as the first text in his collection a notable passage from Pater's The Renaissance ... [and] reformatted Pater's lush prose as a free verse poem.'41 (Walter Pater was an Oxford don whose Studies in the History of the Renaissance was published in 1873. The studies ended with a stirring conclusion, celebrating the intensity of experience and the role of art in contributing to such intensity in a style that was in itself intense and elevated.)42 McGann suspects that Yeats was inspired to 'revisualize' Pater's writing by a similar enterprise by Louis Zukofsky, whose collection, An 'Objectivists' Anthology of 1932, printed several texts which had been similarly rewritten. McGann concludes that both Yeats's and Zukofsky's works showed 'the renewed interest that modern poets were taking in the materi24

Poetic Discourse and Genre

alities of poetic textualization'.43 But such a concern did not suddenly appear in the twentieth century. Richard Bradford has some very interesting observations to make on the reception of Milton's poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1679 'a little known country parson, Samuel Woodford' suggested that Paradise Lost 'might suffer little if printed as prose'. Although valuing the poem highly, Woodford says of its style that 'through the Disguise the Prose appears' and to illustrate the prosaic nature of the poem he reprints some of Milton's prose as verse. Bradford comments that 'although the new format is an irregular departure from the strict iambic pentameter, it does echo the uniquely Miltonic effect of the verse line cutting into and intensifying the already elaborate syntax, which many critics have found to be part of the poetic design of Paradise Lost'. Bradford's conclusions echo what I have already remarked about the Old English homilies of /Elfric, and the more general conclusions already made, that poetry can be characterized as a discourse rather than a genre, as particular conventions of practice rather than particular conventions of text. I quote him at length: Woodford's experiment is significant because it sets a precedent for eighteenthcentury critics. First it suggests that the rhythms and intonational sequences which we regard as poetic are actually present in a variety of distinct expressive contexts, including, it would seem, theological prose. And by implication, it would seem that our response to such sequences is determined essentially by our visual recognition of context. We read Paradise Lost as poetry because it looks like poetry, and Woodford attempts to demonstrate that we would also read the unpoetically titled Apology in Answer to the Modest Confutation of a Libel intituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence of Smectymnuus as a poem if it were made to look like a poem. It would seem that our response to context and genre might be part of a Pavlovian instinct triggered by typography.44 Or as I'd prefer to say in Bourdieu's terms, part of the habitus, the individual's disposition to interpret, a disposition which is produced through the personal trajectory of a socially and historically situated subject, who recognizes (or not) poetic discourse in its lineation and who then invokes (or is unable to invoke) practices of interpretation deemed appropriate for poetry. The inability (to recognize or adequately interpret) may relate to the individual's life trajectory (such as educational level and textual experience) or it may relate directly to the social possibilities of the time, as in the classificatory difficulty of Milton's poem as poetic discourse. As Bradford points out, Paradise Lost was the 'first major English poem to deploy varied and extended rhythmic sequences unregimented by rhyme or regular syntactic closure - its true rhythmic and prosodic identity thus became a matter of opinion'.45 A final comment on these two examples of 'prose as poems'. It is clear that in Yeats's and Woodford's rewritings, a different attitude to literacy, to 25

The Written Poem

the printed text, is involved. Woodford lineates Milton's prose to show that (some of) his poetry might as well be prose. Yeats lineates Pater's prose to show that his prose could well have been poetry (both in its influence on Impressionism in literature, and in its own evocative imagery). So Woodford assumes that text classified as poetry ought to have particular generic features of sound patterning, whereas Yeats (I infer) assumes that a text may be classified as poetry through its visual display. In Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, Marjorie Perloff takes the role of lineation one step further, to the text which is lineated but which is not poetry. She writes, the standard print format associated with the word 'poem' (justified left margin, ragged right margin, a block of type to be read from left to right and top to bottom and surrounded by white space, a format still ubiquitous in the 'poems' printed in The New Yorker or Poetry magazine or American Poetry Review) is by no means the inevitable or the only one. Indeed as the 'look' of the standard poem begins to be replicated on the billboard or the greeting card, an interesting exchange begins to occur.

Perloff gives an example of a billboard sign for a garage, lineated poetically.46 Its elegant display (in capitals, in lines carefully balanced in width by judicious hyphenation) reminds me of the classical and post-Renaissance inscriptions collected by John Sparrow (in Visible Words: A Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of Art, and in Line upon Line: An Epigraphical Anthology) ,47 From the point of view of their time of production, the garage sign and the inscriptions, like the Old English manuscript text and the modern prose-poem, are discursively classified by quite different recognition rules. However, what the garage sign and the pre-twentieth-century inscriptions have in common is that either might be seen by a late twentiethcentury poet and imported, directly or indirectly, into a poem, all grist to a postmodernist mill, a pastiche of language registers. Authorized by some institutional authority, the lines of advertising billboard or memorial tablet may well now be recognized as the lineation of poetry, to be read as poetic discourse, with whatever interpretative practices that implies for the individual habitus. The seventeenth-century readers of Milton could be uneasy because the traditional generic features of sound patterning were absent. The late twentieth-century reader of contemporary poetry in English may also be uneasy because she/he is unlikely to encounter comforting textual features of realized genre. As Margaret Atwood wrote at the end of her prose-poem, 'Iconography', 'We fall back into these rhythms as if into safe hands'.48

26

Poetic Discourse and Genre

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Roger Sell (ed.), Literary Pragmatics (London: Routledge, 1991). Quotations are from Roger Sell, 'An introduction', p. xiv and Adrian Pilkington, 'Poetic effects: a relevant theory perspective', p. 44. Sell gives a brief summary of his approach in 'Literary genre and history: questions from a literary pragmaticist for socio-semioticians', Approaches to the Analysis of Literary Discourse, ed. Eija Ventola (Abo: Abo Academy Press, 1991), pp. 1-38. M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). 'Language practices are social practices' - a point reiterated, for example, by Norman Fairclough in Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989). See especially Chapter 2, 'Discourse as social practice'. Ruqaiya Hasan, 'The conception of context in text', in Peter H. Fries and Michael Gregory (eds), Discourse in Society: Systemic Functional Perspectives (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995), pp. 183-283. Jay Lemke, Chapter 2, 'Discourse and social theory', Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). Hasan, Halliday and Bernstein have been in close correspondence since the 1960s and Bernstein comments 'the Halliday/Hasan contribution to my development is incalculable'. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity (London: Taylor & Francis, 1996), pp. 148-9. Again, Norman Fairclough briefly describes the mutual contributions which so-called 'critical discourse analysis' and the insights derived from Foucault's work could make to each other. The former, a more micro approach to discourse, pays close attention to text analysis, including linguistic analysis. The latter, a more macro approach to discourse, focuses on the social institutions brought into being and perpetuated through particular historical 'discursive formations'. See Chapter 2, 'Michel Foucault and the analysis of discourse', Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Unfortunately, Bernstein's earlier work was not fully understood in the United States. He was misread in some places as assigning a lower value to some uses of language, whereas it was to the value judgements of the schools that he was drawing attention. 'Bernstein tried to point out something that is now largely taken for granted: that the schools expect people to use language in certain ways, and that these are by and large the ways of the upper-middle class, putting the members of other social classes at an automatic relative disadvantage' (Lemke, Textual Politics, p. 27). The word' discourse' also needs to be understood in its scholarly context of use. In Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), Anthony Easthope uses 'discourse' in the Foucauldian macro sense, as described in note 6, above, linking the 'rise and dominance' of iambic pentameter with class dominance. 27

The Written Poem

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

28

The words Field, Tenor and Mode are used in systemic functional linguistics as technical terms to describe the three principal components of the 'situation' or 'social context' which is 'realized' in language by a speaker/writer, or which is 'construed' from language by a listener/reader, as in literary interpretation; I will indicate systemic use by capitalization. The words are also variously used by other writers; such use is not capitalized. More detailed discussion of these terms is given in Chapter 5, with the relevant reference in note 28 of that chapter. M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn. (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 106-9 and pp. 352-3 ('processes and participants') and p. 180 ('Thing'). The vocabulary of systemic functional grammar is used lightly throughout this book with a minimum of explanation as its use is wherever possible glossed in non-technical language for the general reader. For an introductory account, see David Butt, Rhonda Fahey, Sue Spinks and Colin Yallop, Using Functional Grammar: An Explorer's Guide (Sydney: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, Macquarie University, 1995); see especially pp. 60-1. An introduction to Peirce's thought is rather a contradiction in terms! Perhaps Thomas A. Sebeok, 'The doctrine of signs', Frontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), pp. 35-42. Gunther Kress and Terry Threadgold give a brief overview of these disparate uses in 'Towards a social theory of genre', Southern Review, Vol. 21 (Nov. 1988), pp. 215-43. The vocabulary of textual description has also been extended to a more general material concern which includes descriptions of the body, as in Michel Foucault's notion of bodily 'inscription'. Bernstein himself considerably extends the social application of 'literary' words when he writes, 'The text that is constructed may be no more than how one sits or how one moves. In this system a text is anything which attracts evaluation. The definition of a text is anything which attracts evaluation, and this can be no more than a slight movement' (Bernstein, Pedagogy, pp. 32-3.) Tony Schirato and Susan Yell give an excellent introduction to 'narrative', 'genre' and 'discourse' as used in cultural studies in Chapter 5, 'Framing contexts', Communication and Cultural Literacy, an Introduction (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996). Cultural studies can suffer from being overeclectic. Thus Schirato and Yell's list of genres includes those identified by traditional literary criteria ('poem') with those identified by linguists ('parent-child talk') (pp. 95-6). A post-structuralist perspective emphasizes the role of the subject, the interpreter, in arriving at this particular 'objective description', that is interpretation, of the 'object'. See, for example, Norman Fairclough's comment on linguistic description as interpretation, Language and Power (London: Longman, 1989), p. 27. The writings of the philosopher Jacques Derrida are of course relevant; references now abound but see, for example, Peggy Kamuf, A Derrida Reader, Between the Blinds (New York: Harvester, 1991), especially pp. 31-58.

Poetic Discourse and Genre

15. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 38. 16. Mary Macken-Horarik, 'Construing the Invisible: Specialized Literacy Practices in Junior Secondary English', unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1997. See also Macken-Horarik's article 'Literacy and learning across the curriculum: towards a model of register for secondary teachers', Ruqaiya Hasan and Geoff Williams (eds), Literacy in Society (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 232-78. 17. Bernstein, Pedagogy, p. 18. 18. 'Many of the systems [of genres] depend on a formal distinction, said to be fundamental and universal, among three ways of representation... called lyric, dramatic and narrative. These representational modes go back to Plato's division of literary discourse into authorial, figural and mixed, according to whether the feigned speaker is poet, character, or both. As developed by Aristotle, this division according to speaker underlies much ancient, Renaissance and neoclassical theory' (Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 235). We see here the origin of generic differentiation in discourse practices, rather than texttype. 19. See for example Jose L. Rodriguez Illera, 'Code theory and pedagogic subject', in Knowledge and Pedagogy: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein, ed. Alan R. Sadovnik (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995). 20. Angus Mclntosh felt obliged to gloss graphology, and place the word in citation marks, in his first footnote to' "Graphology" and meaning', written in 1961 but published in 1966, in Patterns of Language, ed. A. Mclntosh and M. A. K. Halliday (London: Longman, 1966), p. 98. Michael Cummings and Robert Simmons, using the systemic model of language in a student text, The Language of Literature, a Stylistic Introduction to the Study of Literature, include a chapter on 'Graphology', with discussion of three poems (Oxford: Pergamon, 1983), pp. 63-85. 21. Walter J. Ong, Chapter 3, 'Some psychodynamics of orality', Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). See also Rosemary Huisman, 'Displaced belief: the role of religious textual conventions in the practices of production and interpretation of meaning in English literary texts', in Michael Griffith and James Tulip (eds), Religion, Literature and the Arts Project, Australian International Conference 1996 Proceedings (Sydney: RLA Project, 1996). 22. Roman Jakobson, 'Concluding statement: linguistics and poetics', Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-77. 23. For an introductory account of some possible functions of poetic metre, also utilizing a systemic functional model, see John Haynes, 'Metre and discourse', Language, Discourse and Literature, an Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, ed. Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 24. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning (London: Oxford University Press, 1960 reprint), p. 359.

29

The Written Poem

25. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn. (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 849. 26. The spelling and punctuation are as handwritten. Reproduced, with transcription, in P. J. Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language, Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Cassell, 1973), pp. 108-9. 27. As quoted by Antony Easthope (Poetry as Discourse, p. 51) from Boris Tomashevsky, 'Sur le vers', Theorie de la Litterature, Texts des Formalities Russes reunies, ed. and trans, by Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965), p. 155. 28. Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans, from Russian (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1977), pp. 94-104. 29. In English, the development of prose is usually associated with the reign of Alfred the Great in the second half of the ninth century. Alfred initiated a programme of translation into the vernacular; see his Preface to the Old English translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis. See Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (eds) 'From the translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care', Alfred the Great (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1983), pp. 124-6. 30. I am using the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu. See John B. Thompson, 'Editor's Introduction', Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 10-25. 31. This is a favourite explanatory image of the physicist/discourse scholar Jay Lemke, as in Textual Politics, pp. 159-66. 32. This use of the punctus is most consistently developed in Bodleian MS Junius 11, as discussed by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), pp. 151 and 179-86. The Germanic versification of Old English poems, and some Middle English poetry such as the thirteenth-century Lagamon's Brut, and the later poems of the Pearl manuscript and of Piers Plowman, was based on regularity of stress, not on syllable counting, as is the natural spoken rhythm of English. With a similar 'natural' transference of the characteristics of spoken English, metrical units (usually of two stressed syllables with a varying number of unstressed syllables) were appropriately linked by alliteration, not rhyme, for the principal lexical stress in English is typically on the first syllable of the word. In similar fashion, though from a very different linguistic environment because of the relationship to Latin, the Romantic traditions of syllable counting and rhyme emerged from the dominant rhythm and word stress patterns of the spoken Romantic vernaculars. See Halliday, Functional Grammar, pp. 292-4, on the stress-based rhythm of spoken English. (I should acknowledge that the linguist Peter Roach, in 'On the distinction between "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed" languages', has questioned the conventional assumption of this distinction as empirically observable. See Linguistic Controversies: Essays in Linguistic Theory and Practice in Honour of F. R. Palmer, ed. David Crystal (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), pp. 73-9.)

30

Poetic Discourse and Genre

33. As in the text of I^amon's Brut in British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ix, to be discussed in Chapter 6. 34. For example, Elliott van Kirk Dobbie makes no mention of the cul-de-lampe (inverted triangle) display of the short poems Thureth and The Metrical Preface to the Pastoral Care, in Volume VI of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia UP, 1942). 35. Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (eds), The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (Ringwood, Victoria, Aust.: Penguin, 1986), 185. The whole 'Pillows' Series was first published in Compass, Vol. 5 (1984); it was republished in Joanne burns, blowing bubbles in the 7th lane (Sydney: FAB Press, 1988). 36. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). See also John Simon, The Prose Poem as a Genre in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (New York: Garland, 1987); Jonathan Monroe, A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987). 37. My French/English edition of Paris Spleen is in a combined volume with The Flowers of Evil, a collection of 160 conventionally lineated poems. The notes give a one-page history of the prose-poem before Baudelaire and on Baudelaire's own usage comment, 'Compare "L'Invitation au voyage" in both versions, the prose and the poetry, to perceive how the form shapes the work, the one free of restraint, the other hobbled by the rules of prosody.' The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen, translated by William H. Crosby (New York: BOA Editions, 1991), p. 483. 38. Paul Hoover, 'Introduction', A Norton Anthology of Post-Modem American Poetry (New York: Norton, 1994), p. xxxiv. 39. Scholars have pondered the loose classification rules for prosaic and poetic discourse in the late Old English/early Middle English period, as in 'Was ^Elfric a poet?', Sherman M. Kuhn, Philological Quarterly, vol. 52 (1973), pp. 643-62. 40. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Vol. 1, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1976), p. 314. 41. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 81. 42. A brief summary and excerpt is given in Perkins, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, pp. 55-7. 43. McGann, Black Riders, p. 83. 44. Richard Bradford, 'The visual poem in the eighteenth century', Visible Language, vol. 23 (1989), pp. 9-27. This quotation is from p. 11. Another relevant article by Bradford, with some overlap of material, is 'Criticism and the visual format of poetry', Word & Image, Vol. 5 (1989), pp. 198-205. 45. Bradford, 'Eighteenth century', p. 15. 46. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 100. 31

The Written Poem

47. John Sparrow, Visible Words: A Study of Inscriptions in and as Books and Works of An (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969) and Line upon Line: An Epigraphical Anthology (Cambridge: Brooke Crutchley, 1967). 48. Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems II, Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1986), p. 99.

32

2 The Seen Poem and Its Semiosis

The phrase 'visual poetry' suggests, in the usual grammatical role of modification, that 'visual poetry' is a subclass of 'poetry', that is, that one could speak of 'the discourse of visual poetry'. Thus Willard Bohn in his booklength study, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928, calls visual poetry a 'genre', one with a 'long and varied history, from the technopaegnia of the ancient Greeks to the latest experiments with concrete poetry'.1 (In the various quotations from others throughout this book, the word 'genre' is usually used in the traditional literary sense which blurs together the two meanings which I have differentiated in Chapter 1: 'categories of discourse' and 'genres of text'.) But with what is such poetry contrasted so that its category classification can be made? In one sense, since the use of writing to record poetry, and certainly since the use of printing to publish poetry, all poetry is visual (a point made by The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, in its entry under 'Visual Poetry').2 Similarly, John Hollander comments - after quoting Dryden's scathing comment on figured poems, a far from isolated scorn - that 'the burden of all these denunciations is upon the superficiality, the literary version of taking the letter for the spirit. And yet the fact remains that from the early sixteenth century on all poems are in some sense shaped.'31 take it Hollander is thinking of the advent of printing - in Part Two, Chapter 6,1 will suggest that, for English, one might more accurately suggest the twelfth century rather than the sixteenth, as that from which 'all poems are in some sense shaped'. Yet a traditional reading practice which read the basic visual signs of poetic discourse - the line, indentations of the line, the stanza - as transparent, as the means to the end of transmitting a text to the reader's auditory sense, assumed there was only one poem, the spoken one. This is a poem whose semiosis is construed from sound alone. However, to the extent that poets, or readers of poems, become aware of the seen poem, the poem as visual object, the phenomenon of'visual poetry' comes into being for them, to be variously exploited. (I sometimes refer to 'seen poetry', for 'visual poetry' has already acquired particular uses which differ from scholar to scholar, but which do not include all the phenomena I wish to discuss.) If the poem can still be read, as heard language, then the text is now recognized as being construable (able to be interpreted) through two semiotic systems that in which the signs are accessible to the ear, and that to the eye. What I have said so far raises those two basic and interrelated questions: first the extratextual question of historical and social production: when and 33

The Written Poem

why did the 'seen poem' achieve recognition? and secondly, the intratextual question of semiosis - what meaning-making practices (various or persistent) can be identified in relation to seen poetry? Part Two of this book is primarily concerned with the first question in the extended period from Old English poetry (before 1100) to the present. Histories of poetry which call themselves 'modern' (in the general sense, though they may also focus on 'Modernism' as a type of poetic discourse) typically begin with writing of the late nineteenth century, as does the impressive two-volume study by David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry.* Because I want to begin here, in Part One, primarily by discussing the second question (just what use has been made of visual semiosis?) it is helpful to begin at our historical end point of 'modern poetry'. Bernstein describes an environment in which different categories are strongly differentiated from each other as having strong classification (poetic discourse may be clearly differentiated from prose). An environment in which realization rules are explicit and prescriptive he describes as having strong framing (poetry may be written and interpreted according to clear generic expectations, as in early eighteenth-century English poetry). One could say that, since the nineteenth century, poetic discourse in English has increasingly been weakly classified and weakly framed. This is an issue seriously discussed by literary critics and by poets, the latter sometimes enacting the issue by conducting such discussion in what might otherwise be recognised as poetic discourse. Jerome McGann, discussing the work of the American poet Ron Silliman, comments: 'The Chinese Note-book' is one of a large group of recent works ... where the borderline between imaginative and expository writing is called into question, or is lost, or is actively being shifted. Silliman's text comprises a numbered set of reflections on various problems of writing and philosophy. An explicit parody of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, 'The Chinese Notebook' raises the question of poetry's relation to truth both formally and substantively. The formal aspect of the problem is particularly crucial because (according to the received line of argument) poetry's failure as truth comes from its preoccupation with appearances. Is 'The Chinese Notebook' philosophy or is it poetry? And if we say it is (or is not) one or the other, why and how do we arrive at our judgment?5

Roman Jakobson's famous structuralist understanding of'poetic language', referred to in my previous chapter, certainly assumed it was textual orientation to appearances (to the message itself) which was the sign of the poetic function. McGann continues: One reads the work of Alan Davies (for instance, a piece like 'Language Mind Writing') or a critical text like Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson only to experience a crisis of language. As in 'The Chinese Notebook' and so many other recent texts,

34

The Seen Poem

the dissolution appears as a problem of genre ... My Emily Dickinson looks like 'literary criticism', and is catalogued as such by booksellers and libraries. It reads, however, like poetry ... frequently slipping altogether into ballad meter as the physical text maintains the linear formalities of prose, (pp 136-7)

McGann's last example nicely brings out the way in which framing and classification rules can operate in disjunction. According to Bernstein, this possibility is the 'potential of change'. Bernstein writes, 'Although framing carries the message to be reproduced, there is always pressure to weaken that framing . . . at some point, the weakening of the framing is going to violate the classification. So change can come at the level of framing.' Thus the sound pattern, the 'ballad meter', into which My Emily Dickinson 'frequently slips' - a conventional genre of text according to the realization rules which frame poetic discourse - 'violates' the classification which divides poetry from literary criticism, the category into which the text has otherwise been placed ('by its looks'). I will return later to the question of why, according to Bernstein, 'there is always pressure to weaken the framing'. An environment in which classification is weak is one where categories are more permeable, can 'leak' into each other more readily. So discourses 'leak' into each other (as in McGann's example of poetry/literary criticism).6 An environment in which framing is weak is one in which the realization of text is less controlled. So different semiotic realizations 'leak' into each other (the visual/aural poem). With weak framing, poetic discourse gains the potential to be realized in different semiotic systems (including, though it is not here my concern, those of the drama in so-called 'performance poetry'). I have already differentiated visual from aural semiosis in language and both can conventionally be understood as realizations of discourse as 'language as social practice'. But critics do not always 'see' language even when they 'see' poetry. The senses of sight and hearing associated with visual and aural semiosis are also of course associated with the perception of 'texts' of other 'discourses' - notably that of art for sight and music for hearing. Though there is general agreement among critics and literary historians that the period from the late nineteenth century to the twentieth has been strongly interested in visual poetry, variously understood, it is the influence of art and music on its development which has attracted most attention. Less remarked on are developments of seen poetry concerned with the possible meaning-making of graphology, that is a concern with 'visible language'. Perhaps these last developments are less noticed by commentators because they do not involve a semiotic shift to another 'discourse', such as that of art. They represent an enlargement of the possibilities of semiosis in language, a more subtle shift of framing than a complete transfer of classification to a non-verbal semiotic environment. Chapter 5 discusses some of these 'more subtle' developments in detail. In overview, what kinds of semiosis have been invoked in the various 35

The Written Poem

practices of 'visual' or 'seen' poetry? I have inferred the following catalogue from my readings of poetry, from the comments of poets on their work, from the opinions of literary critics. They are (at least) the the the the

semiotic semiotic semiotic semiotic

of art (painting, sculpture, drawing, 'found art', etc.) of music (including jazz) of the body of language.

The last, meaning-making through seen language, can be subdivided (at least) into (using the vocabulary of systemic functional grammar): graphology as a realization of Mode ('the organization of the message') to facilitate semantic concentration syntactic ambiguities counterpoint between syntax and semantics graphology as realization of meanings of Field, Tenor and Mode (meaning-making directly through the seen language).

The semiotic of the body includes two realizations which may seem to contrast the most natural and the most contrived. First there is theorizing about the breath - sometimes taken as life itself, and the way in which the 'seen poem' can represent the very breathing of the poet. Secondly, there is theorizing about sight as a human sense and graphic display as visual presence, embodying all that is peculiar and accessible to the sense of sight rather than to the other modes of perception (visual presence does not 'belong' to art but underlies all semiosis perceived through sight, including that of art and written language). All these types of semiosis, and the 'interreading' we give to their juxtaposition (the interpretation of their simultaneous presence) are not ahistorical and asocial. It is helpful to return briefly to the work of sociologists such as Bernstein and Bourdieu to explore this point, for the very reason that they do not introduce some of the issues of social context which I will suggest are needed. The reason why, according to Bernstein, 'there is always pressure to weaken the framing' - that is, for poetic discourse, there is always an impetus to generic change - is because '(pedagogic) discourse and (pedagogic) practice construct always an arena, a struggle over the nature of symbolic control'.7 This is a comparable insight to that of Pierre Bourdieu, in his account of 'cultural production', in which he would describe 'the institution of literature', and, by implication, its sub-area 'the institution of poetic discourse', as a 'field' or 'market', within which there were different sites of authority - well-known poets, 'unknown' poets, editors, prestigious pub36

The Seen Poem

Ushers, vanity presses, academic critics, popular journalists, public literary boards, private prize-givers and benefactors and so on and so on - who have various and varying amounts of 'symbolic capital' because of their placement in the field, and who are engaged in a struggle to enlarge that symbolic capital by defining the nature of symbolic control.8 For both Bernstein and Bourdieu, a change in 'what' signals a change in 'who'. Thus Bernstein suggests, 'if framing changes from strong to weak or the classification changes from strong to weak, there are two basic questions we should always ask: which group is responsible for initiating the change? Is the change initiated by a dominant group or a dominated group .. .?'9 Or as Bourdieu puts it: the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer ... the fundamental stake in literary struggles is the monopoly of literary legitimacy ... the monopoly of the power to say with authority who are authorized to call themselves writers.10 Bourdieu, in my opinion, does oversimplify the case here. The institution of literature is not isolated from other social institutions, and over time its interrelationship with those others may vary considerably. For example, some of the avant-garde artists and poets of the early twentieth century saw the symbolic power of literature as capable of exerting force upon political and economic structures. This is a concern with more than 'the struggle to define the writer'. This period was one of the four 'great periods' for visual poetry, probably a significant conjunction as the following would imply. Poets and literary critics have agreed that, since the late nineteenth century, there has been a resurgence of visual poetry of one kind or another. Geoffrey Cook suggests that 'visual poetry has appeared four times in Occidental art history as an extensive movement - during the Alexandrine period, the Carolingian renaissance, the Baroque and our own day'.11 (I would assign two periods to the twentieth century, with its fast forward approach to cultural transformation - the first period being the first three decades of the century, the second, that following World War II, for there are significant discontinuities of practice.) Cook sees great significance in this appearance: 'each of the past three incarnations appeared at the death of one cultural epoch & the beginning of another... Visual poetry... is a visual statement that nothing more meaningful can be said till we can restructure the basic vision that is an historical culture.'12 In the terminology of Michel Foucault's earlier writing, one could say a resurgence of visual poetry is associated with, even a sign of, epistemic change. (For Foucault, the episteme of a culture was characterized by certain discursive formations, ways of construing reality.)13 This is a larger topic which cannot be pursued 37

The Written Poem

here, but one which reminds us of the essentially social location of literary studies, however we may narrow our focus for the purposes of research. Change in twentieth-century English poetry most commonly has been associated with changes in French art and French poetry. In addition, Jerome McGann gives a British antecedent, associating the twentiethcentury developments particularly with what he calls 'the late nineteenth-century Renaissance of printing'. The latter gave artists 'a new horizon of bibliographical and institutional possibilities'.14 McGann's introduction of 'the late nineteenth-century Renaissance of printing' introduces one of two features that need to be mentioned as constituting some of the important possibilities of the 'field of struggle', to use Bourdieu's words. Bourdieu and Bernstein do not mention (or at least foreground) these features - Bernstein because he is concerned with the strongly classified institution of the school, and Bourdieu, I suspect, because he is thinking particularly of the literary 'scene' in Paris, and both because they are assuming an atemporal, or contemporaneous presence of contemporary (or near-contemporary) life. These two features, theorized separately but always interrelated, are concerned with the subject of reading (the reader) and the object of reading respectively. To study the subject of reading one needs to take account, historically and socially, of practices of literacy and reading, including the different relations between reading and writing, at different times. To study the object of reading one needs to take into account the possibilities of object production within available technology. 'Available technology' is a very open-ended term. Changes in transport, in public utilities (such as the availability of electricity), in craft or manufacturing practices and so on - all can be relevant but the most centrally relevant area is that associated directly with language itself. According to Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy^ an oral culture is profoundly changed by the introduction of writing, the first 'language technology'.15 Elizabeth Eisenstein first drew detailed attention to the restructuring of the social world associated with the introduction of printing, another technology for language production.16 And the twentieth century has seen an acceleration of technologies for seen language production, especially those under individual or private control, from the typewriter to the local personal computer with its associated text-oriented applications (word-processing and formatting programs, and graphics programs transferable into the previous two). I say 'seen language production' because the twentieth century has also witnessed the development of heard language technology, both for private and public use - the telephone, radio, the tape recorder - together with the technologies of mixed semiotic realization, film and video. And finally, from the 1980s, we have the development of interactive multimedia technology for both production and reception of language, seen and increasingly heard, and graphics and sound generally (computer art and computer music) 38

The Seen Poem

through the Internet. Thus the realization of the signs of one semiotic or another - of art, of music, of language - traditionally material, but now also immaterial or virtual with electronic realization, will be an 'instantiation', an instance, of the technological possibilities of the culture. Geoffrey Cook's observation, previously quoted, on the four periods of visual poetry, in conjunction with a consideration of the periods of technological change and histories of reading, immediately raises an interesting question. To what extent, if at all, have these periods of prominence of visual poetry (signifying crises of culture, Cook implies), some correlation with changes in technology and/or changes in literacy? This is part of the larger question of'the sociology of literature': 'what is the relation between poetic discourse and social change?', a question obviously much larger than the scope of this study, but one on which it may throw some light. Part Two attempts some overview of these issues of literacy and language technology, beginning in the period of 'transferred literacy' in late Old English manuscript culture and concluding with a discussion of some of the implications for poetic discourse of the most recent technological developments, those of interactive media. I return now to the catalogue of kinds of semiosis associated with visual poetry, and to a discussion of the different framings of poetic discourse, that is, the production of different text-types or genres of poetry through the different media of semiosis. First, the semiotic of art. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 1.1 discuss technopaegnia in Chapter 3. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, The New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 1364-6. John Hollander, Vision and Resonance, Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), p. 268. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP), Vol. I (From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode), 1976, and Vol. II (Modernism and After), 1987. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 135. In contrast, the nineteenth-century development of the prose-poem has been described as a political reaction against the strongly classified categories and strongly framed genres of traditional French poetic practice. 'The wealth of devices and artifice characteristic of rhymed metrical verse, in particular the classical alexandrine, had become by the mid-nineteenth century its peculiar poverty', writes Jonathan Monroe in A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), p. 117. The reaction is political, Monroe comments, because it suggests an equation between accepting a 39

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

40

'hierarchy of genres' and a 'hierarchy of social classes', yet another example of the way in which disruptive literary practices foreground the reversible statement 'language practices —>are<— social practices'. Basil Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity (London: Taylor & Francis, 1996), p. 30. Bernstein's word 'pedogogic' I have placed in parentheses because I am using his words here with more general import. See particularly Pierre Bourdieu, 'The field of cultural production, or: The economic world reversed', in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on An and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 29-73. Bernstein, Pedagogy, p. 30. Bourdieu, Cultural Production, p. 42. Geoffrey Cook cites his own essay, 'Visual poetry' in La Mamillae Art Contemporary (Vol. 2, No. 4), which I have not seen, in 'Visual poetry as a molting', Visual Literature Criticism: A New Collection, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1979), p. 141. See also Dick Higgins, Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (State University of New York Press, 1986) and his comments in the Editor's Foreword, Visible Language, Vol. 20 (1986), p. 5. Higgins believes that 'each time pattern poetry [i.e., early visual poetry] has flourished it has done so with an incomplete view of its predecessors and that this accounts for many of the differences among each wave of pattern poems'. This view contrasts with that of Ulrich Ernst, who sees a continuity of tradition for European visual poetry in 'The figured poem: towards a definition of genre', Visible Language, Vol. 20 (1986), pp. 8-27. Cook, 'Visual poetry as a molting', p. 141. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972, repr. 1985), pp. 191-2. McGann, Black Riders, p. 23. Walter Ong, Chapter 4, 'Writing restructures consciousness', Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982). Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modem Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979). An abridged version, but with the advantage of illustrations, is The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983).

3 The Semiotic of Art and Music

The essential feature of Visual poetry' has often been said to be that it attempts to combine the semiotic of language with the semiotic of art - a generalization which fails to acknowledge the wider possibilities of semiosis listed in the previous chapter. Thus Geoffrey Cook, as previously quoted, inserted the history of 'visual poetry' into 'Occidental art history'. And though Willard Bohn states generally that 'for our purposes we can define visual poetry as poetry meant to be seen', it is clear from his discussion that 'seeing' is associated with painting or drawing, and not with language. Bohn quotes Michel Foucault: Thus the visual poem claims to abolish playfully the oldest oppositions of our alphabetic civilization: showing and naming; representing and telling; reproducing and articulating; imitating and signifying; looking and reading.1

These traditional dichotomies are of course artificial. They assume that knowledge is somehow directly accessible to the eye, that art has no semiotic. Like the Aristotelian dichotomy of mimesis (the showing of the seen and heard drama) and diegesis (the telling of the heard lyric poem), they privilege the cognitive integrity of the eye. (It is no accident that in Old English an originally past tense of the verb 'to see' acquires the present sense of 'to know', that is 'I have seen'.)2 Foucault highlights the rhetorical status of this visual innocence. He does not say 'the visual poem abolishes ...' but rather 'the visual poem claims to abolish'. Presumably, in the personified agency this rhetoric gives it, the visual poem asks not to be judged harshly as its duplicity is only 'playful'. But when a semiotic of art is allowed, its recognition can in turn repress the equal recognition of the semiotic of seen language. This is the recognition that the graphic realization, the visual display of language, may also be meaningful in its own right, that the signification of language may be realized in the written text as well as in the spoken word. In another publication, Willard Bohn's work offers an example of such repression. He has written: 'By definition visual poetry is a hybrid genre, a second-order semiological system in which linguistic structures support pictorial structures and vice versa. Each poem consists of a complex dialectic between these two sign systems and centers itself around their point of articulation'.3 In Bohn's statement, the point of articulation, physically realized in speech, in the mouth, has been transferred to the material realization of the visual 'pictorial structure', so that the possibility of a third 41

The Written Poem

sign-system, associated with the visual realization of language, entering this 'complex dialectic' is written out of the story. In such a story, language means speech only. Visual display means art, not writing. It is not surprising that commentators have been particularly aware of the contribution of the semiotic of art to visual poetry, for this association has an ancient history. The earliest examples are described and translated in J. M. Edmunds's 1912 edition, The Greek Bucolic Poets. These are the technopaegnia (from Greek tekhne, 'skill'), referred to by Willard Bohn in the opening quotation of Chapter 2. In Edmunds's edition, grouped as 'The Pattern Poems', these consist of The Axe, The Wings, The Egg, The Shepherd's Pipe, The First Altar and The Second Altar.4 In these examples, the disposition of the graphic lines gives the shape. The words of the lines are written horizontally for eggs and altars, vertically, perhaps curved, for wings. Thus the poem has two visual realizations. The one, shared by all examples, is the dominant graphic display of poetic discourse, that is lineation, poetrywritten-in-lines, the other, varying from wings to altar and so on, is the iconic shape. A 1986 'Special Issue' of the periodical, Visible Language, is devoted to 'pattern poetry' or carmen figurata, especially that before the twentieth century. It includes the technopaegnia but also introduces several papers on the figured poem outside the Western tradition (the note lists the titles).5 Again we notice a surprising effacement of written language. Ulrich Ernst suggests that the figured poem, 'considered historically', is said always to have had 'artistic ambitions; it has always been a mixed poetic and art form', yet, while recognizing this mixture, he comments: one may be able to find a new generic principle in the distinction between aural and visual poetry, the latter calling not only on the power of reading, but, somewhat like the fine arts, on the power of interpretative vision as well. In this new system the figured poem, like other forms of visual poetry ... would be allied to the drama or television play.6

This is surprising because Ernst has completely elided the difference in Mode of language, that is between the seen poem and the spoken drama or television play. The written figured poem is mixed in semiotic realization (art and language), the written text of the drama or television play is realized only in language. It is only the performed drama or television play which introduces a complexity of semiosis - heard speech and sound effects, seen gesture, costume, lighting and so on. The figured poem and the performed drama/play are comparable in that they are realized in more than one semiotic medium. They are not comparable generically however; if the figured poem were 'performed' in speech, it would gain quality of voice, gesture and so on, but lose the very quality which is seen to characterize it that which can only be seen, its realization in the semiotic of art. I will not here rehearse in detail the pre-twentieth-century pattern/figured 42

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poems, as to appreciate any commentary fully one needs illustrations of each text discussed. The several articles of the issue of Visible Language devoted to 'Pattern Poetry' are generously illustrated. Two books which provide illustrations of the classical works, the latter with more detailed discussion, are, translated from the French, Letter and Image by Massin, published in 1970,7 and, in German, by Ulrich Ernst, Carmen Figuratum: Geschichte des Figurengedichts von den antiken Urspriingen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, published in 1991.8 In addition, John Hollander provides some English translations with illustrations in the chapter, 'The Poem in the Eye' in his 1985 book, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form.9 For the figured poems, neither medium of semiosis intrudes on the other; the verbal and the iconic realizations could be 'read' independently, although typically some symbolic relation will be established to link both readings and establish some macro-interpretation of the text. John Hollander, as a poet, discussed his own practices of production and interpretation for shaped poems in Types of Shape, as, for example: 'In writing a poem in the shape of this cup, I kept to my earlier procedure. I would draw an outline, fill it in with x's, and contemplate the silhouette (in later instances, this sometimes took months) until I began to realize what the poem about, in, occupying, conjured up by its shape would also be about.'10 At the same time, such juxtaposition and duality of visual interpretation is a textual context (of practice) encouraging visual 'play'. Thus, as Massin points out, for the 'Egg' of Simmias ('Simias' in Edmunds) of Rhodes, fourth-century BC, 'the reader was intended to travel from the first verse to the last, then from the second to the second-to-last, from the third to the antepenultimate verse, and so on until he comes to the middle lines'.11 Given the 'natural' convention that sequence for eye represents sequence for speech, such a procedure certainly 'denaturalizes' any conventional understanding of visual language as a transparent representation of the spoken language of the poem. The Greek figured poems reappeared in the Renaissance, in the printed editions of the 'bucolic' poets. According to Dick Higgins, there are about 110 English-language pattern poems from the late sixteenth century to 1750.12 As early as 1509, Stephen Hawes included the shaped poem 'a pair of wings' in his longer poem The Convercyon of Swerers (with 46 rime-royal stanzas in addition to the 'wings'). As with Simmias' egg, the foregrounding of the visual provides a context for 'visual play' in language. John Hollander comments, 'actually there are two pairs of wings, separated by brackets, and the poem can be read in three versions - down the main wing shape (first slowly widening then contracting Skeltonic lines), down the outer wings, or across at the lines on which they meet'.13 Again, such play prevents the effacement of written language as the mere transparent representation of speech. George (or Richard) Puttenham famously published his Arte of English 43

The Written Poem

Poesie in 1589, and included a section of shaped poems' in Chapter XI, 'Of proportion in figure'.14 (I discuss Puttenham's work further in Part Two, Chapter 6). Dick Higgins points out 'the extraordinary role of the prescribed forms which Puttenham recommends . . . He was not even a very good poet; yet the forms which he recommends as being suitable for pattern poetry are, with the addition of the cross and serpentine forms, virtually the only forms the English have used besides the Greek models.'15 It is not my concern here to write a history of figured poems in English, but no account could omit mention of George Herbert's 'The Altar' and 'Easter Wings', pattern poems using the Greek models within the larger context of his integrated collection, The Temple. 'The Altar' is the first poem in the section entitled 'The Church', which follows the section 'The Church-Porch'. 'Easter Wings (1)' and 'Easter Wings (2)' follow some ten poems after 'The Altar'. Even the quickest glance through Herbert's The Temple reveals the variety of stanza form and visual display in his poems, though the three mentioned are the only overt pattern poems.16 In his discussion of Herbert, Hollander comments that the altar shape was used more frequently in seventeenth-century verse 'than has been perceived'. He supports this by an observation which will be echoed later by scholars such as Jerome McGann, concerning Emily Dickinson. Hollander writes, 'A glance at the ms. poems of Joseph Beaumont in the Wellesley College Library reveals what the misleadingly set up printed edition (ed. E. Robinson, 1914) does not - a mass of altars, lozenges, and "triquets displayed".'17 Emily Dickinson does not use shapes - but she does arrange her lines of poetry in a way quite ignored by her earlier editors.181 remarked in Chapter 1 that editors of Middle English poetry often ignored the function of colour in texts, perhaps because it was not functional in relation to their recognition of later poetry. Similarly, editors tend to return to the 'traditional natural' relation between 'seen' and 'spoken' poem, where the former is understood transparently to represent the latter. Shapes or lineation not clearly related to metrical schemes or rhymes, especially when handwritten - such features foreground the visual in a way sometimes too unconventional for traditional editors. In the 1986 Visible Language issue on 'Pattern Poetry', Dick Higgins states that 'no English pattern poems are known from the entire eighteenth century'.19 In an approach that assumes visual poetry equals poetry which is realized in the semiotic of art as well as the semiotic of language, such an absence of pattern poems has been taken to mean an absence of visual poetry. This accords with the 'periods of prominence' described by Cook and others, that after the seventeenth century, visual poetry will not again become prominent until the twentieth century. However, a different understanding of 'visual poetry', one which recognizes the role of other semiotic media, such as that of seen language (as opposed to spoken) will take a different view. Thus Richard Bradford, in a 1989 paper, 'The Visual Poem 44

The Semiotic of Art and Music

in the Eighteenth Century', suggests that there did actually exist in the eighteenth century 'a series of intriguing debates on how the visual text affects the journey of the poem from writer to reader'.20 As his work brings in those historical contingencies of literacy and technology to which I earlier alluded, I will postpone its discussion until Part Two. The general point I wish to make here is that too limited an understanding of the functions of written language in 'visual poetry', displacing all concern with the 'seen' to the semiotic of art, renders that written language invisible, so that a full historical account of 'the semiotic conventions of the written poem' cannot be written. As I remarked earlier, since the late nineteenth century, there has been a resurgence of visual poetry of one kind or another. In relation to the semiotic of art, this has been primarily in two periods, that of the first three decades of the twentieth century (the heyday of the 'avant-garde') and the period from the 1950s on. The earlier period is associated particularly with Guillaume Apollinaire in France. Stephane Mallarme is usually mentioned as a foundational influence although his work is more appropriately discussed, I believe, in a consideration of the visual semiotic of music, to which I will turn at the end of this chapter. The semiotic of art in the latter period (from the 1950s) is associated particularly with so-called 'concrete poetry'. It is unsurprising that Willard Bohn gives primary significance to the interrelation between art and language in his theorizing, since the objects on which he appears most to have focused are the 'calligrammes', the 'beautiful drawings', of Apollinaire, in which words either fill a shape, or trace the outline of a shape. Thus in The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, Bohn devotes a chapter to developing a 'calligrammar'. Using a structuralist opposition of paradigm (metaphor) and syntagm (metonymy) derived from the work of Roman Jakobson, Bohn suggests that, in the calligrammes, visual images work primarily through metonymy (things associated in the same situation) while verbal images work primarily through metaphor (things associated by similarity). Of course his discussion inevitably 'deconstructs' this objective dichotomy by recognizing the subjectivity of such associations or similarities, that is, that without access to Apollinaire's experience, we cannot always 'decipher' the association or similarity.21 However, Bohn's conclusion remains valid: that in this poetry, the visual component 'is at least as important as the verbal'. Yet because he equates both the visual and verbal 'image' with 'meaning', the graphic display of language is transparent to him; he cannot see it because he sees immediately through it to the 'meaning'.22 Bohn points out that critics see our century as giving a high value to sight, but again his examples show that he does not associate the visual with written language, though he does assume a semiotic structuring to the visual (which he speaks of in the vocabulary of linguistic terms as 'syntax' in the following quotation). As a profound influence on the pre-eminence of sight, 45

The Written Poem

he cites the development of the cinema, especially in its early stages: 'the early cinema emphasized the visual sign at the expense of everything else and introduced a radically new syntax.'23 Again, he refers to the development of still photography, and the greater use of photographic illustrations in newspapers and magazines. And similarly in poetry, he suggests, a new association emerged of the verbal genre with painting, displacing the stronger association of the genre with music (which had been dominant for the Symbolists). This 'verbal painting' he equates with the use of 'arresting similes and vivid metaphors'. In this last example, we can see the extent to which Bohn is not equating 'visual poetry' with 'graphic display', for similes and metaphors are realized in the formal choices (words and grammatical constructions) of a text, and understood by the reader in the process of giving meaning to that 'lexicogrammar', a process in which the substance in which the poem has been encountered (heard or seen) is irrelevant. Apollinaire's influence on subsequent 'visual poetry' is indisputable. In The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, Bohn goes on to discuss his influence on the visual poets of Catalonia and on the so-called 'Ultra' movement in Spain. And in the final chapter Bohn discusses the early development of visual poetry in the United States, associating its introduction from 1915 with Marius de Zayas, who 'spent the summer of 1914 in Paris in the company of Apollinaire when the latter was publishing his first calligrams'.24 Similarly, David Perkins remarks of the poet Mina Loy (regarded as comparable to Marianne Moore in the early 1920s), that she 'was English and came to New York with imposing avant-garde credentials, for she had known Marinetti in Milan and Apollinaire in Paris'.25 (Marinetti was the founder of the Italian 'futurist' movement in Italy, whose 'manifesto' was published in 1909.)26 Mariorie Perloff, in her book-length study of the period, pays particular attention to the internationalism of European artistic influence in the earliest period, when transport had improved and borders had not yet closed;27 thus an anthology such as Willard Bohn's The Dada Market, published in 1993, brings together the work of 'forty-two poets writing in seven different languages' in the period 1914-23. (Bohn impressively translates and introduces the whole anthology.)28 The principal feature of the avant-garde work which is relevant to this present study is the way in which its producers deliberately set out to blast apart, not only the framing of traditional genres, but also the classifying of traditional categories. The prose-poem, discussed in the previous chapter, had worked against the discrete classification into prose and poetry, but both categories remained those of verbal realization, that is, located in the hegemonic institution of 'literature', or 'verbal art'. But avant-garde work blurred the classification of different categories of art as a social institution, such as the categories of 'literature', 'painting', 'sculpture', at the least juxtaposing word and image in a way which, to the modern eye, is now more familiar through the similar habits of modern advertising.29 Similarly, the 46

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verbal realization of these often multi-semiotic works picked and chose from available discourses in a way which both ignored and/or parodied the traditional framings of genre for poetic discourse, including linguistic conventions such as textual cohesion (our expectation from past experience that certain words 'go together', are more likely to be encountered together in texts of a certain register).30 Thus a 'poem' might 'borrow' the language of mathematics, using numbers, alone or mixed with words. (Willard Bohn gives a 'numbers only' example by Picabia in his introduction to The Dada Market, an anthology from which the following examples also come, and judges the poem 'boring'.)31 If a poem were entirely in natural language, clauses might be incomplete, lexical choices 'inappropriately' juxtaposed, as in Hans (Jean) Arp's poem, Bim Bim ... with its baby talk and adult preoccupations and its repetition of incomplete statements and arguments. Incongruously, in view of this lexicogrammatical intransigence, Bim Bim... is graphically very conventional, a generically predictable realization of poetic discourse. It is lineated; it has rhetorical repetition ('Red is ...', 'So too ...') whose repeated line initial position gives a graphic parallelism of characters in different lines; it has three stanzas, each of the same number of lines, whose relative lengths create a visually repetitive stanza shape of which Puttenham would approve.32 Semantically, by the everyday conventions of reading, the text does not cohere. Graphically, the text is as tightly cohesive as any traditional genre of poetry could require. As much as the graphically disruptive text (Vanity ... no title) of Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, with its letter forms as images, its anarchic juxtaposition of fonts, Arp's text draws attention to the visual conventionality of the language of traditional poetry.33 David Perkins points out that poets of the avant-garde in New York in the early years of the twentieth century were different from those in other parts of the country because only in New York was it possible easily to become familiar with the work of Modernist painters, sculptors and photographers. Perkins describes the galleries of Alfred Stieglitz, which from 1908 to 1911 showed work of Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Cezanne and Picasso. Then in 1913 came 'the famous exhibition of Modern Art... [with] paintings by Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Braque, Gauguin and Picabia'.34 Just as in Europe, modern art was to influence other aspects of poetry besides its use of the semiotic of art, such as the semiotic of visual language. William Carlos Williams records in his Autobiography, What were we seeking? No one knew consistently enough to formulate a 'movement'. We were restless and constrained, closely allied with the painters. Impressionism, dadaism, surrealism applied to both painting and the poem. What a battle we made of it merely getting rid of capitals at the beginning of every line! The immediate image, which was impressionistic, sure enough, fascinated us all. ... We were looked at askance by scholars and those who turned to scholarship for 47

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their norm. To my mind the thing that gave us most a semblance of a cause was not imagism, as some thought, but the line: the poetic line and our hopes for its recovery from stodginess.35

Peter Halter's 1994 book-length study, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams, explores these issues in detail (see especially Chapter 7, 'The Poem on the Page').36 What is clear is that whether or not twentieth-century poets actually used the semiotic of visual art in their poetry, like Apollinaire, the presence of avant-garde art, the changes or overturning of realization rules by which 'genres' of painting or drawing had been produced, and the blurring of classification rules which had discriminated between visual art and other categories, such as verbal art, influenced their thinking about the possibilities for their verbal medium. William Carlos Williams begins Chapter 23 of his autobiography, 'Painters and Parties', with an account of his reaction to 'the famous "Armory Show" of 1913', and the gatherings 'with the gang' on Sundays, where talk of one art blurred into talk of another; 'We'd have arguments over cubism which would fill an afternoon. There was a comparable whipping up of interest in the structure of the poem' (p. 136). The conventions of both the seen and the spoken poem were deliberately flouted: 'It seemed daring to omit capitals at the head of each poetic line. Rhyme went by the board' (p. 136). Williams sees this as the time of rupture, that, one way or another, is focused through a visual awareness; 'There had been a break somewhere, we were streaming through, each thinking his own thoughts, driving his own designs towards his self s objectives. Whether the Armory show in painting did it or whether that also was no more than a facet - the poetic line, the way the image was to lie on the page was our immediate concern' (p. 138). As previously remarked, the twentieth century has two periods when visual poetry is noticed by commentators. I say 'noticed' because, as Bradford's illuminating work on the eighteenth century makes clear, poets and readers have remained fairly consistently concerned with poetry as visual language despite the general lack of critical comment. This lack of critical comment is a direct result of associating the 'visual' with art, not with language. Thus the second period remarked on, from the 1950s, is again one in which poets turn to incorporate the semiotic of art as well as the semiotic of language in their realization of poetic discourse. The usual name given to this enterprise is that of'concrete poetry'. The periodical Visible Language, to which I make frequent reference (originally called the Journal of Typographic Research), began in the same environment of interest as the development of concrete poetry. In the first issue (1967), Mike Weaver, in 'Concrete Poetry', traces the origins of the concrete movement and prints its early manifestos as appendices.37 Max Bill, who Weaver says 'is recognized as the most important single figure in the concrete movement', had edited the writings of the artists Kandinsky and 48

The Semiotic of Art and Music

Klee and organized the first international exhibition of concrete art in Basle, Switzerland, in 1944. Bill lectured in Brazil in 1953, in 1956 there was a National Exhibition of Concrete Art there (at Sao Paulo), and in 1958 the so-called Noigandres group issued a 'pilot plan for concrete poetry' (Weaver's Appendix A). With a sense of the historical contingency of discourse, it begins with an assertion that the earlier genres of poetry are no more, 'concrete poetry: product of a critical evolution of forms, assuming that the historical cycle of verse (as formal-rhythmical unit) is closed'. It asserts the seen Mode of the new poetry, 'concrete poetry begins by being aware of graphic space as structural agent, qualified space'. Qualified space is not the old use of spatial display merely as metaphor for language spoken in time, rather 'qualified space' is 'space-time structure instead of mere lineartemporistical development'. The manifesto goes on to mention the relevance and influence of Mallarme, Pound, Joyce, cummings, Apollinaire, futurism, Dadaism and earlier Brazilian writers. It is clear that by 1958, the avant-garde can situate itself within an established tradition, a paradoxical situation which will not go unremarked by later critics.38 After 1958, the term 'concrete poetry' came to be applied loosely to any poetry where the visual display was thought to be noticeably foregrounded. By 1974, criticism felt the need for a more general poetics. Aaron Marcus, in 'An Introduction to the Visual Syntax of Concrete Poetry', studies 'visual syntax' as part of the larger study of 'visual semiotic'.39 He begins by describing the critical problem (which appears to be a lack of identifiably framed genres, in Bernstein's sense), 'Anthologies have attempted to gather and analyse the work [of concrete poetry]. The task has been difficult, however, for the collected body of recent concrete poetry has been exceedingly heterogeneous and has defied attempts at categorisation.' My earlier discussion of Dada work concluded that it was just such a defiance which was among its original aims. However, by 1974, though such work may be valued as an individual product, its critical impropriety, its lacking in unambiguous relative value, is not. Marcus comments, 'One is left in a confusion of claims and counter claims for the proper areas of concern of concrete poetry. There is a consequent difficulty in describing, comparing, and evaluating different works' (my italics). I think such talk would have surprised the writers and artists of Dada! Yet however one 'evaluates' Marcus's own ideological purpose, his paper provides very helpful insight into the structural possibilities for graphic display. He describes each concrete poem in terms of its 'figure-field' relationships, in which an object is described in relation to its background. The object establishes its 'visual presence' in terms of 'size and shape, position, and orientation judged against this field'. Although the 'visual statement is physically twodimensional', it may contain factors which promote the interpretation of depth. There may be other objects in the visual field, so that the relative arrangements 'can be described in terms of points, lines and planes'. This 49

The Written Poem

structuralist account, focused on what is in the text as objectively described, and speaking of 'visual presence', is clearly written before the general dissemination of Derrida's work on 'the metaphysics of presence' and the general post-structuralist writing on the subjective positioning of all interpretation, but Marcus's discussion of several individual concrete poems provides, effectively, a post-structuralist context for viewing the 'figure-field' associated with the genre of traditional poetic discourse. He makes plain how 'constructed' is the 'natural' appearance of the traditional lineated poem. He also recognizes dynamic possibilities for concrete works, either because of changes in the object (physically suspended, movements of the figure or in the field and so on) or because of changes in the subject, as in 'the shifting of the viewer's attention'. The latter comment brings in a recontextualizing of his discussion from a post-structuralist perspective. Again, what is clear is the way in which the habitual reading only of traditionally lineated poetry (line equals sound) may produce a poetic habitus (the disposition to interpret) in a reader of being unaware of the freedom of choice the figurefield potentially allows. Such a reader can only associate the figure-field with the semiotic of art, will not see the use which linguistic genres already do make of its possibilities (to be discussed in Chapter 5), and will certainly not, without considerable prodding, follow William Carlos Williams in reworking 'the stodginess of the line'. In any account of the development of modern visual awareness in poetic discourse, even when other contributing factors are mentioned (as by Jerome McGann, the late nineteenth-century Renaissance of printing), the name of Stephana Mallarme inevitably appears. The poet, any poet, until the advent of the computer screen, if composing a written poem, begins with the blank page and the potential of its materiality for the graphic display of a text (an idealized vision, I acknowledge, compared to the backs of envelopes and other domestic scraps of paper on which poems are often first composed). It is in the writing and work of Mallarme that we begin to read a particular kind of concern with the meaning-making potential of that graphic display, though, as we shall see in Mallarme's (translated) words, it is a semiotic concern more related to that of music than that of art. I think it is still pertinent to quote, in full, Henry Weinfield's translation of the Preface to Mallarme's graphically innovative poem, Un Coup de Des ('A Throw of the Dice'), printed in the journal Cosmopolis in 1897, the year before his death. I would rather that this note not be read, or, if glanced at, that it be forgotten; to the skillful Reader, it imparts little that is situated beyond his penetration: but it may prove a hindrance to the inexperienced one, who must apply his gaze to the first words of the Poem, so that those that follow, disposed as they are on the Page, lead to the final ones, the whole without novelty except for the way the reading process is spaced out. The 'blanks', in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately 50

The Semiotic of Art and Music

most striking; versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence, so that a lyric poem, or one with a few feet, generally occupies about a third of the leaf on which it is centered: I don't transgress against this order of things, I merely disperse its elements. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others; and, as it is not a question, as it usually is, of regular sound patterns or verses but rather of prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, at the instant they appear and for the duration of their concurrence in some exact mental setting, the text imposes itself, variably, near or far from the latent guiding thread, for the sake of verisimilitude. This copied distance, which mentally separates words or groups of words from one another, has the literary advantage, if I may say so, of seeming to speed up and slow down the movement, of scanning it, and even of intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page: the latter is taken as the basic unit, in the way that elsewhere the Verse or the perfect line is. The fiction rises to the surface and quickly dissipates, following the variable motion of the writing, around the fragmentary interruptions of a central phrase, a phrase introduced from the title and continuing onward. Everything that occurs is foreshortened and, as it were, hypothetical; narrative is avoided. Add that from this stripped-down mode of thought, with its retreats, prolongations, flights, or from its very design, there results, for whoever would read it aloud, a musical score. The difference in the type faces, between the dominant motif, a secondary, and adjacent ones, dictates their importance for oral expression, and the range or disposition of the characters, in the middle, at the top, or at the bottom of the page, marks the rising and falling of the intonation. In a work lacking in precedents, only a certain number of very bold directions, infringements, and so forth, forming the counterpoint to the prosody, remain in an elementary state: not that I judge it expedient to be timid in one's first attempts; but it isn't appropriate, outside of one's own special pages or volume, to go too much against custom in a Periodical, however courageous, generous, and open to freedom it may be. In any event, I shall have indicated a 'state' rather than a sketch of this Poem, a 'state' that does not break with tradition at all; I shall have extended its presentation in many directions, but not so far as to offend anyone: just enough to open some eyes. Today, or at least without presuming upon the future that will emerge from this - nothing or perhaps what merely verges on art - let us openly acknowledge that the attempt participates, in a way that could not be foreseen, in a number of pursuits that are dear to our time: free verse and the prose-poem. They are joined under a strange influence, that of Music, as it is heard at a concert; several of its methods, which seemed to me to apply to Literature, are to be found here. Its genre, if little by little it should become one like the symphony, alongside personal song, leaves the ancient technique of verse - for which I retain a religious veneration and to which I attribute the empire of passion and dreams - intact, while this would be the preferred place for treating, as may follow, subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect, which there is no reason to exclude from Poetry - unique source.40 Bohn had quoted Mallarme's much earlier remark, made in a letter of

51

The Written Poem

1864, that he tried to 'paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces', as suggestive of a close relation between the poet's work and the art of painting. The Preface however is at pains to foreground a similarity between the seen poem and the musical score.41 On the face of it, according to Mallarme's explanation, the layout of his poem is simultaneously both idiosyncratic and traditional. It is idiosyncratic in that features of phonology (such as intonation) which are not usually represented in graphic display, are represented. It is traditional in that the conventional understanding of the use of graphology in poetry has been that of a spatial metaphor (the seen object, the textual product 'a poem') for the temporal phonology (the embodied process of speaking/hearing, the poetic performance). Thus Mallarme speaks, as if it were the most natural or inevitable language, rather than metaphor, of the 'silence' of the 'blanks'. The not-heard is equated with the not-seen. And, in the following simile of 'seem' rather than equated metaphor 'is', where reading is a liminal process of becoming, coexistent space is brought together with sequential time: 'this copied distance ... has the literary advantage ... of seeming to speed up and slow down the movement, of scanning it, and even of intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page'. Later critics of 'visual poetry' will write of the effect this visual displacement may have on the 'normal' speaking of the poem, and the effect the latter, the normal speaking, may in turn have on our reading of the visual, especially in rereadings, when the initially unfamiliar visual display has been 'naturalized' into recognizable structures of word and syntax. Clive Scott discusses these effects as 'The Prosody of the Visual' in relation to Apollinaire's calligrammes.42 Of course Apollinaire's calligrammes, with their breaking up and arranging of letters in individual words, of words in individual phrases, of phrases in individual clauses, and these displacements arranged in various ways pictorially, displaces the usual typographic conventions much more extensively than Mallarme. Yet it is the latter's displacements which will, I suggest, have a more profound influence on subsequent poetry, an influence which is acknowledged but not always understood. This is because Mallarme's graphic display, taking the analogy of the musical score as a visual guide to meaningful performance, is an organization of typography to realize the semiotic of language rather than the semiotic of art. Thus the visual text realizes both semantic choices of language, as in the font size correlating with thematic significance, and phonological choices over and above the usual conventions of written language, as with page height indicating intonation. Weinfield, in his commentary, suggests that Mallarme's somewhat contradictory emphasis on the lack of transgression in his radical ways emerges from the poet's desire to augment, rather than displace, the traditional possibilities for poetry (p. 264). But radical these ways are. As Weinfield writes: 52

The Semiotic of Art and Music

What is most innovative about the poem, from a formal point of view, is the way in which the concept has been materialized - in a manner that makes the physical layout, the spacing, and the typography not merely a representation of the poem but an integral aspect of the poem itself. The paper 'intervenes'; the printed words are disposed variously on the page, sometimes in ideogrammatic fashion - so that central images or motifs are literally constellated (constellated literally) on the page (but the perceptions of readers differ widely on this point); and finally, the various motifs and themes that the poem develops are differentiated typographically: in terms of their importance (as Mallarme indicates in the Preface), in terms of their location in the poem, and as a representation of the sometimes far-flung syntactical connections that the poem, with its absence of punctuation, makes or allows us to entertain, (p. 265) Again, this is not talk about the semiotic of art. In Un Coup de Des, unlike Apollinaire, Mallarme appears to maintain a congruency between graphology and word-boundary and between graphology and syntactic unit. The graphic display facilitates, rather than disturbs, the reading of the 'lexicogrammar' (vocabulary and grammar). The lines are displaced from the usual display of language not from the conflicting semiological demands of visual art, but better to align different levels of the semiotics of language. The graphology of the poem is now not a metaphor for phonology, one substance symbolizing the other, but a visual realization of the several levels of language. The 'music' of Mallarme's preface turns out to be not so much the music of the ear, as of the harmony of 'mind' and eye, the unifying of the language of the mind with the language of the eye. One could fancifully describe this as a denning moment in the history of literacy, the full enthronement of a literate subjectivity in the production/interpretation of meaning in language. The semiotic transformations of Mallarme's Un Coup de Des are thus more complex than many later uses of visual poetry. Sight (graphic display of the poem seen) signifies sound (the poem spoken), but not transparently as for the general use in poetic discourse, but with the purposeful awareness of a musical score, the conscious direction of a performance, with instructions from the composer. Mallarme's work then prepares the way for a selfconscious attention to the visual language of the poem.43 Notes 1.

2.

Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 2. Bonn's translation of Michel Foucault is taken from Ceci n'estpas unepipe (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), pp. 21-2. Compare Old English witan with Latin videre. For a brief historical discussion of the various symbolic understandings of vision, see Chapter 8, 'Sight', in Anthony Synnott, The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society (London: Routledge, 1993). 53

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

54

Willard Bohn, 'Landscaping the visual sign: Apollinaire's "Paysage"', Philological Quarterly, Vol. 65 (1986), p. 347. J. M. Edmunds, The Greek Bucolic Poets (London: Loeb, 1912), pp. 487-511. Visible Language, Vol. 20 (1986), is guest edited by Dick Higgins (Foreword, pp. 5-7) and contains the following papers in addition to those subsequently mentioned in endnotes: Ana Hatherly, 'Reading paths in Spanish and Portuguese Baroque labyrinths', pp. 52-64; Piotr Rypon, 'The labyrinth poem', pp. 65-95; Herbert Franke, 'Chinese patterned texts', pp. 96-108; Kalanath Jha, 'Sanskrit Citrakavyas and the Western pattern poem: a critical appraisal', pp. 109-20; Jeremy Adler, 'Pastoral typography: Sigmund von Birken and the "Picture-Rhymes" of Johann Helwig', pp. 121-35; Karl F. Otto, Jr., 'Georg Weber's Lebens-Fruchte (1649)', pp. 136-45. Ulrich Ernst, 'The figured poem: towards a definition of genre', Visible Language, Vol. 20 (1986), p. 9. (Robert) Massin, Letter and Image, trans. Caroline Hillier and Vivienne Menkes (London: Studio Vista, 1970), illustrations 623 to 628 and 158-9. In French: La lettre et I'image: la figuration dans I'alphabet latin, du huitieme siecle a nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1970). Ulrich Ernst, Carmen Figuratum: Geschichte des Figurengedichts von den antiken Urspriingen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters (Cologne: Bohlau, 1991). See particularly pp. 84 and 87 (Greek) and 100 (Latin). John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), pp. 252-9. John Hollander, Types of Shape, new, expanded edn. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), p. xv. Massin, Letter and Image, p. 158. Dick Higgins, 'The corpus of British and other English-language pattern poetry', Visible Language, Vol. 20 (1986), p. 28. Hollander, Vision and Resonance, p. 260. Hollander gives a brief but very informative account of the occurrence of'figured poems' from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, pp. 259-66. Stephen Hawes's poem appears as 'A pair of wings', No. 152 in R. T. Davies (ed.), Medieval English Lyrics (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 259. Davies notes, 'This poem ... is the first known in English to copy the pattern poems of the Greek Anthology. Stephen Hawes travelled in France where poets were already shaping poems like eggs and wings' (p. 360). George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. A reproduction of the original volume was published by the Scolar Press, Menston, England, in 1968. A modern print edition was edited by Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936, and reprinted 1970). In the latter, 'Of proportion in figure' is pp. 91-112. Higgins, 'Corpus', p. 29. Higgins includes Puttenham's complete list of figures (p. 35). He also points out that there is controversy over Puttenham's first name (p. 29).

The Semiotic of Art and Music

16. George Herbert, The Temple. My edition is George Herbert, The Complete English Works, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater (New York: Everyman, 1995 edn.). Herbert has received a fair proportion of the little attention given to the seen poem. The latter fills only six pages of a total 749 in T. V. F. Brogan's annotated bibliography, English Versification 1570-1980 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981). See Chapter 9, 'Visual (typographic) structures', pp. 463-8. 17. Hollander, Vision and Resonance, p. 263. 18. See Jerome McGann's discussion, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 26-41. 19. Higgins, 'Corpus', p. 41. 20. Richard Bradford, 'The visual poem in the eighteenth century', Visible Language, Vol. 23 (1989), p. 9 (Special Issue, 'The Printed Poem and the Reader'). 21. Bonn, Visual Poetry, see especially pp. 76-80. 22. In addition to references already made, the following studies are particularly pertinent to a consideration of Apollinaire's visual poetry: Johanna Drucker, 'Typographic manipulation of the poetic text in the early twentieth century avant-garde', Visible Language, Vol. 25 (1991), pp. 231-56; Jennifer Pap, 'Apollinaire's ekphrastic "Poesie-Critique" and Cubism', Word & Image, Vol. 8 (1992), pp. 206-14; Clive Scott, 'Guillaume Apollinaire, calligrammes (1918): the prosody of the visual', Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Free Verse 1910-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 88-120; Anna Whiteside-St Leger Lucas, 'Apollinaire's ideogrammes: sound, sense ... and visible signs', Word & Image, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 163-79. 23. Bohn, Visual Poetry, p. 2. 24. See also Willard Bohn, 'Guillaume Apollinaire and the New York avant-garde', Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1976), pp. 40-51. Carole Anne Taylor discusses the interrelation of French and American poets in Chapter 3 of A Poetics of Seeing: The Implications of Visual Form in Modern Poetry (New York: Garland, 1985). Her book overall has many interesting insights but is handicapped by the inadequate resources available for talking about language within traditional literary discourse. 25. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Vol. 1, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1976), p. 531. 26. The Princeton Encylopedia describes futurism as 'the prototypical twentiethcentury avant-garde movement in literature and the arts'. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), New Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 'Futurism' entry, p. 445. For a discussion of Marinetti's work see Michael Webster, 'Words-in-freedom and the oral tradition', Visible Language, Vol. 23 (1989), pp. 65-87, and Perloff in the following note. 27. Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the 55

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28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

56

Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). A generously illustrated study of avant-garde art and literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Willard Bohn, The Dada Market, An Anthology of Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993). In relation to advertising, see D. A. Steel, 'DADA - AD AD, Kurt Schwitters, poetry, collage, typography and the advert', Word & Image, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 198-209, and, on later developments, Chapter 3 of Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). More generally, see Visible Language, Vol. 21, Nos 3/4 (1987), a special issue on the avant-garde, and Philip Mann, 'Symmetry, chance, biomorphism: a comparison of the visual art and poetry of Hans Arp's Dada period (1916-1924)', H>W & Image, Vol. 6 (1990), pp. 82-99. M. A. K. Halliday, Chapter 9, 'Around the clause, cohesion and discourse', An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), especially 'Lexical cohesion', pp. 330-4. Bohn, Dada Market, p. xx. George Puttenham, in the chapter preceding his discussion of proportion in figures, discusses 'proportion by situation', (Chapter X [XI]) by which he means stanza shape. See Willcock and Walker (eds), Puttenham, English Poesie, pp. 84-91.1 return to this matter in Part Two, Chapter 6. Bohn, Dada Market; Jean Arp, 'Bim Bim ...', p. 23, Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, '(Vanity ...)', pp. 222-3. David Perkins, 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, p. 530. See Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), especially Chapter 1, 'The "Kinolling Breath" of the 1910s'. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 148. Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). Mike Weaver, 'Concrete poetry', Journal of Typographic Research, Vol. 1 (1967), pp. 293-326. The Journal acknowledges a first printing of the same article in The Lugarno Review, Vol. 1, Nos 5-6 (1966). Marjorie Perloff summarizes the critical stance in 'Avant-garde or endgame?': 'The thesis that the contemporary avant-garde is no more than a recycled version of Dada revolt, that it can do no more than spin, so to speak, its Duchampian wheels, returning again and again to the "scene of provocation" of the early century but devoid of that scene's inherent political motive, has become a commonplace of postmodern theorizing', Perloff, Radical Artifice, p. 9. (Marcel Duchamp produced a work of art from a found bicycle wheel in 1913; for a photo of a 1951 reproduction see Perloff, Radical Artifice, p. 8.) Aaron Marcus, 'An introduction to the visual syntax of concrete poetry', Visible Language, Vol. 8 (1974), pp. 333-60. In the same volume, Abbie W. Beiman

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publishes 'Concrete poetry: a study in metaphor', pp. 197-223. In 1977, Paul H. Gray discusses the comparative incompatibility of concrete poetry with American practices, and the contrasting development of that poetry in Canada, in 'American concrete: new poetic, new performance', Studies in Interpretation, Vol. 2, ed. Esther M. Doyle and Virginia Hastings Floyd (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1977), pp. 77-98. 40. Stephane Mallarme, Collected Poems, translated and with a commentary by Henry Weinfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 121-3. The original French and the English translation are juxtaposed throughout. 41. Bohn, Visual Poetry, p. 3. James Smith Allen discusses the nineteenth-century French reader's habit of comparing poetry to music and prose to an, with a progressive blurring of these comparisons as the century progressed, towards what he calls a 'necromantic synergism of the arts'. In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in France 1800-1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991), pp. 245-6.1 do not discuss 'Symbolism' with its insistence on the relationship of poetry and music, as that would take me from a specific discussion of graphic display to the more inclusive topic of semantic practices associated with poetic discourse. An anthology of relevant readings is edited by A. E. Dyson, Poetry Criticism and Practice: Developments since the Symbolists (London: Macmillan, 1986). 42. Clive Scott, Chapter 4 in Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Free Verse 1910-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 43. In 'Concrete and abstract poetry', Mary Lewis Shaw discusses the 'contrary anti-representational directions of extreme abstraction and concreteness' in late nineteenth-century French poetry. 'The symbolists threatened mimesis by their rejection of explicit allusion and exact description in favor of undefined symbols and vague suggestiveness ... And the symbolists were also generally obsessed with the possibility of articulating the correspondences between the arts, a preoccupation manifest in Baudelaire's and Rimbaud's poetic practice of synesthesia and Verlaine's and Rene Ghil's identification of poetry and music.' Shaw considers that these 'aesthetic principles' converge in the work of Mallarme; she discusses Un Coup de Des in some detail, together with later examples of concrete poetry. See Visible Language, Vol. 23 (1989), pp. 29-43.

57

4 The Semiotic of the Body

The analogy between a musical score and the written realization of language, though illuminating in many ways, is ultimately an unhelpful and misleading comparison. It inhibits the investigation of the possibilities of written language as written language, makes it, though not transparent, still the means to the end of spoken language, as in the traditional view. Yet written genres for various categories of discourse, usually printed, have acquired many graphic signs of their generic being which have no spoken equivalent, as, for example, the chapter and paragraph divisions of novels, or the fine printed columns of the telephone book with their arrangement by letters of the alphabet. In Halliday's model of language, these are texts whose Mode, the 'organization of the message so that it is relevant to its environment', is 'written to be read' (silently, or in private), not 'written to be spoken' (like a lecture or dialogue in a play). The musical score thus has a Mode similar to the latter, that is, written to be performed. Yet a structural either/or description of Mode (to be read silently or to be spoken) is also misleading, for the implications of 'more than one semiotic realized in a poem' is that there is more than one message organized as relevant in its particular possibilities of semiosis, and the final 'text' is an overlapping of these different semiotic choices. Thus Mode, in this one respect, can be compared to the clause, as Halliday describes it in systemic functional grammar: the final structure of the clause (heard or seen) results from the overlapping of three structures, each of which realizes choices of a particular functional meaning (experiential, interpersonal, textual). Similarly, the final organization of the text as poetic discourse results from the overlapping of various messages, each of which is realized in the choices of one semiotic kind or another (in Chapter 2 I suggested those of the body, of spoken language, of written language, of art, of music). The possibilities of producing/realizing or interpreting/ construing the Mode of genres framed in such a discourse is more complex, more interpretatively open-ended, than those for genres more simply realized. In this chapter I discuss visual poetry and the semiotic of the body, theories of poetics which are theories of perception. When talking spontaneously, a speaker usually breathes at the end of a unit of syntax, that is at the end of the clause, or at the end of a lengthy phrase, especially one functioning as a lengthy subject. This is of course because these syntactic units are functionally meaningful to the speaker. When, as in most pre-twentieth-century poetry, metrical requirements are 58

The Semiotic of the Body

brought together with syntactic requirements, most commonly metrical unit and syntactic unit will coincide (as typically in the traditional ballad: //There lived a wife at Usher's Well,/ And a wealthy wife was she;/ She had three stout and stalwart sons/ And sent them o'er the sea.//)1 so that the speaker will usually breathe at the end of a metrical unit. How is this conjunction of phonology, syntax and semantics (meaning) represented in graphology? In English poetry of Germanic versification, the normal English practice before the Norman Conquest of 1066, the metrical unit is the Verse' of two feet, each foot containing one stressed syllable and a varying number of unstressed syllables. (Chapter 1, note 32, has a further brief description of Germanic and Romantic versification.) The first verse is linked to the second by alliteration of the first stressed syllable in each verse. Optionally the second stressed syllable of the first verse may also participate in the alliteration. The second verse is quite often linked to the third verse (and to others) by what Old English scholars refer to as 'variation', a semantic (meaning) repetition, which may also involve a parallelism of syntax (as in 'the good king/ the wise ruler'). Again the second verse is quite often linked to the third verse syntactically as in enjambment, that is by the completion of a unit of grammar, such as a clause or phrase structure. Thus, an appropriate visual image (for us, not the Anglo-Saxons!) to represent these metrical, syntactic and semantic connections might be the plait or interlace rather than the line. Yet modern editors impose the anachronism of lineation on Old English poems in their modern printed editions. In contrast, the Romantic couplet as used by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales typically equates its syntactic unit, of clause or lengthy phrase, and metrical unit, of ten syllables, with occasional use of enjambment. That ten syllables is the limit of the metrical unit is clearly marked out by the repeated phonemic link of rhyme. Thus the display of one (phonological) metrical unit as one (graphological) unit of writing, the horizontal line, is an appropriate visual image, and the most common equation of metre, line and syntax means that a reader, reading aloud, will most probably breathe at the end of the graphic line. Of course the reader does not have to breathe at the end of the written or printed line. It is heard metrical regularity which continues to determine seen lineation. In the presence of some metrical regularity, such as iambic pentameter, even without rhyme as in Shakespeare or Milton, the poet can use enjambment to play metre against syntax. Less experienced readers tend, in my experience, still to breathe at the end of the graphic line. Experienced readers and actors, on the other hand, usually accept the invitation to vary the rhythmic pace of such meaningfully linked lines. But what if there is no metrical regularity of syllable counting, if the poet abandons that post-Norman Conquest tradition derived from the rhythmic patterns of Romantic languages? What if the language of English speech is used again directly in poetry as it was in Old English poetry, the metre 59

The Written Poem

related to the stress-based rhythm of everyday English speech? What is left for the graphic line to correspond to now? It is of course the breath - the printed line can be equated with the breath-span of the poet saying/hearing/ living the poem as an embodied text of poetic presence. Such poetry came to be called 'free verse'. This tradition as a forceful influence in American poetry originates with Walt Whitman. It is not irrelevant that Whitman was a printer. He designed and printed his collection, Leaves of Grass, in 1855.2 Unlike Wordsworth, who was disinclined even to write down his own poems,3 Whitman concerned himself intimately with the printed text. For Wordsworth, the printed text was, apparently, a record of his spoken poem, already complete in its aural patterning; for Whitman, the printed text was a vocal score, like a musical score, to direct any future performance of his work, though in a much more limited fashion than the extraordinary detail of Mallarme's Coup de Des. Moreover, Mallarme's poem is a deliberate 'making strange' (as Russian formalists of the 1920s might have said) whereas those American poets who follow on, consciously or otherwise, in Whitman's tradition, share a distinctly Romantic view of life and art in which 'the natural life of the artist' permeates the constructed art object (and a distinctly American view too, I suggest, of the independence of the artist and the artist's control over the medium). In 1919 D. H. Lawrence made a strong statement of this kind in the Preface to the American Edition of New Poems, 'Much has been written about free verse. But all that can be said, first and last, is that free verse is, or should be direct utterance from the instant, whole man. It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out. They speak all together.'4 William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley - these are the names of American poets most usually mentioned in such a lineage from Whitman. There is an irony here. To those readers for whom the traditional conventions of poetry are still those of the Georgian poets in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, the poets mentioned above may seem to belong to the avant-garde, the disruptive voices of the twentieth century. But the disruptive voices of the 1970s on (I am thinking particularly of the socalled Language poets, or the critical use of post-structuralist theory, such as that of Derrida) position themselves very much in reaction against any poets or theorists who equate the material, physical presence of the text (visual or heard) with the physical speaking presence of the poet. For them 'free verse' as described by Whitman or Lawrence projects a delusion grounded on the tradition of the authorial logos, that underlying presence, or intention, which underwrote the coherent interpretation of the text. For modern poets in general, the problem of free verse is more mundane. Marjorie Perloff, in Radical Artifice, comments that, far from bringing into play any sense of reaction against a constricting formality, free verse is now the 'lyric norm' of 60

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poetry and so correspondingly weakened in its capacity to engage. 'Students coming to poetry today are increasingly taught that if a given text is lineated, then it's a "poem", no matter how the lines are constituted.'5 Yes, well... It was exactly my realization of such attitudes which led me to raise the issues whose teasing out led to the matter of this book. Why did a (literary) genre which was still assumed to be essentially oral by many of its practitioners and critics come to be primarily signified by a literate device?6 What were the social origins of this line? These are the questions explored in Part Two, Chapter 6. The line-as-breath poets stated their positions with enthusiasm. In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams quotes three pages from Charles Olson's 1950 essay, Trojective Verse', including the following: But the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse ... The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the - what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the 'Single Intelligence'. And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line, its metric and its ending - where its breathings shall come to, termination. ... Let me put it badly [baldly?]. The two halves are: the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE7 Williams quotes the extract because, he says, 'an advance of estimable proportions is made by looking at the poems as a field rather than an assembly of more or less ankylosed lines - well illustrated by Charles Olson in the following'. (Ankylosed is Williams's own life of medical practice entering the text; the verb is derived from ankylosis, 'abnormal adhesion or immobility of the bones in a joint'.) These 'immobilized' lines appear to be, in Olson's words, 'that verse which print bred', also referred to as 'closed verse'. It is characterized by 'inherited line, stanza, over-all form'. In contrast, 'open verse' is composed 'BY FIELD'.8 For Olson, this means the poem must be a 'high-energy construct', which invokes the principle that 'FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT' (this phrase Olson apparently took from a letter written to him by Robert Creeley) .9 The process by which this principle can be maintained is the rapid record of these perceptions through the syllable and the line as the head and heart of the perception. Williams's own view of the line is not always clear, but he does toss off references such as 'The Wanderer ... [was] my first "long" poem, which in turn led to Paterson. It was the "line" that was the key - a study in the line itself, which challenged me.'10 Certainly Williams had an acute sense of the material substance of poetry, brought out in such comparisons as 'A man 61

The Written Poem

makes a picture, it is made of paint upon canvas stretched on a frame. In spite of endless talk, this has never been sufficiently brought out. ... if the elements of paint are emptily used, the painting would prove empty even though it represented some powerful dictator or a thesis of Sartre' (p. 241). Such considerations had led Williams, with Louis Zukofsky and others, to inaugurate the 'Objectivist' theory of the poem.11 As Williams understood it, objectivism argued that 'the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes'. Again there is the merging of semiotic media in Williams's generalizations, 'The poem being an object (like a symphony or cubist painting) ...' but in this instance Williams suggests it was Gertrude Stein 'for her formal insistence on words in their literal, structural quality of being words, who had strongly influenced us' (pp. 264-5). Williams's Autobiography records several meetings with Gertrude Stein in Paris over the years. It is clear from even these limited quotations that there is a tension in Williams's statements of his own poetics. On the one hand David Perkins can quote Williams giving opinions which seem to position him closely with Olson: 'Speech is the fountain of the line' ... 'it is in the newness of a live speech that the new line exists' ... 'the new line must express our modern civilization'.12 Here line and breath and the world are equated. Elsewhere Perkins reinforces this impression: 'Mainly, though not always, [Williams's] lines are arranged so as to enact the movement of the verse speaking: they reinforce the natural rhythm by linear notation' (p. 316). This arrangement, of graphic display as representation of spoken language, is usually assumed to be associated with the earliest development of so-called 'free verse' in Europe, as in, for example, Clive Scott's study Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Free Verse 1910-1930.13 And Jerome McGann is in no doubt about its continuity in the American tradition: 'The (free verse) line from Zukofsky to the projectivist work of the 1950s is quite direct. It is a line for composing, in the musical sense, sound and speech patterns. If we look backwards from Zukofsky, this line - as we all know - is spun out of Whitman.'14 But, on the other hand, Williams's objectivist stance could be interpreted as viewing the graphic display of the written poem, not as a means to speech, but as an end in itself, a visual object. Certainly his appeal to the influence of Gertrude Stein could support such an interpretation. Again, it is certainly easy to invest Williams's characteristically short lines with semantic rather than phonological functions. One can read a word or phrase as thematically more significant. Or one can read a word or phrase lineally decontextualized (that is, distributed into different lines) as ambiguous. I turn to this use of graphic display to realize semantics in the next chapter. The equation of breath and line, and the analogical relation of such a preoccupation to the body and music (in this case jazz), is nowhere more 62

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explicitly stated than in Allen Ginsberg's 'Notes for Howl and Other Poems'. He wrote: By 19551 wrote poetry adapted from prose seeds, journals, scratchings, arranged by phrasing or breath groups into little short-line patterns according to ideas of measure of American speech I'd picked up from W. C. Williams' imagist preoccupations. I suddenly turned aside in San Francisco, unemployment compensation leisure, to follow my romantic inspiration - Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath. I thought I wouldn't write a poem, but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind - sum up my life - something I wouldn't be able to show anybody, write for my own soul's ear and a few other golden ears. So the line of Howl, 'I saw the best minds', etc. the whole first section typed out madly in one afternoon, a huge sad comedy of wild phrasing, meaningless images for the beauty of abstract poetry of mind running along making awkward combinations like Charlie Chaplin's walk, long saxophone-like chorus lines I knew Kerouac would hear the sound of- taking off from his own inspired prose line really a new poetry, [original italics]15 It is also clear from Ginsberg's comment that he sees Williams's short breath-line as somehow contemporary, out of American speech (with all the context of literacy, modern technology and modern art which that entails), whereas he sees the breath-line of his inspiration as the ancient one of oral culture, the bardic declamation, with its religious/magical associations. Poets who equated the visual display of the line with the spoken breath, reading the line as spatial metaphor for temporal sound, tend as a result not to see the contribution graphic display makes to the reading of the poem. They see the seen poem as a transparent representation of the heard poem. Consider Robert Creeley's responses, in a 1965 interview with Linda Wagner: Q: One question that's fairly relevant here, this issue of using so-called prose rhythms in poetry, of taking the language of poetry from natural speech: How does the poet himself [sic - this is 1965] decide what is poetry and what conversation? A. If we think of Zukofsky's poetics as being 'a function with upper limit music and lower limit, speech' perhaps that will help to clarify what the distinctions are. Really, the organization of poetry has moved to a further articulation in which the rhythmic and sound structure now becomes not only evident but a primary coherence in the total organization of what's being experienced .. .16 'What's being experienced' represses a distinction between poet composing and reader reading. For a reader, the sound of the poem then appears to be directly 'experienced' through the transparent print on the page. Again, Creeley seems unaware of the causal reversal he makes in the following answer, where visual display has determined breath, rather than breath determining visual display (as his previous answer above would imply): 63

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Q. I have noticed in your readings that you pause after each line, even though many of the lines are very short. You're not just creating quatrains of fairly even shape, then? A. No, I tend to pause slightly after each line. Those terminal endings give me a way of both syncopating and indicating a rhythmic measure. I think of those lines as something akin to the bar in music - they state the rhythmic modality. They indicate the basic rhythm of the poem. The quatrain, to me, operates somewhat like the paragraph in prose. It is both a semantic measure and a rhythmic measure. It's the full unit of the latter, (p. 285)17

and so on. Creeley's attitude to graphic display is made clear in the next response, though equally clear is his awareness of the possibility of other positions (in Bourdieu's institutional field). Creeley's comments are prophetic of the next dominant -ism of 'language poetry'. Q. Is line and stanza arrangement still used to indicate what the poet intends, rhythmically? Are poets today more concerned with the sound or with the visual appearance per se of their work? A. For myself, lines and stanzas indicate my rhythmic intention. I don't feel that any poet of my acquaintance whose work I respect is working primarily with the visual appearances except for Ian Finlay; and Finlay is working in a very definite context of language which has to do with the fact that there have been printed words for now, say, 400 years. The experience of words as printed has provided a whole possibility of that order as visual as opposed to oral or audible. Ian conceives language as what one sees on signboards, stop signs, titles of books - where the words are in that sense; and there is an increasing school of poets who are involved with concrete poetry in that way. But for myself the typography of poetry is still simply a means of scoring - in a musical sense - of indicating how I want the poem to be read. (pp. 284-5)

I defer talking about the literate context of print-culture to which Creeley is referring until Part Two. In Chapter 2, I suggested that 'the semiotic of the body' 'included two realizations which may seem to contrast the most natural and the most contrived'. The first I have just discussed, the way in which the 'seen poem' can be taken to represent the very breathing of the poet. The second kind of bodily semiosis is that associated with the possibilities of sight, with the interpretation of graphic display as visual presence. This topic includes the discussion of the semiotic display of art, whether painting or drawing or sculpture and so on, and includes the discussion of the semiotic possibilities for written language, just as discussions of the 'line-as-breath' usually include some reference to the semiotic possibilities of spoken language and the conventions of the musical score. However, because commentary can easily blur what is common to visual semiosis in the general economy of a 64

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culture (conventions and value of practice) with what is particular to some institutional field within it (such as that of art), I think it is helpful to make some general and more inclusive remarks about 'visual presence' and 'poetic discourse'. Almost every twentieth-century poet whose name I have mentioned so far, at some stage of their statements on poetics, records the influence on their thinking of the writings - and sometimes the person - of Ezra Pound.18 Though his work may be quoted with great approval by the line-as-breath poets, it is in his recognition of visual presence that Pound makes his most profound contribution to the refraining, and hence the reclassification, of poetic discourse in this century. As is well known, Pound formulated his theories of the 'Ideogram' from a consideration of Chinese script. His previous concern with the Image (and so called Imagism) - 'an "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.' - had already showed his desire for a poetic intensity through condensation.19 Pound had next turned briefly to so-called 'vorticism', a concern to make the poetic representation dynamic.20 Pound was able to bring these two contradictory desires, for the intense image and the dynamic representation, together in his notion of the Ideogram. He derived this concept from the writings of Ernest Fenollosa (who died in 1908), which he first read in 1914, and from which he edited and published the paper, 'The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry', in 1918. In the Chinese language, Fenollosa suggests, the semiotic of art (static) and the semiotic of language (dynamic) can be simultaneously realized, overcoming the disjunction of eye and ear, of instant and sequence, normal to Occidental culture. To Pound, Fenollosa's work suggested how what had been assumed to be 'natural' and 'transparent' in European poetry was rather - in paraphrase - a realization of the context of culture, in conventions of practice which instantiated the possibilities of European languages: The untruth of a painting or a photograph is that, in spite of its concreteness, it drops the element of natural succession ... One superiority of verbal poetry as an art rests in its getting back to the fundamental reality of time. Chinese poetry has the unique advantage of combining both elements. It speaks at once with the vividness of painting, and with the mobility of sounds. It is, in some sense, more objective than either, more dramatic. In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.21

So for Pound the question became - how could poetry in the English language also claim that simultaneity of stasis and dynamism. It is scarcely important that Pound did not fully understand Fenollosa, and Fenollosa himself did not accurately understand the nature of Chinese script, for 'reading Fenollosa gave Pound the idea for a wholly new poetics, arguably a 65

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method which became more influential, in its several forms, than any other in the twentieth century'.22 This method was the principle of juxtaposition, a structure of parataxis rather than the hypotaxis of rational argument - the poet selects what is juxtaposed and the reader integrates in interpretation. Juxtaposition is a word for talking about space - 'putting next to', to use a Germanic paraphrase of the Latin noun. Thus the essential principle of the ideogram was visual, that of simultaneous graphic display. I have included Pound's ideogram within the discussion of the semiotic of the body, because, so it was claimed, this 'ideogrammic method' worked through the normal operation of visual perception. 'Separate items are juxtaposed so as to be re-integrated by the reader exactly as objects and events are integrated in ordinary perception of the external world: the reader's mind will organize the elements into a coherent pattern' (see note 22). To the extent then that poets take for granted that what the eyes sees together, the brain interprets as related, and arrange their lines accordingly, they are following Pound's ideogrammatic visual method. This has become one of the 'natural' or 'transparent' features of most poetry in the twentieth century, including that of the line-as-breath poets, previously discussed. (The most obvious exception is the prose-poem, whose authors refuse to exploit the resources of lineation.) David Perkins gives a reading of that much read poem by William Carlos Williams, 'The Red Wheelbarrow', which interprets the poem both as and as about the ideogrammic method. I partly quote and paraphrase in the following (my italics): in the poem, the objects evoke no association from poetic tradition, and no particular associations of other kinds, as from rural life. The objects are merely things perceived. In each pair of lines the poem notes first a colour and then an object, and thus enacts a process in which a bright, pleasing quality is located in an ordinary thing. Together the things make a pattern of contrasts, an aesthetic composition. The poem says that so much depends on these objects or the composition they make. But it also means that so much depends on the eye that perceives. The poem is about poetry but also about finding and relating to reality - the themes are inseparable for Williams, an implicit 'credo'.23

Perkins has thus read Williams's poem - indeed read Williams himself- as construed, given meaning, through Pound's ideogrammic theory. The American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce described the sign as being of three kinds, the icon, the index or the symbol. The signs of language are symbols, their interpretation being socially conventional, a sign which is an index has a metonymic relation with its interpretant (smoke as indexical sign for fire); but the sign which is an icon signifies by natural similarity (like the shape of a swan in John Hollander's shaped poem, 'Swan and Shadow').24 In effect, Pound read Fenollosa as saying that in Chinese script, and hence also in Chinese poetry, the sign was simultaneously symbol and 66

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icon, language and artistic image. To translate that simultaneity into English, where linguistic sign was definitely not iconic, Pound in effect resorted to an indexical relationship through graphic metonymy. Signs, which in English are symbols, conventional, are juxtaposed so that the mind reads an indexical relation between them; each is a sign of the other and so cognitively, the total is an enlarged understanding of signification. It is of course very easy to give a post-structuralist critique on these interpretative practices - the objects which are construed through the reading of subjects (readers), and which yet are theorized as being produced through the body of the poet - the poet's eye and ear. This is the sort of simple communication model (A sends a message to B) which Derrida's critique of writing no longer permits us.25 The particular aspect of such a critique which is relevant here, a point I have previously made, is the assumption of the transparency of the visual. The image or icon (and less obviously, the index), it is assumed, can be perceived directly. On the other hand, the Western linguistic sign, the symbol, it is assumed, must be cognitively processed, its meaning understood only by one whose habitus is situated in the appropriate semiotic context (that is, a person familiar with the appropriate language). But as any student of art knows, art has its semiotic conventions which are socially and historically contingent (the Renaissance development of perspective is a stock example of a change in the realization of Mode; again the recognition of an object in the Field or subject matter, such as a pipe, will be contingent on the culture of the viewer having such a functional object). Thus the visual object is no more 'objective' than the linguistic symbol embodied in it (the words of Hollander's poem on the swan). And 'the eye which perceives' in Perkins's comment on Williams's poem, does not remain constant. In Perkins's analysis, the eye is assumed to be that of Williams, ordering the lines to enact the reality of his perception. But the eye of Perkins's account is really the eye of Perkins! And what that eye sees is the graphic materiality of the poem, its linear display. The reader's interpretative journey from words to (construed) world has no necessary correspondence to the writer's productive journey from world to (realized) words. It is partly in recognition of these illusionary equivalences, that, in reaction, from the 1970s the so-called 'language poets' in the United States have produced texts which inhibit the reader's rush, through 'transparent' language, from word to world. A reader encountering the textual opacity of these poems reads from word to word, initially at least - that is, reads the language as some kind of social object rather than as having an immediate 'communicative function'. Because of the so-called immediacy of the visual object in Pound's influential work, the semiotic conventions of the visual in poetic discourse have been relatively undertheorized. Moreover, theories of language coming from linguistics, especially those formal theories dominant in the United States, have for the most part been little help in raising 'visual67

The Written Poem

consciousness'.26 Such formal theories equate language with speech, and include only the study of phonology in linguistics. To study written or printed language one needs a functional theory of language, such as systemic functional linguistics, with a contextual understanding of semantics (meaning as meaning in use) and a realization level of graphology. The next chapter takes up these issues in a discussion of the semiotic of language and the seen poem. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

68

Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (eds). The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn. (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 89. The first verse of 'The Wife of Usher's Well'. Ellman Crasnow and Christopher Bigsby (eds), 'Introduction', Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (London: J. M. Dent, 1993), pp. xxxi-xxxii. Wordsworth wished to avoid 'the unpleasant feelings which I have connected with the act of holding a Pen' and he had taken 'a great dislike to all the business of publishing', so that the three women of the household, his wife Mary, his sister Dorothy and his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, copied out his poems for the publisher, who apparently added punctuation. This information, with the quotations from Wordsworth himself, I owe to the introduction of W. H. Kelliher to The Manuscript of William Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), a facsimile (London: British Library, 1984). D. H. Lawrence, 'Preface to the American Edition of New Poems', The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Evergreen, 1973), p. 72. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 135-6. 'The single most important key to understanding the magic of English poetry is to be found in the rhythms and phonic patterns of our language', Philip Davies Roberts, How Poetry Works (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), p. 15. In Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Paul Fussell is rather dismissive of visual display - of George Herbert's 'Easter Wings' he comments, 'like most shaped poems it incurs one important artistic disadvantage: it makes an unbalanced sensuous appeal - its structure directs itself more to the eye than to the ear.... we are left with the feeling that the visual experience of the stanzas has triumphed inharmoniously over their auditory appeal. Or better, we feel that the two dimensions are not married: one is simply in command of the other' (New York: McGraw-Hill, rev. edn., 1979), pp. 169-70.1 confess Fussell does not speak for my feelings. William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 331. Charles Olson's paper is reproduced in Allen and Tallman, New American Poetry, pp. 147-57. Williams, Autobiography, pp. 329-30.

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9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

'Linda Wagner: an interview with Robert Creeley', Allen and Tallman, New American Poetry, pp. 285-6. Williams, Autobiography, pp. 60-1. In the previous chapter I quoted similar sentiments from pp. 138 and 148. See Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: California UP, 1994), especially Chapter 5, 'Williams: a clear mirror'. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Vol. 2, Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard UP, 1987), pp. 269-70. Clive Scott, Reading the Rhythm: The Poetics of French Free Verse 1910-1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 84. Allen Ginsberg, 'Notes for Howl and Other Poems', Allen and Tallman, New American Poetry, p. 318. 'Linda Wagner: an interview with Robert Creeley', Allen and Tallman, New American Poetry, p. 283. Eleanor Berry discusses this very issue, that the 'theoretical pronouncements' of twentieth-century American poets such as Creeley, Olson, Williams, Zukofsky, are often at variance with their poetic practice in the use of visual display. 'Visual form in Free Verse', Visible Poetry, Vol. 23 (1989), pp. 89-111. William Carlos Williams's Autobiography records many meetings, conversations, impressions concerning Pound in the lifetime of their friendship. Ezra Pound, 'A Retrospect', Allen and Tallman, New American Poetry, p. 37. 'A Retrospect' was originally printed in Poetry (March 1913). Ezra Pound on 'vorticism' in BLAST, Vol. 1 (1914). I have taken the reference from the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 1368. Ernest Fenollosa, 'From the Chinese written character as a medium for poetry', Allen and Tallman, New American Poetry, p. 16. Preminger and Brogan, Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 556. Perkins, 1890s to High Modernist Mode, p. 551. Ferguson et al., Norton Anthology, p. 1664. Jacques Derrida, Chapter 2, 'Linguistics and grammatology', Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976). Formal theories have a conceptual or monologic, rather than a contextual or dialogic, understanding of semantics. See M. A. K. Halliday, 'Language as code and language as behaviour: a systemic-functional interpretation of the nature and ontogenesis of dialogue', The Semiotics of Culture and Language, ed. Robin P. Fawcett, M. A. K. Halliday, Sydney M. Lamb and Adam Makkai (London: Pinter, 1984), pp. 3-35, especially pp. 1-11.

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5 The Semiotic of Language

I refer back, in paraphrase, to the two statements made at the beginning of Chapter 1: studying the meanings of poetic discourse involves the study of two related practices. First one must study the practices of production and interpretation through which a text is recognized as an instance of poetic discourse, as 'a poem'. The graphic line has been identified as the basic sign of poetic discourse since at least the fourteenth century. Secondly, once a text has been recognized as 'a poem', one must study those practices of production and interpretation (historically and socially contingent) which may be invoked as appropriate in the speaking/writing/reading (aloud or silently)/hearing of the poem. What realization rules determine the framing of genre? What kinds of texts are produced? how may they be interpreted? and especially, what kinds of productive and interpretative practices are specific to poetic discourse? In this chapter I explore answers to these questions of realization in relation specifically to the semiotic of written and printed language. In Chapter 3, I described the common assumption that talking about visual poetry means talking about the use in poetic discourse of the semiotic of art. Those who, like Willard Bohn, accept a genealogy primarily from Apollinaire (although it is Mallarme's name which is more typically invoked) give such an account. Yet there are other ways of viewing 'visual poetry' and parallel histories can be written. For Jerome McGann, in his book Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, the graphic display of language is not transparent, rather it is the very focus of his concern.1 McGann does not talk about the semiotic of art because he sees the typography, the printed text, or the handwriting, the written text, as a visual realization of language. He describes poets writing with the eye as well as the ear, rather than as writing with the ear but drawing/painting with the eye, and he associates the intensification of this development with what he calls the 'late nineteenth-century Renaissance of printing'. Thus for him the work of William Morris is seminal: 'to anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century poetry, Morris's career will be seen [as] a profound, a deeply influential, precursive event' (p. 69). McGann, in contrast to Bohn, insists that we do not (or should not) slip quickly from the graphic to the semantic level of interpretation when reading Morris. 'In Poems by the Way Morris wants us to read this typographically rendered poetry as much with our eyes as well as with our minds' (p. 69). In discussing the initial ornamented opening of the Kelmscott Press Earthly Paradise, McGann 70

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writes, 'Equally important for creating the extraordinary (even excessive) richness of these pages is the choice of typeface and line layout. The decision to print everything in capitals recalls the manner of certain medieval manuscripts. In a culture that largely imagines print as a vehicle for linguistic meaning, the effect is to foreground textuality as such, turning words from means to ends-in-themselves' (p. 74). And 'Morris's poetry in a Kelmscott Press format ... has crossed a boundary that marks off some distinctively twentieth-century poetic and semiotic innovations' for 'Morris affects not inspiration and spontaneity so much as craft and extreme deliberateness' (p. 75). Inspiration and spontaneity would become the touchstones of the lineas-breath poets discussed in the previous chapter. McGann continues, 'The textual move is the opposite of transcendental because we are not borne away with these pages, we are borne down by them. The work forces us to attend to its immediate and iconic condition, as if the words were images or objects in themselves, as if they were values in themselves (rather than vehicles for delivering some further value or meaning) ...' (p. 75). We recognize, I think, assumptions in McGann's interpretation derived from, or at least compatible with, Pound's theory of the ideogram, as discussed in the previous chapter, on the immediacy and iconic condition of the visual presence, the visual object or image. At the same time, McGann's comments are a helpful literary statement of what could be described in the vocabulary associated with systemic functional grammar as Field, Tenor and Mode (Halliday's theorizing of three elements of the social context or situation in which language is produced). In Morris's text, the Mode of the text (its organization as a written/printed message) is realized in the graphic display and does not merely facilitate our construing of Field (subject matter) and Tenor (social relations) as in most uses of language, but also draws attention to itself as a message. The latter, as foregrounding, was a central statement of Russian formalism in the 1920s, and informed Roman Jakobson's later structuralist insight into the nature of the poetic function.2 Jakobson's observations on 'the principle of equivalence' being 'projected from the axis of selection [the paradigm] onto the axis of combination [the syntagm]' were principally concerned with phonic equivalence - repetitions of sound, as in rhyme and rhythm, in the sequence of the poetic text. It is characteristic of speech that time, or sequence, be built into its patterning. However, the object of visual presence, the written or printed poem, is displayed in space, not time. It is coexistent, not sequential, patterning, if any, which will be realized in written language. The mention of Jakobson's structuralist analyses necessarily brings in its train reference to Derrida's deconstruction of the characteristic dichotomies of Saussurean structuralism (such as paradigm and syntagm) and Cartesian tradition (subject and object) (see Chapter 1, note 14). Certainly, returning to McGann's account, it is easy to identify the metaphorical agency (and 71

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hence the structuralist import of meaning 'in' the text) he gives the textual object: 'we are borne down by [the pages]. The work forces us to attend ...' At the same time, McGann himself points out - as Derrida's differance would imply - that not all readers allow themselves to be positioned compliantly by the text, 'Scholars of the book have often condemned Morris's typographical work because its extreme physicality interferes with the text's "readability".3 What McGann implicitly allows us to move into here - despite the apparent agency he gives the text - is a realization of the importance of reading practices, rather than texts themselves, in the response of individual readers to a text, their interpretation of it. This is the move which takes us from studies of the text only to studies of discourse, studies of interpretative practices as well as studies of the text, as already discussed in Chapter 1 of this book. In one respect, because he is writing within a literary rather than linguistic tradition, McGann cannot clearly describe his insight into the function of typography (as I read him). When he writes, as previously quoted, 'In a culture that largely imagines print as a vehicle for linguistic meaning, the effect [of Morris's typography] is to foreground textuality as such, turning words from means to ends-in-themselves', the notion of'linguistic meaning' appears to exclude the meanings of 'textuality'. That the latter do exist he makes clear by his previous statement, 'The decision to print everything in capitals recalls the manner of certain medieval manuscripts'. Literary accounts are typically bedevilled by the traditional dichotomy of content and form (or 'style'), in which 'content' is identified with (linguistic) 'meaning' and 'form' with the words, grammar, and possibly sound of a text.4 But one of the salutary implications of using the systemic functional model is its deconstruction of the style/content dichotomy. One can describe a 'style of content' - (semantic choices realizing Field)5 - and equally one can describe the 'content of style' in the realization of Mode. Mode, like Field and Tenor (these three terms are glossed later in this chapter), is realized in semantic choices, semantic choices are realized in formal choices of grammar and vocabulary (lexis), and formal choices are realized substantially/materially either phonologically or graphically (or in tactile substance for braille). Interpretation, or construal of meaning, works of course in the other 'direction' - from heard sounds or the seen page to the recognition of forms to the construal of meanings which 'make sense' to interpreters in the context of their previous social experience of language - so certain graphic displays may or may not be generically 'meaningful' to the individual reader. Thus, from Morris's page, the reader familiar with medieval manuscripts (or their reproduction) may construe, as McGann does, the meaning 'like a medieval manuscript'. McGann's comment on Ezra Pound's physical presentation of the three books of 30 Cantos is particularly interesting. If juxtaposition is the key, then Pound can be said to juxtapose the codicological nature of his work, the 72

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physical book production, with the contents of the books. The total work linguistic signs (material and formal) in the texts of the Cantos and extralinguistic (material) signs in the book - contribute to (the possibility of actualization depends on the habitus of the reader) an integrated response, as had been described for the ideogram. McGann writes: The physical presentation of these three books [Volume I A Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925), A Draft of the Cantos 17-27 (1928) and A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930)] ... constitutes a display of their meanings. Book design here defines not merely the immediate historical horizon of Pound's Cantos project, it declares the meaningfulness of historical horizons as such. ... The Cantos summons up the power and authority of the most elementary forms of language, its systems of signifiers, and it apprehends these signifiers as historical artifacts. The graphic presentation of Pound's books is thus made an index of their aims. Through book design Pound makes an issue of language's physique, deliberateness, and historicality.6

In speaking of the forms of graphic realization as 'signifiers', McGann is calling on the traditional sign of Saussurean semiology, with its bonding of form/'sound-image' (signifier) and content (signified). But the point of his comment is not that the graphic display, the 'signifier', is free-floating, but rather that it too can be interpreted, just as the lexicogrammatical forms can be interpreted in the usual way. In McGann's account, what is 'natural' is not the transparency of language (the graphic display a direct window on the spoken poem, as in the line-as-breath poets) but rather the equation of the codicological and typographic realization of 'culture' (social and historical practices of book and graphic display, in written and print culture) with the semantic realization of culture (social and historical practices of language). This harmonious conjunction of language technology and discursive practice accords with Halliday's description of language as social semiotic, in which, to reiterate, graphic or phonic (or tactile for braille) choices of substance are the realization of lexicogrammatical choices (words and grammatical structure) which are the realization of semantic choices (of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning), which are the realization of the social context or situation (Field, Tenor and Mode) in which the language is used. A sociological extension to the theorizing of'social context' could include the technology of language. In contrast - that is, in an example in which the 'flow' of realization in Halliday's model is blocked - Marjorie Perloff, discussing the 'procedural' work of John Cage in his 'mesostic' text Roaratorio, comments: On the one hand. Cage's procedurality can be characterized as an extreme formalism - the subjection of natural speech, free expression of emotion, the true voice of feeling and so on - to elaborate ordering systems ... On the other hand,... the text produced by the constraints in question has little resemblance to one that observes the rules of versification.7 73

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(The poetry of John Cage is said to be influenced by Zen Buddhism and Dada, with an interest in the use of aleatory, or chance, procedures. Cage makes particular use of 'mesostics', 'a form of word puzzle in which emphasized letters spell out words vertically at the center of horizontal lines of poetry', an attempt to 'free language from syntax'.)8 Perloff then quotes a stanza from Yeats's 'Stream and Sun at Glendalough', and continues, the stanza uses sound repetition (both rhythmic occurrence and rhyme) to enforce meaning, the continuity of the former counterpointing and underscoring the complexities of the latter. But in a Roaratorio stanza, ... the generating rule creates no perceptible repetitions,... no parallel sound tracks, no regular chiming [of repeated sounds, as in rhyme]. And no doubt this 'burying' of the device is intentional, an attack, as it were, on the technological base of the printed book, whose typography has ideally been, in Richard Lanham's words, 'as transparent as a crystal goblet', and whose 'linear flow was not, except incidentally, interrupted by iconographic information, (pp. 160-1)9 Thus on the one hand, in McGann's example of Pound, the graphic display of a poem may be read as 'intensifying' the 'meaning', and on the other, in Perloff s example of Cage, the graphic display of a poem may be read as inhibiting or interrupting linguistic interpretation. What however both Pound's and Cage's work have in common is the feature of directing attention to the material realization of the poem as visible (seen) language. The work of poets which has been loosely grouped together as 'language poetry' (in the United States, since the 1970s) is also usually described as focusing attention on the seen poem, at the same time as focusing negative attention on the spoken poem. The poems draw attention not so much to their textuality as a realization of English semantics as to their intertextuality as instances of 'literary texts', that is, this is poetic discourse whose framing requires a reader not so much to know spoken English as to know other poetic (or literary) texts. Marjorie Perloff has warned against grouping together under the label 'language poets' poets whose work may differ considerably in specific practices.10 Nevertheless, the writings of Charles Bernstein are often taken as the clearest statement of this recent poetry so it is one of his 'books' I'll briefly describe." The little booklet, The Nude Formalism, by Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, its page size a quarter of an A4 sheet, and its 20-page length indicated largely on its glossy red cover and its title page, is clearly a parodic play at several levels. Its title is a sound-play, I imagine, on 'the New Formalism', whose desire for a reactionary return to regular metre and longer poems, typically narrative, that is to the traditional transparency of the seen poem, looking through its visual display to meaning with phonic patterning, was described by Frederick Feirstein and Frederick Turner.12 In The Nude Formalism, on the contrary, it is the graphic pattern which is naked or 74

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displayed; attention is drawn to its form, rather than to the 'meaning' or 'sound'. The 'Poems' are by Charles Bernstein and the 'Design' by Susan Bee and the typography on cover and title page, in font type and size, equates these two functions. Presumably Susan Bee draws the artwork which, in a plethora of different artistic styles for book illustration from, say, the 1750s to the 1930s, decorates each page (one historical style per page) and presumably Charles Bernstein writes the words of each verbal text. But who chose the fonts? These, like a sampler for a desktop publisher, change from poem to poem. Like Morris's printing which McGann discusses, the illustration and the typography for each individual verbal text are historically compatible, but whereas Morris's book maintains a consistent 'message' in its visual display throughout the book, The Nude Formalism accumulates a pastiche of visual messages. If, from Morris's pages, as I remarked earlier, the reader familiar with medieval manuscripts may construe, as McGann does, the meaning 'like a medieval manuscript', from Bernstein and Bee's pages the reader familiar with printing conventions over the last two hundred years might construe the meaning 'a visual history of the printed text'. The booklet begins with a (very amusing) 'Fragments from the Seventeenth Manifesto of Nude Formalism', with (contradictory) instructions which should prevent any reader from trying to read the poems traditionally for semantic sense, let alone to construe a coherent 'poetic persona'. Thus the last two items are: 'Poetry has as its lower limit insincerity and its upper limit dematerialization' and 'Use absolutely no word that contributes to the direct sense of a thing seen'. In case a reader ignores these sensible guides, at every level the language of the poems, like poems misremembered, has intertextual echoes of texts already familiar (to a canonically educated literary habitus) - of phonic patterns (rhyme and metre), of graphic display (stanza shape, indentation, lineation or its lack), of lexical choices and grammatical structures (archaisms, colloquialisms and so on). Like the artwork and typography, the texts of the poems suggest a history of poetic discourse, without any one poem 'making sense' by the traditional conventions of reading. Language as social practice, in particular the historical development of practices for visual display in print, is the subject matter of this book of poetry, to this reader. Language as individual practice, as emphasized by the line-as-breath poets discussed in the previous chapter (the line's length determined by the living breath of the individual poet) provides the immediate historical context in which Charles Bernstein's poetry can be 'made' meaningful, being that within and against which texts such as his can be read. At the same time, though the 'material focus' of the language poetry has been emphasized as a sign of its particular concerns, early twentieth-century poetry which also emphasized the material text, such as the printed work of William Morris, or the Cantos of Ezra Pound, provides another historical context within and against which Bernstein's work can be read as meaningful. (What 75

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is the relation of this materiality to other levels of language? as in my comments on Cage.) Others have pointed out the elitism of such 'language poetry', for reading it as meaningful requires the reader's prior immersion in a world of high literacy and academic knowledges.13 Pessimistic mutterings about 'the end of poetry' may be heard (I cite no references); the last chapter of this book turns briefly to the question of possible futures. In this chapter however I want to point out that 'language poetry' is the logical end point of print poetry - of fixed text poetry, on the page of the book, initially drawing attention to its language in visual display but ultimately self-reflexive, drawing attention instead to the visual display of its language. So far in this chapter I have discussed the semiotic conventions of modern printed poetry as language at the macro level, that is moving into the sociological realm of social context. I now want to discuss the semiotic conventions of modern printed poetry at the micro level, that is considering how the two linguistic levels of semantics and the lexicogrammar are related to graphic display. I focus on that basic sign of poetic discourse, the line. Four aspects, the first three briefly, will be discussed: first, the use of lineation to reduce the information load in lines, and hence to facilitate semantic concentration, secondly the use of lineation to promote syntactic ambiguities, thirdly the use of lineation to produce a counterpoint between syntax and semantics through enjambment and, finally, fourthly, the organization of lineation on the page, in its horizontal and vertical display, so as to realize semantic choices directly. William Carlos Williams is usually credited with developing the very short printed line, sometimes of only one word. Thus the famous 'The Red Wheelbarrow'14 has a regularity in its four stanzas of two lines in each, the first line of three words, the second line of one word only. Given the tradition of line-breath correspondence, the line is a place of attention, in linguistic terminology, a unit of information.15 Thus a minimalist line, with less than the usual number of words, is likely to receive, per word, more than the usual amount of interpretative attention. David Perkins points out that 'the lightness, speed, and vividness of the Williams lyric in the 1920s and 1930s are permitted in part by the fact that his lines, individually considered, perform less than a poetic line ordinarily does'.16 This 'vividness' Perkins particularly attributes to the extra attention these shortened lines receive. What is being pointed to here is the way in which the graphic sign of poetry, the line, may activate reading practices associated with poetic discourse, in particular that of paying greater attention to the text. This traditional reading practice, of assuming greater semantic profundity in the text, associated for example with the tradition of symbolic reading, is one many twentieth-century writers of avant-garde poetry - from Dada poetry to 'language poetry' - will repudiate. But Williams's practice in the production of texts, of increasing the concentration of semantic import by reducing and concentrating the lexical realization of the Field (that is, fewer words more 76

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meaning), was to have a profound influence on other poets. It also was the necessary condition for the more general development of most of the other uses of lineation in relation to semantic realization. Hand in hand with the reduction in length of lines went the reduction of punctuation. (This has become the norm in modern French poetry but is still less standard in English practice.)17 William Carlos Williams's poems are minimally punctuated. 'The Red Wheelbarrow' has no capitalization or punctuation, besides a final full stop. 'This is Just to Say'18 has no punctuation, but the first word of the last stanza, grammatically the beginning of a new sentence, is capitalized. In other poems, the hasty dash appears, a punctuation of less literate gravity than the signs of comma and full stop. In terms of field/figure theory (as mentioned in Chapter 3 in the discussion of concrete poetry) the text of Williams's poem, like the text of Mallarme's Un Coup de Des, may project itself the more prominently to the eye because of its limited intrusion on the blank page, a minimal amount of black type surrounded by 'silence', in Mallarme's terms. (Contrast this with the social context of Old English manuscripts, where the expense and rarity of vellum would not have allowed such prodigality.) This cleaning or diminishing of punctuation, relinquishing one source of authorial control over the reader's interpretation of the text, facilitates the next feature, that of the use of lineation to promote syntactic ambiguities. The handwritten texts of Emily Dickinson's poems are particularly illuminating here. As is now well known, the texts of Emily Dickinson's poems were originally edited from her manuscripts for the printed editions in such a way as to 'normalize' her handwritten lineation. Restoring Dickinson's lineation, now possible from R. W. Franklin's edition of the manuscripts, restores the polysemous possibilities of her originals.19 Jerome McGann comments, '[Dickinson's] text - unlike Johnson's - has so loosened the hinges of its more formal subtext as to throw its words open to surprising linguistic possibilities. In the poetic form that Dickinson has scripted, these openings to alternative sense arrangements emerge principally because of the text's visual structure'.20 I will not attempt here to summarize further McGann's interesting and detailed discussion, with manuscript reproductions. What is plain is the way the printed text, in the past, has simplified the handwritten text of this poet, so that the poet's strong sense of her poems as seen objects could not be 'read', a salutary example to show that the mere use of print does not necessarily facilitate a more literate subjectivity. With the shorter line, the traditional relation between line length (the graphic device for attention) and grammatical unit (clause length, phrase length and in some more recent poetry even word length) could more readily be manipulated for various purposes. The shorter line lent itself to enjambment, the breaking up of usual syntactic relations - the clause, phrase, even word printed over adjacent lines - and the proliferation of possible interpretations. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics says of 77

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Williams, '[his] interest in painting and his friendship with precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth taught him to make his imagism into a kind of verbal cubism, using lineation as an analytical device to work against rather than with the syntactic groupings of words, splicing and rearranging the expected verbal relationships so as to focus maximum attention on the words themselves and the complexities of their relationships'.21 Here is an example, chosen more or less at random from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which shows how unremarkable it now appears to use lineation to open up the interpretative possibilities of syntax. This is the first often stanzas of 'Girls on the Bridge' by Derek Mahon: Audible trout, Notional midges. Beds, Lamplight and crisp linen wait In the house there for the sedate Limbs and averted heads Of the girls out Late on the bridge.22

etc. A reader can ignore the line-ends, true, and read this language as if it were in prose layout, but there is also the invitation to linger on those line-final words, understanding them in the context of what precedes them, momentarily disassociated from the syntactic unit which is completed after them, before the eye rushes on to the next line.23 (The 'out-dentation' of the first three lines, mirrored in the indentations of the last three, shows a concern not dissimilar to that of Keats, earlier discussed, to relate the poem of the eye to the poem of the ear. The resulting 'shape' on the page is not the usual poetic rectangle, aligned on the left margin. The individual reader may respond to such graphic foregrounding and interpret the poem as being realized in the semiotic of art as well as that of language, that is, that the shape is meaningful in some way.) These features can be seen forcibly in a poem by Marianne Moore, 'The Fish'. This is an example of syllabic-metre, its principle of versification being based on a regular number of syllables for the lines of each stanza: one, three, nine, six, eight (though line four of stanza four has eight syllables in my pronunciation). Here the title, on its separate and elevated line as usual, functions as subject of the first clause of the poem. There are eight stanzas, each of five lines. The clause begun in the title is complete in the first two lines of the poem. The clause which then begins mid-stanza continues to completion in the second stanza, a pattern of syntactic links across graphic divisions of stanza which continues for all stanzas except five to six. The first 78

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line of each stanza - contained therefore within the clause begun in the previous stanza - consists of one monosyllabic word only, with the exception of stanza seven which consists of the first syllable only, 'ac-', of the word 'accident'. This one word/syllable rhymes with the last word of the second line in its stanza, in some cases being a so-called 'light rhyme', the rhyming of 'an' with 'fan' and 'the' with 'sea', and even 'ac-' with 'lack'. These rhymes are only noticeable because the first word in its stanza appears alone on its line. Once again, as one could see in Keats's 'To Autumn', progressive indentations for each line link the rhyming units. Thus: The Fish wade through black jade. Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps adjusting the ash-heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. 24

All of the features I have discussed so far may be combined with the following significant development in the writing practices of twentiethcentury poetry: the direct realization of semantic choices in graphology. In contemporary poetry, how has the spatial arrangement on the page become 'meaningful' in its own right? In the general use of language, in poetic discourse as in other discourses, semantic choices (choices of meaning) are typically realized in choices of lexicogrammar (lexis/words and grammatical structure). In turn those choices of the lexicogrammar are realized in a perceivable substance of language, phonic or graphic. Some few semantic choices are realized directly in phonology, not grammar (for example 'key': a grammatical declarative 'you're coming home at six' - spoken as a question with upward intonation). What I am talking about here is the less theorized possibility of meanings realized directly in graphic display. Patently such a development in language practice would be one associated with a highly literate subjectivity, in the writer or reader. In the suggestions which follow, I am not suggesting that all poets adopt these practices, and certainly many readers have not and perhaps will not. The diatribes of the Edinburgh Review against Wordsworth remind us of the potential time lag between writers' and readers' practices!25 Moreover, the traditional generic use of graphology in poetic texts as metaphor for phonology persists (the spatial seen poem representing the temporal heard poem), and can often be read as coexisting in the one poem with the devices which I shall discuss.26 79

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To talk about graphic choices, we need some simple-minded structuralist picture in our mind's eye, that literate eye with which a modern poet can write. Imagine a graphic grid printed on a transparent page, like the square grid pattern in a French exercise book, or on a sheet of graph paper. You have been reading a printed poem and overlay, as it were, that grid as a transparent sheet on the poem. Each square in the grid is the size of a standard character in the format of the printed page. You map in a kind of rectangle over the poem. The leftmost vertical line represents the leftmost vertical alignment of the poem. In the most conventional of poetic representations, all lines of the poem begin at this alignment, that is, the poem is left-justified. The right vertical line of your conceptual rectangle represents the most extreme right position of a character in any line. In the most conventional of poetic representations, not all lines will reach this position, that is, the poem is not right-justified. The top horizontal line of the rectangle can represent the first line of the poem, and the bottom line can represent the last line of the poem, or the last line of the page if the printing of the poem continues on to another page. Moving from left to right, you are counting standard characters. Moving from top to bottom, line by line, you are counting standard lines. This is of course a perceptual grid, not an architectural drawing; what a reader reads as alignment, horizontally or vertically, or as stepwise progression in any direction, or as longer spaces between words, will not necessarily correspond to any exact measurement. In the following discussion I use Halliday's terms of Field, Tenor and Mode, his theorizing of three elements of the social context of language use.27 Some explanatory comments on Field and Tenor follow. Field refers to the field of social action, which can be non-linguistic, as in 'playing a game of football', partly constituted in language, as in 'playing a game of bridge', or totally constituted in language, as in 'writing a poem'.28 Field also refers to the second order field of discourse, which social actions totally constituted in language bring into being, that is, subject matter, such as the subject matter of a poem. In the lexicogrammar, nouns and adjectives, for example, typically realize meanings of Field. Tenor refers to the social relations and attitudes of those participants present in the Field; for example, in the lexicogrammar, modal auxiliary verbs like may or must realize meanings of possibility or obligation associated with Tenor. The first and second person pronouns also realize meanings of Tenor (the meanings of social roles of speaker and one spoken to in the discourse). The Tenor associated with the first-order Field of 'reading a poem' will relate to the construal of an implied poet, and a relationship between reader and implied poet, whereas the Tenor associated with the second-order Field relates to the characters in the subject matter. Specific genres of poetry may be realized with particular configurations of Field and Tenor. For example, in the lyric poem, the 'implied poet' (the first-order Field 'subject of the enunciation' or 'speaking subject') and the T character of the poem (the second-order Field 80

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'enounced subject' or 'subject of speech) are typically read as one and the same. In contrast, in poems read as dramatic monologue, like those of Browning, the implied poet and the first person character of the poem are not read as identically positioned.29 What conventions of spatial arrangement can realize, in the graphic display, meanings associated with Field and Tenor? The examples that follow are taken from recent poems by Australian poets. First, Tenor. What is relevant for Tenor is the vertical alignment of succeeding lines. I refer to this realization as a choice of Graphic Voice. The typical monologic, that is one implied speaker, poem has just the one vertical line, the left margin. Every line returns to that one initial position. Comparable to the interpretation of the pronoun T in the lexicogrammatical text as 'subject of speech', this alignment in the visual text can be interpreted as a graphic 'subject of speech'. In the lyric poem, 'subject of speech' and 'speaking subject' are usually read as equated, so this alignment will typically be read as that of the authorial Graphic Voice, the voice of the implied poet. Conversely, in the case of poems read as dramatic monologues, where first person pronouns in the text are not interpreted as referring to the implied poet but to a character, the furthermost left alignment of the text is interpreted as the voice of a character in the second-order Field, the subject matter. Most poems still begin every line at that left vertical alignment. But some modern poems regularly indent lines for a consistently other voice. Each voice is given its own vertical alignment to the right of the authorial voice. This practice presumably derives from the register of another genre, such as the indentations for citations used in prose layout. Consider the following extract, the first half of a poem by Gwen Harwood. The Present Tense30 I M Vincent Buckley 'What does it mean to move out of the present tense?' I asked you in a dream not long after your death. You said, 'We live two lives. One in the world, and one in what others write about us.' In the dream it was towards evening. As many suns in the galaxy as nerve cells in the brain. My skull's a dome of darkness, the only room of my own I'll have this side of death. 81

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Today's the feast of Corpus Christi. Honey out of the rock. The sun after a moment's elevation is veiled in a Bridgewater Jerry. Seagulls head for the tip. My blackbird takes his life in his throat. The sparrows come close for crumbs. Is this a world containing in itself all hunger? Pain's your continuing absence from the world among other matters. 'Love is not a feeling. Why is pain not put to the test like love? If it were true pain, would it go away?' Who said such things? Saint Ludwig of Vienna. That thinker should have used the Queensland but. Love's not a feeling, but. Real pain is not put to the test, but. Doesn't sound so pompous. A difficult man, one much in need of friendship. A genius. Didn't like women, but. Thank God you did. It was beatitude to talk shop to a man who plainly liked me. You'd met the doctor who nursed Wittgenstein. In my reading of Harwood's poem, the extreme left alignment of the vertical margin is equated with the voice of the implied poet. In later lines, another's words are given, printed as indented to the right: 'Love is not a feeling. Why is pain not put to the test like love? If it were true pain, would it go away?' I chose this poem as a first example because there are other textual marks to support my interpretation of the graphic indentation: that these lines are attributed to a different speaking subject from the implied author is indicated by punctuation, the use of quotation marks. Moreover, the next line returns to the authorial extreme left to disown the previous question, 'Who said such things?'. I return to this poem shortly. The next example by Geoff Page uses italics as well as indenting to realize a second voice graphically and makes the double voicing explicit in its title: 82

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Decalogue in Double Voice31 But first, dear brethren, let me say What brings a bishop out this way How pleased I am to speak to you Words are many, blankets few With everything so spic and span Just like an English gentleman The Ten Commandments are my text What gubba nonsense coming next? Especially from six to eight Watch that stick and hook there, mate! Number six 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' My auntie's in the ground there still Number seven's most important Tells you what the white man oughtn't 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery' Unless she's black and velvety 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' is number eight Or only dreaming any rate Nine and ten we might defer Thank you for the sermon, sir Now let me see. Where should I start? Number eight. I like that part. Note that it is the usual authoritative authorial position, the extreme left margin, that is occupied by the authoritative, institutionally more powerful, voice of the bishop. As with Browning's tomb-ordering bishop, the context of contemporary ideology, within which readers give meaning to a text, will probably displace any sympathetic identification of the reader with this character, and hence of that character with the implied poet. This displacement of subjectivity is of course the stuff of satire in dramatic monologues and the non-authorial use of the extreme left alignment is a graphic augmentation of such displacement. What would be the effect of reversing the two speakers in relation to the left alignment? (Different readers may give different answers; my general point is that a difference in indentation alone may produce a reading different in Tenor.) Sometimes the indented lines may differ noticeably in register (choices of language associated with particular social uses) from the language of the leftaligned voice. A reader may interpret this as a second speaker, a second 'character' in the subject matter (as in the contrast between the fulsome generalities of the 'bishop' and the more pertinent colloquialisms of the second speaker). Or a reader may interpret this as the same speaker, taking up a different social/linguistic role. The social differentiation of Graphic 83

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Voice may relate to a change in linguistic purpose by one speaker rather than a change in speaker. For example, in Heather Cam's poem, 'How I Come to Own a Black Leather Jacket with Studs, Zippers, Snaps and Pockets Galore',32 the authorial voice, on the extreme left alignment, describes going through the pockets of a jacket, left behind by a burglar. The list of contents, given in nominal groups, is then indented: a 10 piece (for luck?) a Bic pen a pair of hoodlum's dark sunglasses a chock of wood for propping open windows and two Excita condoms. Here the poetic persona is 'writing a list' in graphic realization, not 'telling a story', as in the dominant left alignment. In the examples I have given so far, one can infer the meaning of the graphic alignment from other features of the language. But the significant point here is that from encounters in texts such as these, the experienced reader of modern poetry learns to read graphic voices by the indentation, even when no other linguistic clues are present. For example, the second stanza of Gwen Harwood's poem 'The Present Tense' is indented, but it is not very different in language from stanza one, except for the change in tense from past to present. The graphic display allows an easy recognition of a change in Graphic Voice but it requires a fairly close reading of the lexicogrammar to suggest a possible change in Tenor. In my reading, the farleft-aligned lines can be construed as a second-order Field in which the T of the text addresses a 'you', the dead friend. This is not the first-order Field of implied poet speaking to reader. This second-order 'you' is addressed explicitly by the second person pronoun 'you' in stanzas one, four and five or implicitly by the interrogative ('is this a world/ containing in itself all hunger?') in stanza three (though the last could be construed as referring to the reader). In contrast, I read the indented second stanza as addressed by the implied poet (again referred to by T in the text) to the first-order 'you', the reader in the situation of reading the poem, a comment outside the relation of implied poet and dead friend. This is not an obligatory reading, of course, but the conventions of graphic realization promote the reading of a different Tenor, a change in social relations, in these indented lines. If the graphic line has been taken as the fundamental sign of poetic discourse, then it is the Tenor which crucially determines the realization of poetic genres, for it is this returning to the left vertical margin of the text while abandoning the right, which I have described as the graphic realization of Tenor, which generates the poetic line. Literary critics, in literary rather than linguistic discourse, say similar things about the line. For example, the 84

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Australian poet and critic Chris Wallace-Crabbe wrote, 'One of the kinds of authority, and hence of personality, which poetry traditionally claims is the authority of the line. Poems are built out of lines, and then out of stanzas; the lines bespeak kinds of strength.'33 The prose-poem of course gains its generic identity through rejecting such a poetic 'personality' but most printed poems still return relentlessly to that single left vertical alignment. Lineated poems which do not can often be interpreted as rejecting the 'strength' of WallaceCrabbe's line, the confidence of a single authorizing voice. Consider 'Nettie Palmer to Frank Wilmot ("Furnley Maurice")', by Katherine Gallagher: Nettie Palmer to Frank Wilmot34 ('Furnley Maurice') we never said Nettie and Vance, we always said Nettie'n'Vance sliding the three words into a single puff of breath (Arthur Phillips, at a plaque-laying ceremony to honour the Palmers, 25 July 1985) Vance is There are always the poems determined what sky-splitting poems I would write if only is The time and the leisure escape me taking on still there is Vance's writing the country a landscape he has won prizes My prizes have been for criticism We are When do I get time you ask 'the Palmers' or 'Nettie'n'Vance' after the chores and the children? Vance is taking on the country 'Nettie'n'Vance' says we are living in a state of barbarism you say it and poetry not enough to change it almost one syllable Its audience too small he says a way of seeing we must develop prose and the drama Our lives an Australian literary tradition run together But if only I had the time for writing My life-story for my poetry my own I would like the time and the leisure but it will never be to exploit the tiny talent I've got told to be more than a hausfrau except through my poems a circuit my daughters Reviews in the TLS and the Bulletin and my letters I was encouraged Still that was years ago there were poems Now the poetry has become criticism praised merely a laugh a distraction to be remembered to entertain the children reminding 85

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In this poem we see not a poem of alternative lines (as in Geoff Page's 'Decalogue in Double Voice') but a poem of adjacent poems. We have two voices as one voice as two voices as ... - a paradox I'll return to when discussing Field. The poem on the left is not aligned down its left margin, while the second poem on the right is aligned down its left margin. In my reading of the poem as a whole, the indecisiveness of the authorial voice of the poem on the left, and the consistent authority of the authorial voice of the poem on the right, are meaningful. (I read an alternation between hesitancy about the unfulfilled promise as an individual and confidence in shared achievement by identification with the husband.) In David Herkt's poem of four stanzas, 'Standing in the Shadows',35 any vertical alignment of the authorial voice appears to run through the centre of the 'perceptual grid' rather than on the extreme left - in every stanza, the lines move towards and away from this central position (in the larger context of this poem, one might read the visual symbolism of the mirror, the self and not-self which is yet the same). The third stanza reads: Silence that I cannot interpret which can only be gestured towards neither confirms nor denies for that is to make it speak as the bees sound and though leaves were once considered oracles I cannot make this world speak as thunder in the noon as others have heard in the sound of many waters it is only upon your tongue that I am brought into being and where are all of them their voices mingling from whom I am inseparable they have fallen quiet and turned together in the gossamer haze And the last four lines of stanza one read: and I watch myself

my loss of you holding watch myself my own absence and not the self-same

In this dispersion of textual self, of consistent authoritative position, it is none the less possible to read individual vertical alignments as one graphic voice, as if several social locations are coexistent, even if only temporally. For example, one might identify the 'religious' voice of stanza one in the first words of the only three lines which are aligned to the extreme left (lines 1, 6 and 10 in the 15-line stanza, with the wording 'The brightness is wounded/ 86

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with the word made flesh/ as it was in some unimaginable beginning'), or in stanza three, printed above, the voice on 'speech' aligned to the extreme left ('for that is to make it speak/I cannot make this world speak/ as others have heard/ and where are all of them/ they have fallen quiet') and, again in stanza three, aligned towards the right margin, a voice on non-human noise, 'as the bees sound/ as thunder in the noon/ in the sound of many waters/ their voices mingling'. Finally, in Carol Novack's poem, 'The Staircase', all lines are justified to the extreme right only, each line beginning uncertainly on the left - the sort of effect one could achieve using the 'align to the right' formatting choice with a word processor. As in David Herkt's poem, the T of the poem claims in the wording of the poem to be unsure of its authority, as in the first three printed lines:36 I am sitting on a staircase. Below me, steps rise and fall. Above me, the pattern repeats itself. I am a figment of my own imagination. I pinch myself. In summary, in the three poems just discussed, by Gallagher, Herkt and Novack, the marked choice of graphic display, a choice different from the usual convention of consistent far-left alignment for the authorial Graphic Voice, can be read as meaningful, as a sign of the diffusion or tentativeness of the poetic persona which contributes to one's interpretation of the poem, just as one's conventional interpretation of the lexicogrammar (the wording) contributes. Secondly, Field. In graphic display Field is realized in the arrangement of characters in juxtaposition with each other in one line or over several lines. I refer to the meaning realized in this graphic display as Graphic Iconicity. I am not referring here to iconic shapes, such as the wings of a Renaissance pattern poem, or the shapes of Apollinaire's calligrammes or of post-1950s pictorial concrete poetry. This use of language to fill in a shape can be discussed semiotically as art, rather than language, as already described in Chapter 3. Iconicity on the other hand derives from the graphic display of the typographic characters of language as language. Typically the graphic display glosses, or is glossed by, nouns or lexical verbs or even phrases in the lexicogrammar of the poem. Consider the following poem by Anne Kellas. Z , under house arrest in Johannesburg, 198837 I take my prison with me any four walls 87

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any old town would do. You may come to me one at a time. That's the game.

I don't do crowd scenes. No words I write may reach you. And these are banning orders stripes of shadow across your path. The word 'you' is typographically alone on a line in each of its two occurrences. As the lexicogrammar says, 'you' can come only 'one at a time'. Another example of quantity - this time of duality not isolation - we can read in the poem already referred to by Katherine Gallagher, the graphic display of two poems as one poem as two poems ... The iconic significance is glossed in the poem's rubric, lwe never said Nettie and Vance, we always said Nettie'n'Vance, sliding the three words into a single puff of breath' and quoted in the second poem on the right, from the third stanza: We are the Palmers or 'Nettie'n'Vance'

'Nettie'n'Vance' you say it almost one syllable a way of seeing Our lives run together

(and so on). Another simple example of Graphic Iconicity may be seen in the poem 'Childhood in Dublin', by Jack Healy.38 In line two of part 4, 'The Fear', several empty character spaces follow the verb delayed. Characters resume in the verb waiting. The printing of charac88

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ters has literally been delayed, the reader is waiting for the type to resume, so the graphic display can be read as realizing the meaning of 'waiting' directly. A similar delay of blank characters is used by the poet Subhash Jaireth in the poem 'About words (a journey into the world of Alzheimer's disease)'.39 The poem begins: Things are the same faces are the same colours, shapes, sizes smells, sounds and tastes are all the same only the names are confused. That in which i take tea is meant for taking tea i still remember but because you call it cup i know it as cup. Here the brief graphic blanks can be read as meaning 'no word', paraphrased in the line, 'only the names are confused'. Later strophes also use this device. In the larger lexicogrammatical context of this poem, I read these arrangements as iconographic of habitual hesitancy, verbal loss and confused repetition. To the extent that one reads written/printed language rather than merely 'language', one's interpretation of the meaning of Graphic Iconicity in poetic discourse will both contribute to and derive from one's interpretation of the lexicogrammar. On the other hand, John Hollander's 1969 pattern poem 'Swan and Shadow' (p. 1664 in The Norton Anthology)™ a swan shape/shadow delimited by poetic lines of varying lengths is recognizable as a picture of a swan, if one is familiar with the semiotic of drawing, whether or not one can read English printing. It is fairly easy to find examples of Iconicity in modern poems. Some characters in a line are raised or lowered above others when raising or lowering is mentioned, a new line is begun when a 'renewal' is mentioned, and so on. The reader familiar with modern practices 'reads' this distribution in space as it seems relevant to her/his interpretation of the Field of the subject matter. Thirdly, and finally, Mode. Mode refers to the organization of the poem as a particular type of message - more or less coherent and relevant to its environment in various ways. For example, in the lexicogrammar, the words the and a realize Mode, the typically with the meaning 'something specific in the context of this message', and a with the meaning of 'something not specific in the context of this message'. What is relevant to Mode in graphic display is the horizontal alignment of items in initial or medial/final position in the line. I refer to this realization as a choice of Graphic Theme (just as, in Halliday's grammar, one can refer to a choice of grammatical Theme).41 The 89

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usual or unmarked position of the Graphic Theme is in the initial position of a line or, especially, in the initial position of the printed stanza. The meaning of Graphic Theme is similar to that of grammatical Theme, that is, the meaning is 'the starting point of the message' or 'what the message is about'. Accumulatively, in one's reading, the sequence of grammatical Theme choices contributes to one's larger or literary sense of Theme - what a poem is about overall. In English generally, the grammatical Theme is at the beginning of a new clause. Most typically or unremarkably in poetry, the grammatical Theme is at the beginning of a line - that is, a new clause usually begins on a new line - but Graphic Theme and grammatical Theme may be played off against each other. Consider this extract from Stephen Mallick's poem, 'First Kill'. (I have italicized the grammatical Themes.) Their strange cries, part-human part Bird reached us first then like Sparks of green fire they Darted in sight. / trained on One, saw the surprise of its Body as my bullet let in the Light. Then it fell like a stone.42 This is a marked or less usual message, with its grammatical Themes displaced from initial position in the lines. An unmarked or more usual message, with grammatical Theme in initial position in the line, would look like the following: Their strange cries,

part-human part bird reached us first then like sparks of green fire

they darted in sight. / trained on one, saw the surprise of its body as my bullet let in the light. Then it fell like a stone. The reader acquainted with modern practices will give meaning to the poem's message structure in his/her interpretation. In the poet's stanza, Graphic Theme (initial position in the line) falls on Their strange cries/ Sparks of green fire/ Darted/ One (i.e. bird)/ Body/ Light - an accumulation which, if taken account of in reading, foregrounds a message about the birds, their strangeness and brilliance. On the other hand, a conventional arrangement of the lines, in which each new clause is placed at the beginning of the line (as in the second arrangement above), gives Graphic Themes something 90

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like 'Their strange cries/ part-human/ reached/ then like sparks of green fire/ they/1/ (I ellipsis)/ as my bullet/ Then it'. This is a considerably more diffuse message about both the birds and the hunter and his bullet; moreover the accumulation of pronoun themes is less vivid, to this reader, than the accumulation of lexical words (nouns, adjectives, past participle, with only the one pronoun substitute, 'one') in the poet's arrangement. It is clear that the organization of the message in relation to Graphic Theme will intersect with the breaking up of the lines for particular purposes of enjambment and syntactic ambiguity, as already discussed. In the English clause, the beginning of the clause and the end of the clause are positions associated with particular importance in meaning. Comparably, I suggest, the beginning of a poetic line and the end of a poetic line are graphic positions which may receive more than the usual attention from a reader, more, that is, than the same words would receive in unlineated prose if they did not also have some significant grammatical function. So in poetic discourse, graphic display may realize meanings of Mode over and above those associated with non-poetic uses of language. The language model of systemic functional grammar associates Field, Tenor and Mode with three kinds of meaning: ideational meaning (subdivided into experiential and logical), interpersonal meaning and textual meaning respectively. Halliday has written on the structures in the lexicogrammar typically associated with these three kinds of meaning.43 It is interesting to compare his comments with mine on the graphic realizations. In the lexicogrammar, experiential meaning typically is realized in an elemental structure of discrete constituents (the nouns, adjectives, lexical verbs, -ly adverbs, realizing discrete meanings of participants, processes, circumstances). For graphology, the relevant observation was that of arrangement of items in relation to each other in the same line or adjacent lines. In the lexicogrammar, interpersonal meaning typically has a prosodic structure, a continuous or pervasive structure encompassing the experiential meaning ('perhaps she may go tomorrow?' - the meaning of possibility in 'perhaps' and 'may' and, if spoken, upward key is diffused through the experiential meaning of'go' and 'tomorrow'). For graphology, the relevant observation was that of the continued vertical alignment of succeeding lines. And finally, in the lexicogrammar, textual meaning typically is realized in a periodic or wave-like structure (that is, in speaking, with prominence given to the beginning of the clause, the grammatical Theme, and towards the end of the grammatical information unit, the stressed focus of the intonation unit). For graphology, the relevant observation was that of the horizontal alignment of items in initial or final position in the poetic line. In fact it was the comparability of my initial observations about graphic display in poetic discourse to Halliday's generalizations, summarized above, about language in general, which led me to theorize the functions of graphology in contemporary poetry as I have presented them in this chapter. 91

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Recent technological developments have accelerated the poet's progressive control over her/his visual poem. A modern literate poet, who intends a poem for publication, until recently usually submitted a typed original to a literary editor for publishing. Charles Olson, though unhappy at the way the literate word had removed the poem from the poet ('what we have suffered from, is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice') had applauded the advent of the typewriter. 'It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends.'44 While Olson sees the control of graphic display which the new technology can give a poet, he can conceive of it only to restore the spoken situation of an historically distant oral culture, not to develop new possibilities within a contemporary highly literate culture. To him the typed poem will be a musical score from which the reader can reactivate the 'voice' of the poet. But, as this chapter has implied, even for the line-as-breath poets, as the spoken poem became recognizably less rigidly bound by convention than in previous periods, so, with less recognition, the printed poem began to accumulate meaningful generic conventions. In Basil Bernstein's terms, the framing for realization rules for poetic genres has changed, giving more significance to the constitution of poetic discourse through graphology. The word processor has now replaced the typewriter, for many authors, giving even greater control over the physical placement of the text on the page, the opportunity to 'play' with lineation as well as the innumerable possibilites of font type, size and so on. Desktop publishing directly from authors' disks, rather than traditional typesetting, gives the poet even more control over the layout of the published text. Thus the graphic realization of meaning in vertical left alignments for Graphic Voice, typographic arrangements for Graphic Iconicity and initial and final horizontal positioning for Graphic Theme and focus are well within the individual poet's control, if she/he has access to word-processing technology. Compared to the disruptive programmes of the 'language poets', or the multimedia poetry which I'll briefly discuss in the last chapter of Part Two, these graphic realizations of semantics may seem comparatively 'tame'. I suggest, however, that they point directly to a social phenomenon of great significance: the development of a literate subjectivity which sees written language as a visible consumer object, an object of meaning, values that object, and, if a poet, claims ownership even of the written language in the poetic discourse produced. Most modern poets, I surmise, want the published poem, printed on the public page of the magazine or anthology, to look like the poem they have privately submitted to the editor, written, typed or word-processor printed. This is because to look differently is to mean differently. This leads to the second major question pursued in Part Two: what history can we write of the evolution of the highly literate subject of modern poetic discourse? 92

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Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993). A summary account of formalism and structuralism in the study of literary texts can be found in Terence Hawkes, Chapter 3, 'The structures of literature', Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977). See Chapter 1, note 22 for the reference to Jakobson's discussion. McGann, Black Riders, p. 15. Formal grammars perpetuate a similar dichotomy in talk of' deep' or' semantic' structure versus 'surface' structure, usually associated with phonology. This is yet another writing of the mind/body duality of Western philosophical tradition to which post-structuralist talk draws attention. M. A. K. Halliday, 'Linguistic function and literary style: an inquiry into the language of William Golding's The Inheritors', Explorations in the Functions of Language (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 103-43. McGann, Black Riders, p. 80. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 160. Paul Hoover, 'Introduction', Postmodern American Poetry, a Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 1994), pp. xxxiii-xxxiv. The poem Perloff discusses is reproduced in print as Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, John Cage, ed. Klaus Schoening (Koeningstein: Atheneum Verlag, 1982). (Perloff s reference, Radical Artifice, Illustration 5.4, p. 151.) Perloff, Radical Artifice, p. 174. For such an opinion see Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry, p. xxxvii. Frederick Feirstein (ed.)> Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative and the New Formalism (Santa Cruz, CA: Story Line Press, 1989). Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry, p. xxxv. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 1166. See M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn. (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 295-307. This is an area of the grammar particularly pertinent to the spoken poem to which a brief summary here could not do justice (the information unit is a unit of meaning realizing Mode, in turn it is realized directly in phonological structure, not in grammatical structure, in the 'tone group'). In Study Units 38 and 39 of A Course in Spoken English: Intonation (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), intended for those learning English as a second language, Halliday analyses the prosodic features of spoken poems and spoken conversation (from his own reading, of course, as speaking is a realization of one's own interpretation). David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Vol. 2, Modernism and After (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1987), 255-6. 93

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17. See R. A. York, 'Mallarme and Apollinaire: the unpunctuated text'. Visible Language, Vol. 23 (1989), pp. 45-62. 18. Ferguson et al., Norton Anthology, p. 1167. 19. R. W. Franklin, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981). 20. Jerome McGann, Black Riders, p 31. The edition McGann refers to is that of Thomas H. Johnson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1955). 21. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), 'American poetry', The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 56. 22. Derek Mahon, 'Girls on the Bridge', in Ferguson et al., Norton Anthology, p. 1805. 23. A comparatively early attempt to discuss these issues is that by J. J. A. Mooij in 'On the "foregrounding" of graphic elements in poetry', in Comparative Poetics in honour of Jan Kamerbeek, Jr., ed. D. W. Fokkema, Elrud Kunne-Ibsch and A. J. A. van Zoest (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1975), pp. 89-102. 24. Ferguson et al, Norton Anthology, pp. 1221-2. 25. John Gross, Chapter 1, 'The rise of the reviewer', in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Aspects of English Literary Life since 1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969, and Pelican, 1973). 26. The matter in the remainder of this chapter was presented in part at the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Berkeley, 1994, and is published in very summary form in Semiotics around the World: Synthesis in Diversity, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 433-6. 27. As in all structuralist theorizing - of grammar, or for that matter, natural science - there is no natural 'tightness' about this approach other than its usefulness - its extreme usefulness - in giving me 'a way of talking' that is, to my knowledge, more helpful and appropriate to the task at hand than other available ways for the time being. 28. M. A. K. Halliday gives these examples, with elaboration, in Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), pp. 143-5. 29. The terminology of 'enunciation' and 'enounced' is derived from the linguist Emile Benveniste's account of subjectivity; 'speaking subject' and 'subject of speech', together with the 'spoken subject', a third positioning of subject derived from film theory, are very helpful terms for talking about these relations of Field and Tenor. The 'spoken subject' refers to the reader in the first-order field, a position of interpretation 'prepared' for the reader, as in the tracking of the camera in film theory. For an introductory account, see Chapter 1 in The Subject of Semiotics by Kaja Silverman (New York: Oxford UP, 1983). See also Rosemary Huisman, 'Who speaks and for whom? The search for subjectivity in

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

Browning's poetry', AUMLA (Journal of the Australasian Universities Language & Literature Association), Vol. 71 (1989), pp. 64-87. Gwen Harwood, 'The Present Tense/1. M. Buckley', Island, Vol. 40 (Spring, 1989), p. 18. Geoff Page, 'Decalogue in Double Voice', Westerly, No. 4 (Summer, 1992), p. 12. Heather Cam, 'How I Come to Own a Black Leather Jacket with Studs, Zippers, Snaps and Pockets Galore', Meanjin, Vol. 48 (1989), pp. 325-6. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, 'There are no names: the Forbes scan', Scripsi, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1989), p. 194. A feminist reading of the traditional 'logocentric patriarchal' authority/personality conferred on the line by this literary tradition might be readily construed from Wallace-Crabbe's personification of the line. {Catherine Gallagher, 'Nettie Palmer to Frank Wilmot ("Furnley Maurice")', Southerly (1989), p. 437. David Herkt, 'Standing in the Shadows', Meanjin, Vol. 48 (1989), pp. 377-80. Carol Novack, 'The Staircase', in Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn (eds), The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1986), pp. 93-4. Anne Kellas, 'Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg, 1988', Island, Vol. 40 (1989), p. 72. Jack Healy, from 'Childhood in Dublin', Meanjin, Vol. 48 (1989), p. 390. Subjash Jaireth, 'About words (a journey into the world of Alzheimer's disease)', LiNQ (Literature in North Queensland), Vol. 19 (1992), pp. 96-102. Ferguson et al., Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 1664. Halliday, Functional Grammar, Chapter 3 'Clause as message'. Stephen Anthony (a pseudonym for Stephen Mallick), 'First Kill', Overland, Vol. 132 (1993), p. 73. M. A. K. Halliday, 'Modes of meaning and modes of expression: types of grammatical structure, and their determination by different semantic functions', in D. J. Allerton, Edward Carney and David Holdcroft (eds), Function and Content in Linguistic Analysis -A Festschrift for William Haas (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979), pp. 57-79. Charles Olson, 'Projective verse', in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Evergreen, 1973), pp. 153-4.

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Part Two From Old English to Contemporary Poetry

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6 The Origin of the English Line, 1100-1300

The earliest manuscripts containing poetry in Old English, the English of the Anglo-Saxons, are of the mid-eighth century. The poem is Csedmon's Hymn. Bede includes the story of Csedmon, the illiterate cowherd, who in 681 receives the miraculous gift of poesy on scriptural matters at Whitby, Northumbria, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English-Speaking People, completed in 731. Bede records the Hymn in Latin translation in the body of his text, but the scribe of the 'Moore Bede' adds the Old English version to the last page of the manuscript, and the scribe of a second mid-eighthcentury manuscript, the 'Leningrad Bede', writes the poem in the margin near the Latin text.1 The latest of the six passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which Dobbie, editor with Krapp of the six-volume Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, deems to be in 'sufficiently regular meter to be included in a collective edition of Anglo-Saxon poetry' is for the year 1065 (The Death of Edward). There are some eleven texts of the later years of the Chronicle which Dobbie's edition does not include as poetry but which Charles Plummer chose to edit as verse in his 1892 edition, five of which extend past 1066, the last being in 1086. Of these Dobbie comments: 'It is not always easy to draw the line between irregular meter and rhythmical prose' (which suggests either that we try, anachronistically, to impose modern categories of discourse on Old English texts, or that generic reframing at this time, associated with linguistic and social change, was changing the classification boundaries of 'speaking poetry').2 The latest of the surviving poems in Old English in a regular alliterative metre is a verse description of the city of Durham and its relics, which was composed in the first years of the twelfth century. It is preserved in a manuscript of the late twelfth century. Dobbie comments that, 'considering its late date, the poem is surprisingly regular in its conformity to the Anglo-Saxon verse types, and in its use of alliteration, having usually double alliteration in the first half-lines ... There are no traces of the end-rime which we find more than a century earlier in two lines of the Battle ofMaldon (11. 271, 282) and regularly in several of the eleventh century pieces in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.'3 In between these two dates, of mid-eighth and early twelfth centuries, all the poetry which has survived written down in Old English is recorded. (Any account of the Anglo-Saxon practices of written poetry must now be deeply indebted to the detailed discussion by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe in Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, cited in note 1, and unless otherwise specified, page numbers for quotations in the following account 99

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refer to that work.) Most of that poetry is in manuscripts dating from the last quarter of the tenth century. Again, most of the poetry is in four great codices or books, those of the Exeter Book ('probably copied some time between the years 970 and 1000', p. 155), the Vercelli Book ('around the last quarter of the tenth century', p. 165), the book which contains the two poems, Beowulf and Judith, often now referred to as the Nowell Codex (its dating is disputed but probably late tenth century)4 and finally the manuscript of Junius 11. In her discussion of pointing, O'Keeffe determines that this last codex differs in many respects from the other three. N. R. Ker, in his Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, dates Liber I of this codex (which contains the texts of Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus and Daniel), like the Nowell Codex, as late tenth or early eleventh century (p. 406), but other evidence, reviewed by O'Keeffe in Visible Song, suggests a slightly later date, or at least a more 'forward-looking' manuscript (pp. 179-86). A fifth book, containing Anglo-Saxon metrical translations of the psalms, is known as the Paris Psalter. The manuscript has been dated perhaps later than the four great codices, as being written in the first half of the eleventh century.5 A sixth item, other than individual poems and fragments, consists of the Old English verses in one of the Anglo-Saxon versions of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. This manuscript dates from the second half of the tenth century (see note 5). Finally there are texts, of various lengths, scattered in many places, which Dobbie assembled in Volume VI of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records under the title of The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Allowing a generous leeway, one can generalize that nearly all the manuscripts of the Old English poetry we have today date from about 970 to 1050, with the manuscript of the poem Durham dating from the late 1100s. And conventional Old English poetry was still being composed some forty years after the Norman Conquest in 1066. In Chapter 1, I made some brief comment on how these Old English poems appear in manuscript, that lineation did not distinguish a text of poetic discourse from other categories of discourse. The signification of a text as poetry could be heard when the text was read aloud, in the phonic patterns of rhythm and alliterative links. But, apart from the use of the punctus, there was no graphic sign pushing the text, in Juri Lotman's phrase, into the reader's awareness that 'this text is a poem'. If a genre names what one can do in the culture with language, then it is misleading to speak of 'writing poetry' in our sense at this time. More accurately, one could 'speak poetry' (English poetry), with any writing down being a record of spoken poetry, rather than a script for its recognition. (I qualified a simple oral/ literate distinction in Chapter 1.) Moreover, when there is visual display of some kind in a manuscript, it is clear it is motivated not by the value of the text as poetic discourse, but rather by the value given to the Field of the text, its subject matter. The Junius Manuscript of poems on biblical subject matter was designed with a layout 100

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of interspersed pictures (line drawings) on scriptural matter, although the plan of illumination was not completed.6 The unique manuscript of the poem Beowulf, by any criterion one of the great poems of the English language of any period, is one text among many, prose and poetry, in a small, plain book of genetically undifferentiated writing.7 (What does bear witness to its contemporary social value is the use of valuable vellum for a poem 3,182 lines long - by the layout of modern editions - on an heroic subject matter rather than a scriptural, yet necessarily copied out in a religious context of literacy, usually a monastic scriptorium.) When, on the other hand, we look at a page of a manuscript of a Chaucerian text, the poetry is written in lines.8 Moreover, the prestige of the work is clearly displayed in presentation copies by the elaborate ornamentation, the flourishing capitals and use of colour (usually red and blue) to embellish marginal scroll work and letters. So by the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, lineation and graphic display for poetry as poetry is very well established, for some manuscripts of English poetry at least. We have not had to wait for printing in the late fifteenth century (indeed in practice not much poetry will be printed rather than circulated in manuscript until the mid-seventeenth century, as will be discussed in the next chapter). The visual text-as-object for poetic discourse is not a result of print-culture. Chaucer's poetry uses Romantic conventions of versification, those of syllable counting and rhyme. What of the more or less contemporary poetry of the so-called alliterative revival, which uses patterns of versification similar to the Germanic tradition of Old English? The Pearl manuscript, which contains the unique record of the alliterative Middle English poems known as Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (though the first poem, Pearl, uses alliteration less systematically, and has a complex rhyme and stanza scheme), is also written in lines. Sir Israel Gollancz dated it as 'about the end of the fourteenth century'.9 The more formal manuscripts of the alliterative poem Piers Plowman are lineated.10 It would take another book adequately to discuss the specific variations in the use of lineation in English poetry from the twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries; the general point I want to make here is that the practice is clearly not established for late Old English poetry in the mid-eleventh century and that it is well established, especially for socially valued reproductions of texts, by the end of the fourteenth century, for poetry of both the Romantic and Germanic traditions of versification. The latter date is often taken in anthologies or books on English literature as the beginning of the development of modern English poetry; in such a history, lineation will appear 'natural' and 'inevitable'. But moving back one's historical interest to Old English poetry immediately raises the question: how did this change in generic convention, this new visual representation of English poetry in lines, come about? In the remainder of this chapter I will first give a rapid (and no doubt oversimplified) historical overview of what might be considered the 101

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most relevant social contexts of generic change; secondly comment on the visual features of several texts realized during this period of change; and thirdly make some specific comments on one manuscript, British Library Cotton MS Caligula A.ix, whose visual features provide one of the earliest windows, in my opinion, on changing textual practices for the realization of 'English poetry' in the written Mode. During the last part of the eleventh century and into the twelfth, written documents were gradually becoming more significant for the Norman rulers. Alfred the Great, king of Wessex from 891 to 899, had consciously enlarged the role that literacy played in the affairs of kingship, but it had remained principally a literacy of clergy associated with the king's retinue. During the Norman years, we can trace a literacy of the king's affairs which increasingly begins to have a life of its own outside the preoccupations of the religious centres. After William the Conqueror died, his son William Rufus became king; he was followed by the Conqueror's youngest son, Henry I. J. J. Bagley comments that William of Malmesbury, in his Gesta Regum (Deeds of the Kings) obviously 'preferred Henry I to William Rufus, although he did his best to be fair to both'. The monk historian's preference appears partly to derive from a consideration of Henry's more literate interests. Henry was early instructed in the liberal arts, and so thoroughly did he imbibe the sweets of learning, that ever after neither the disturbance of war nor the pressure of business could deprive his noble mind of them. Although he never read much in public and sparingly displayed his attainments, yet his learning, as I can truthfully say, though acquired in snatches, helped him considerably in the science of governing according to Plato's dictum, 'the commonwealth would be happy if philosophers were kings or kings philosophers'.11

The remainder of the description certainly does not present Henry as the ideal 'philosopher-king', but it is clear that, in contrast to William Rufus, Henry is presented as a man of thought rather than action (thus, 'he preferred to fight by diplomacy rather than by the sword'). One of Henry's acts of diplomacy related to the ongoing squabbles between the Normans and adjacent Angevins on the Continent. As Stephen's supporters are given to say in Gesta Stephani (The Deeds of Stephen): 'It is true and undeniable', they said, 'that King Henry arranged a shrewd marriage for his daughter, that he might make peace more surely and firmly between the Normans and the Angevins, who had often unsettled each other with quarrelling.... he wished ... to insure peace in his own time and by one woman's marriage to hold together many thousands of men in friendship .. ,'12

The civil war which ravaged the country after Henry's death - the supporters 102

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of Stephen, Henry's nephew, fighting the supporters of Matilda, Henry's daughter (led by Robert of Gloucester, the illegitimate but acknowledged son of Henry I) - was an unhappy consequence of Henry's dynastic diplomacy. There was however one eventual happy consequence from our point of view - the accelerated development of literate poetry in the vernacular, first in French and later in English. Henry I ruled from 1100 to 1135. His daughter Matilda and her husband Geoffrey, count of Anjou, had a son Henry. This Henry of Anjou was to marry Eleanor, heiress to the lands of Aquitaine, whose role in this history of literary discourse is central. Eleanor (Alienor) had previously married Louis VII, king of France, in 1137, and scholars associate this marriage, and the migration north of Eleanor's entourage, with the spread of troubadour poetry from the south of France, the langue d'oc area, to the north.13 Eleanor grew up in a court of secular poetry and of literary patronage in which vernacular literacy was emerging; her grandfather, Guillem de Peiteus ('William VII, count of Poitiers, ninth duke of Aquitaine'), is the first troubadour whose works survive in writing.14 Again, Eleanor's two daughters by Louis, Marie and Aelis, will become patrons of literary activity at their respective courts at Champagne and Blois. In 1152, Louis VII and Eleanor divorced and Eleanor married Henry, count of Anjou. In 1154, on the death of Stephen, Henry acceded to the English throne. As well as being king of England, Henry was now duke of Normandy, and though technically in the latter role a vassal of the king of France, through inheritance and marriage effectively ruled all western France from Normandy and Brittany south to the Pyrenees. From his father he inherited direct rule of Anjou, Maine and Touraine, through his mother he inherited direct rule of England and Normandy, and suzerainty of Scotland and Wales, by marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine he acquired direct rule of Aquitaine, Gascony and the Auvergne, and by papal bull and conquest (1169-72) he acquired rule over Ireland. And he controlled Brittany through his son Geoffrey's marriage to Constance of Brittany (1171). (Remember the strong contribution of Breton tradition to the development of secular poetry.) The large area under Henry and Eleanor's domain, England and western France, became an Angevin (or Plantagenet) Empire.15 Historians still debate how much the Norman Conquest changed the legal and political institutions of England. The Anglo-Saxon administrative divisions of counties and the smaller divisions of hundreds (groups of villages) were kept. The system of royal courts and royal taxation which had begun with the Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings in the tenth and early eleventh centuries was developed by William and those after him. What is clear is that the Normans developed the existing systems to facilitate raising large revenues for those in power. The historian Koenigsberger comments that thus 'England acquired the misleading reputation of great wealth'.16 To say that wealth was unevenly distributed is a considerable understatement! From the 103

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Domesday Book, historians have calculated that the Norman royal family owned about a fifth of the land of England, the Church about a quarter, and ten or eleven of the 'greatest magnates' another quarter. Most of England was owned by about 250 persons, most of whom came from the Continent. Similarly the knights, the next social step down in terms of some land ownership, mostly came from the Continent.17 The wealth of England, then, was in the hands of the Norman-French, and later Angevin-French, king and nobles, who of course spoke French, or it was in the hands of the Church, which wrote Latin. Manuscripts were expensive, both in materials and time. This simple fact of concentration of economic power and resources explains why a large English population (the population of England was about one and a half million at the time of the Norman Conquest)18 could suddenly, apparently, be silenced (if written documents are the criterion) by a conquest by a comparatively smaller number of French-speakers. Henry II and Eleanor then, and their immediate court, with much of the wealth of England and a large proportion of the wealth of France, were well situated to indulge any particular interest. What were their interests? I have already commented on Eleanor's literary background. Henry II was the first of the Norman-English kings to be fully literate.19 The palaeographer Bischoff notes that 'a possibly unique phenomenon is the extraordinarily close and often successful attachment of the very productive scriptoria of Angers to the Carolingian style of St Martin's at Tours in the eleventh century'.20 Angers is of course the site of the castle of Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry's father. To the extent that castle and Church had contact in Angers, Henry II had grown up in an environment of well-established active and traditional literate practices in Latin. It is not likely, however, that he was interested in Latin religious texts for his recreational reading. Gerald of Wales is unhappy with Henry's perfunctory attitude to religious matters: as a son of the church, whence he received the sceptre of royalty, he either failed to remember his sacramental anointing or ignored his receiving it; he spared but an hour for the divine mysteries of the sacred Host, and perhaps because of state affairs, he would spend that time oftener in listening to his advisers and in discussion rather than in his devotions.21 Walter Map's account indicates that Henry was literate in the sense of knowing Latin but that it was probably a working knowledge suitable for kingly practices (relevant to charters and legal documents), rather than the bookish knowledge of the churchman. Map writes, he had skill of letters as far as was fitting or practically useful, and he had a knowledge of all the tongues used from the French sea to the Jordan, but spoke only Latin and French.22 104

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The increase in the use of literacy in the court can be assessed from details like the following: Bischoff tells us that in the field of cursive writing, developments took place in England under the pressure of work: 'The charters of the Anglo-Norman kings were written in simple minuscule which, in the hands of busy scribes, already achieves an extreme of cursive writing (with round d closed above) in the mid-twelfth century'.23 (Remember, Henry II became king in 1154.) A wealthy literate king with no particular interest in scholarly expertise in Latin, a well-established and growing number of churches dominated by French-speaking religious in its upper hierarchy (for there is still little suggestion that scribal practices were widespread outside the monastic scriptoria), an independently wealthy queen reared in a tradition central to French secular literature - these are the conditions for the sudden proliferation of manuscripts in the vernacular in the twelfth century. Moreover, it is not just that French texts are being written in England, but that for the French language as a whole, the first manuscripts written, which are preserved, are most frequently written in Anglo-Norman hands and, very often, these first French texts are being written in England. Concerning what is written in France itself, a French scholar has suggested that, until the end of the twelfth century, the centres of manuscript production in France are concentrated in the continental part of the Angevin Empire. Only then (the end of the twelfth century) is there a movement in production to the abbeys on the edge of the east and north-east (Wallonie) of France.24 One remembers that King John of England, the youngest son of Henry II, loses Normandy in 1204, and that the king of France is gradually increasing in power from that time. To this Angevin development of texts in French, English scribes made a significant contribution. The Caroline style originally brought by the Normans to England had a characteristic appearance: Bischoff describes it as 'an oblong fractured north-French script'. In England it met a Caroline minuscule which had already merged with English writing techniques. So the Anglo-Norman script resulted from the merging of the continental Norman Caroline style with the English Caroline, already influenced by Anglo-Saxon traditions.25 Thus I suggest it does not make sense to speak simply of the 'adoption of French generic conventions by English scribes', including 'French influence on English poetry'. Rather, during the period of explosive growth in vernacular texts, including the development of graphic poetic conventions, Anglo-Norman and English scribes collaborated in developing a new tradition. However, for the most part, only Latin and French manuscripts were being written, the languages of institutional power in the Church and court. English scribes writing down poetic texts were necessarily being exposed to whatever conventions were developing for the writing of Latin and French poetry. Subsequently, when the demand for written English began to re-emerge during the thirteenth century, the literacy of 105

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French, and Latin, was transferred to the English language, but it was a literacy to which English scribal practices had already contributed.26 The study of continuity and innovation in English poetry then necessarily includes the study of Anglo-Norman poetry. Modern French scholars have done detailed work on the mise-en-page, the layout, of early medieval poetry in French. The following is a paraphrase of my translation from the French of Genevieve Hasenohr, writing on 'The Monastic Origins': The history of vernacular layout begins when the texts in the 'vulgar' tongue cease to be casual insertions in the Latin book and instead have places planned for them in the layout of the book, a 'codicological autonomous unity' or, in the earliest examples, a planned bilingual unity with spaces reserved for the vernacular as well as the Latin. This development (an 'essential testimony of an upheaval' in the relationship of language and culture) had taken place in 'terre d'oi'l' [that is, in the north of France] in the course of the first quarter of the twelfth century. The copies of the Chanson de Saint Alexis and of the Chanson de Roland are the symbols of it in the years 1120-1130. [Henry I ruled from 1100 to 1135.] Both have been copied in England, both have come from a monastic scriptorium. Both typify the most telling characteristics of the production of manuscripts in French in the twelfth century: first, a large predominance of Anglo-Norman copies of insular origin and secondly, an 'immersion in the monastic milieu'.27 Both The Song of St Alexis and The Song of Roland will be discussed later in this chapter. Hasenohr notes a change or enlargement of subject matter as the twelfth century progresses, that is, during the reign of Henry II and Eleanor. I paraphrase again: Most of the bilingual manuscripts copied near the beginning of the twelfth century are of religious subject matter: translations from the Psalms, commentaries on the Psalms, hagiographic legends, treatises on computation (which are indispensable for the proper progression of the liturgical year) and lapidaries (studies of gemstones which are relevant to allegorical readings of Scripture). As the century progresses, there is an increase in the production of literary genres: chronicles, chansons de geste, and stories more peripheral to the explanations of Scripture, to sermons and to the saints' Lives.28 The monastic context for the production of the first texts in French ensures that Latin texts are part of that context - doubly so in the bilingual manuscripts. As Hasenohr goes on to point out, one is therefore not surprised to see the first vernacular manuscripts copy the graphic layout of the contemporary Latin manuscripts exactly. They do not however mimic exactly the transcription techniques - in particular they do not use abbrevia-

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tions in the way that is characteristic of scribal practices for Latin texts. This difference in practice will persist into the fourteenth century as a conventional distinction but has its origin, Hasenohr suggests, in the practical difficulties of scribes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, first writing down an evolving French language with no stable model for orthography. Other scholars have particularly attributed the original development of Latin abbreviations, over and above the traditional Tironian notae associated with Cicero's secretary, to the early Irish monasteries. There Latin was learnt more as a visual, that is written, language, compared to the situation in southern Europe where the vernaculars had spoken links to Latin. Thus, in Ireland, abbreviations were learnt as the spelling of words known by sight, rather than the sounded out spelling of a word known already in speech. This latter view could be related nicely to the fuller writing out of vernacular pronunciation.29 These beginnings of the writing of vernacular texts in French coincided not only with the development of the wealthy Norman and then Plantagenet line of kings in England, but also with the increase of monastic activity all over Europe from the beginning of the twelfth century. From that time, new monastic orders were established: the Cistercians and the Premonstratensians initiated a large number of monasteries in Germany, England, and Spain (and Italy for the Cistercians). The Carthusians expanded towards the end of the twelfth century. Bischoff comments that these establishments 'fundamentally strengthened' written cultures where they existed, and established the first stages of such culture elsewhere.30 Bischoff is thinking, as I read him in context, of the transition from oral to literate cultures, but his words could be given a more complex reference: this monastic expansion also facilitated the transference of Latin literacy to the vernacular languages. In the first instance, in the monastic context, this is not a change from oral to literate, for the monks are patently literate in the medieval sense, of 'having a minimal ability to read Latin'.31 They could not have made attempts to write down the vernacular French if they had not already been competent in the conventions of writing Latin - as the mere use of the Roman alphabet implies. Thus the history of English textual practices, including those of writing down poetry, is not a linear development from orality through transitional literacy but a more complex development of doubly transferred literacy. Before the Norman Conquest, English had been a written language with a comparatively fixed orthography. But after the conquest, English was to some extent returned to being only a spoken language again. Thus, subsequently, when the demand for written English began to re-emerge, the developed literacy of French, transferred from Latin, was transferred to English. This transferred literacy would include the generic conventions for written poetry. This doubly transferred literacy means that a full account would need to 107

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consider the history of lineation in Latin poetic texts; this is no small undertaking, and the following very simplified summary is offered with apologies to those with expertise in this area. Conventions associated with lineation appear to have emerged originally from the economic needs of the book-trade in Alexandria (founded in 332 BC and famous for its two royal libraries), where book meant rolls of papyrus. First, the size of the rolls was standardized so that they were easier to transport. Later, the lines contained in the columns of prose writing in any one roll were made almost equal in length. Though rolls differed in line length, the maximum length of such a line was taken as the economic unit of measurement for prose and it was to be the average length taken to write down a spoken hexameter verse, that is 16 syllables or 34 to 38 letters (the full Latin hexameter would contain 17 syllables). By this standard length, payment of the scribe and the price of the book were fixed. (In practice lines were often shorter, with an average 20-25 letters.) Thus the visual unit when writing prose was related to (though not defined by) the longest metrical unit used when speaking poetry. Adopting this unit suggests that the tradition of writing down the hexameter poems in lines already existed, but lineation was not inevitable. F. W. Hall has written: In verse texts, the stichic or uniform metres are written line by line. Where however the passage is composed of mixed metres, e.g. in lyric poetry and in dramatic choruses, the practice varies. In the Timotheos fragment, contemporary with Alexander the Great, the whole is written as prose, in the Bacchylides papyrus (about 50 BC) the metres are written in separate lines. In the Berlin fragment of the Phaethon (1st C BC) the choruses are written in prose, the metres being indicated by a horizontal stroke of the pen.32

The Latin etymology of the English word 'verse' provides some glimpse of the non-verbal world of doing/marking transferred into the language of poetics. The semantic field of material experience is that of agriculture, the meaning of Latin versus being 'the furrow'. Verto is a turning around, that is of the plough. By transference, versus means 'a line', 'a row', first in general and secondly in particular, a line of writing or 'in poetry, a verse'. This usage equates the word 'verse' for a heard metrical unit (such as the hexameter verse) with the understanding of 'line', a seen graphic unit, an equation of 'versification' with 'lineation'. ('Verse' can also refer to seen gesture: a second transferred group of meanings relate to physical movement, 'a kind of dance, or a turn, step, pas in a dance'.) The Latin terminology in its transferred senses only will be taken into Anglo-Saxon use (presumably to describe Latin 'verse', though I have not examined the particular contexts of use) while the existing agricultural vocabulary of Old English, as in the word furh> 'furrow' itself, does not appear to be associated with poetry.33 Ivan Illich credits Isidore of Seville with the metaphor which compares the 108

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dictator, the author who dictates a text, with the sower, and the amanuensis, the scribe who writes down what is dictated, with the ploughman. (It is particularly the scratching of words on a wax-covered surface, which reminds others of'ploughing'. This is the first record, from which the more permanent vellum copy will be made.) In the twelfth century, 'ploughing' is still 'copying'. (Illich gives the opinion of Peter the Venerable, who died in 1156, that monks cannot work in thefields'but - what is better - their pen in hand is converted into a plow for cultivating fields of holy letters on the page'.)34 This conventional identification of virtuous writer and good ploughman is no doubt widespread by the late fourteenth century, as evidenced by the poetic persona of Piers Plowman and by the character of Chaucer's Ploughman. M. E. Parkes, in Pause and Effect, An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West, provides invaluable material for consideration.35 As well as plates of textual examples of both prose and poetry from antiquity to the eighteenth century, with detailed scholarly description, he includes a summary chapter on 'The Layout and Punctuation in Verse' (Chapter 8). He identifies three basic layouts for Latin poetry, in all of which metrical verse equals graphic line. Hexameter verses are all aligned against the ruled left margin (Parkes's Plates 2 and 42). In the elegiac couplet, the first verse (the hexameter) was aligned against the margin and the second (the pentameter) was indented. And in lyric poetry, the first verse in a stanza was aligned against the left margin and the remaining verses were indented (see Plate 41). It is this layout which appears to be that eventually followed for writing the Psalms and, as Parkes notes, the layout of the Psalms has been one of the strongest influences on the layout of medieval poetry.36 In Parkes's Plate 43, a Latin psalter copied in southern England in the eighth century, one can see that all lines in standard script are aligned on the left against a ruled margin, and a second narrow vertical margin is drawn to the left of these, in which is written the capital letter of each first word in a psalm verse. (This double margin layout, isolating an initial capital letter, will be particularly popular in later Anglo-Norman manuscripts of poetry.) Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe gives a brief summary, meticulously footnoted, on the copying of Latin poetry in England from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, paying particular attention to the copying of different types of Latin verse in the various manuscripts of Bede's Ecclesiastical History?1 She states that, 'From the eighth century on, Latin poetry in England was copied in lines of verse' (p. 26), but concludes, 'Those of the eighth century show considerable fluidity and experimentation in the formatting of verse, while the eleventh-century manuscripts (none from the ninth or tenth centuries survive) exhibit highly consistent and conservative layouts' (p. 27). Though it is tempting to associate such development with a 'transitional literacy' in which readers are moving towards a greater sense of writing as visual object, rather than merely recorded speech, another possibility exists. This is 109

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suggested by the Irish monks' introduction of word division into Latin texts, that is that the primary motive is not gain in literacy but loss or even absence of orality.38 Also relevant are Hasenohr's comments, already mentioned, on the greater use of abbreviations in the Latin than in the vernacular texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Like word division, abbreviation is thought to originate with Irish monastic practices, because for those speaking a non-Romantic vernacular, Latin was learnt - initially at any rate - more as a written than a spoken language. And a final argument from the continental context of Romantic vernaculars: when new genres of rhythmic Latin poetry begin to appear in manuscript from the eleventh century, this poetry is usually not lineated, while Latin poetry in the traditional metres like that in the early Bede manuscripts - is written in lines. Again, it is suggested that continental speakers could hear the rhythm as poetry because of similarities in the spoken vernaculars, but could no longer discern the classical quantitative metres in speech (see note 40). Consistent lineation in Latin poetry, like word division and abbreviation in Latin generally, may record a loss of orality in Latin rather than a general gain in literacy. This would explain the comparative irrelevance of practices of copying Latin poetry to practices of copying English poetry during the Old English period, a feature noted by O'Brien O'Keeffe (p. 32). It is the Latin liturgical texts (themselves influenced by classical conventions for writing poetry), rather than those of Latin poetry itself, which will provide the material context for graphological change in vernacular texts of poetry. By the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, in England and France, three primary methods for the graphic display of poetry in the vernacular have emerged. By this period, one method - that with which a modern reader is familiar - is dominant, but traces of the other two traditions persist throughout the Middle Ages. The first layout is that of writing the verse continuously in the line, as for Old English, although punctuation or letters in majuscule (both of which may be rubricated, that is marked with red, or otherwise coloured) may indicate verse divisions. (A glossary of technical terms, including those of punctuation, is given by M. B. Parkes in Pause and Effect.)39 The second layout is that of one verse per line. The third is that of writing on the one line the two or three verses which together form a syntactic unit, and indicating verse breaks and rhyme schemes with punctuation, bracketing and so on. This method is really a compromise between the other two, so that vellum is saved but sense and metrical units are visually more prominent.40 I want initially to discuss these three developments with examples of poetry in French. The development of these methods essentially arose, as already suggested, from a transference of literacy from Latin, especially from manuscripts of the liturgy, whose layout in turn, it has already been implied, were sometimes influenced by visual conventions inherited from Latin 110

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poetic conventions. (At the same time, the nature and layout of Latin poetry itself was changing, though that topic is well beyond the scope of this book.)41 The liturgical influence is particularly clear in the manuscript of the text La Sequence de sainte Eulalie (Parkes, Plate 44, pp. 236-7). This is the first known text to be written in 'French', or rather in the terre d'o'il idiom which will later become recognized as standard French. It was copied towards the end of the ninth century in northern France.42 It immediately follows a Latin poem on the saint, and both, according to French scholar Michael Zink, 'will be chanted to the same melody between the two jubilations of the alleluia' within the liturgy.43 At first glance the layout looks like that already described for classical verse, that is it is in graphic lines and each line begins with a capital, spaced a little to the left of the remaining letters in its word, with all these initial capitals vertically aligned. The scribe has been anxious to achieve this layout, for the writing of several lines becomes cramped towards the right side of the page and, when the verse is still too long to be completed, the scribe writes the excess words above the last words which did fit. However one cannot infer that at this early date we already have graphic conventions for vernacular poetry because, according to M. B. Parkes, it is the established conventions of the layout of the Latin liturgy which has dictated this layout. In Basil Bernstein's terminology, in its historical context we can recognize the classification of this text as liturgical discourse, but there are no graphic signs by which we can differentiate poetic discourse as a different category from liturgical discourse. Like all the other earliest works in French until the latter part of the twelfth century, this ninth-century work is in verse (the two halves of each graphic line are linked phonemically by assonance, and separated graphically by a punctus/point). However it will not be until the first quarter of the twelfth century that terre d'oil verse is produced in noticeably larger quantities. This verse, as we'll see, is primarily associated with insular Anglo-Norman production. An example of writing the verse continuously in one line may be seen in the manuscript of the Chanson de Sainte Foy ('Song of Saint Faith', Mise en page, Plate 152, p. 232). This manuscript comes from the area of the 'oc' idiom, the other major vernacular idiom spoken in France. (The Benedictine abbeys of Fleury-sur-Loire and Saint-Martial de Limoges are particularly associated with writing in this idiom.) The Chanson de Sainte Foy was written down at the end of the eleventh century or the beginning of the twelfth, and is the oldest 'roman' poem to be based on rhyme and not on assonance.44 Michael Zink links this text, like that of the Sequence de sainte Eulalie, to a para-liturgical function, a song to accompany a procession in honour of the saint. In the manuscript, the poem is adjacent to an Office of Saint Foy.45 The Chanson de Sainte Foy is written continuously across the page like Old 111

The Written Poem

English poetry. However, the verse and stanza structure in groups of rhyming verses are graphically indicated. Each sequence of rhyming verses begins with a capital; a point marks the end of each verse within the sequence. So although we do not see the graphic display of verse through lineation, we do see it by an alternative graphic means, that of pointing. The Junius MS, as Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe has shown, indicates verse ends by use of the punctus in a comparatively systematic way;46 the Old English poem was written down some one hundred years before the Chanson de Sainte Foy. By analogy with the French, one can readily hypothesize the transference of the graphic conventions of the Latin liturgy to English poetry directly in the Old English period, given the comparable monastic context of manuscript production and the interchange between the English and continental houses in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Indeed, Peter Clemoes, in his paper 'Liturgical Influence on Late Old English and Early Middle English Punctuation', suggests exactly such a transference of, especially, the punctuation used in manuscripts of the Latin Psalms to the copying of English poetry.47 Another example of unlineated poetry in a liturgical context can be seen in the manuscript of the Chanson de Saint Alexis (Mise en page, Plate 151, p. 232), which dates from the first quarter of the twelfth century, or a little earlier. The song is included within the St Albans Psalter, a French text written down in England (St Albans, the modern English city, being the site of a monastery founded before the Norman Conquest). It is a long poem of 625 verses with very elaborate versification; each stanza has five verses (modern lines) of ten syllables each, linked together by assonance, a versification which anticipates the epic laisse.46 This layout, of writing continuously across the page, did not usually persist in formal manuscripts past the mid-twelfth century, although it can be found in less formal copies, perhaps intended for personal use.49 The first vernacular manuscript to have the modern layout of one verse per line of which I am aware is also the first French text on a secular subject. This is the famous Chanson de Roland in Oxford Bodleian Library MS Digby 23 (Mise en page, Plates 163-4, p. 240). It was written down in England at about the same time as the song of St Alexis, that is the first quarter of the twelfth century. (Hasenohr rejects the suggestion that small books such as that of Digby 23 were 'jongleur's texts' for performance, preferring to associate such production with the monastic milieu. French scholars usually maintain that the chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland, have formal links with hagiography, which in turn developed from the liturgy.) We do know of the earlier oral existence of the Song of Roland, as it is mentioned by William of Malmesbury in his Gesta Regum as sung by a 'jongleur' to rouse the Normans during the battle of Hastings in 1066.50 The writing of MS Digby 23 is 'of the English type' (as Hasenohr puts it), that is, it is the work of an Anglo-Norman scribe. The page ruling is for one 112

The Origin of the English Line

column only. (Later Anglo-Norman texts favour two columns; N. R. Ker comments that, after 1066, for English manuscripts, 'the two-column arrangement was adopted soon for big books, later for medium-sized books, and towards the end of the twelfth century for small books'.)51 On some pages, the first letter of every verse is detached from the rest of the verse, on others the first is not detached, or there appears to be only a slightly wider space between the first and second letters. (In later Anglo-Norman manuscripts, this detachment of the first letter will be pronounced.) Every verse (that is line) finishes with apunctus, which could be understood as indicating an appropriate breath-pause at the end of a verse. There is no decoration, but the initial letter of most laisses is large and rubricated (a laisse, 'that which is left', is a sequence of verses linked by the same assonance). Given the principle of performance, that one laisse be performed as a unit of speaking in terms of momentum, the visual prominence of the initial letter could facilitate using the written text for public performance. It is certainly more informative than the manuscript of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf, with which one might compare it, if roughly, in terms of 'heroic' subject matter, and in terms of representing the written emergence of an earlier oral tradition of transmission. (The Beowulf manuscript probably dates from the late tenth century, just over a hundred years earlier.) In its original context of manuscript production, the scribe of Bodleian MS Digby 23 may indeed have been recording a heard poem. But equally one could describe the scribe as 'writing a poem', for the versification is clearly displayed in the appearance of the poem, and this display would facilitate reading the poem, whether or not one were very familiar with it. Another later example of one verse per line layout can be seen in a manuscript of the Roman de Tristan, a poem of 966 verses of rhymed couplets (Mise en page, Plate 156). The manuscript, of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, has a characteristic Anglo-Norman appearance. It is ruled in two writing columns and, for each column, the initials of the odd verses are isolated in a second narrow column drawn to the left of the principal margin. The second verse of the couplet then begins at this principal margin, that is appears indented one character. This use of the left margin is an echo of that old layout of the psalms, associated originally with the layout of Latin elegiac couplets, which I mentioned earlier. The lineation of each verse is emphasized by a strongly marked point on the right justification margin of each column, another characteristic of AngloNorman texts of this period.52 The graphic display thus visually linked the two verses of each rhymed couplet. Apparently there was also a concern to bind the two verses of a couplet together by sense, so that the syntax was completed by the second verse. In practice, 'a phrase can be completed in a couplet, or it can extend over two or more verses, but it always finishes with the second verse of the couplet, not the first. There are phrases of two, four or six verses; there aren't 113

The Written Poem

any of three, five or seven'.53 Thus sound (rhyme), appearance (indentation) and sense (links of syntax) all bound the verses together as couplets, or as multiples of couplets. In a bilingual lapidary manuscript now in the Bibliotheque Nationak in Paris (two pages are reproduced in colour in Mise en page, Plate 308, p. 341), one can see a possible origin for this concern to link the French couplet tightly, for the French couplet there is used to translate the single Latin hexameter (the couplet is written on two lines and the hexameter is written on one). Its punctuation, to which I will return later in this chapter, also emphasizes the equation of Latin hexameter and French couplet. (This lapidary manuscript dates from the latter half of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth century; it appears to have been copied in England by a scribe who did not know French very accurately.)54 Overall, for the text of the Roman de Tristan^ we can see the concern with lineation is related to a concern to emphasize the meaningful connectedness of the couplet. The third method of layout, on which I will say little though there is much to say, is that of writing on the one line the two or three verses which together form a syntactic unit, and indicating verse breaks and rhyme schemes with punctuation, bracketing and so on. MS Oxford Bodleian Library, Selden supra 38 (a version of the EvangUe de Fenfance) is composed in monoriming quatrains, that is two pairs of couplets ending in the one rhyme. The first couplet is written on line one, the second couplet on the following line. A punctus separates the two verses on the same line, and an 'accolade', a red bracket, links the two couplets in the right margin.55 This method also appears to have been devised by Anglo-Norman scribes in the twelfth century. The practice of bracketing lines in various ways to indicate rhyme schemes is also frequently encountered in manuscripts with the dominant one verse per line layout (for example in Latin, Parkes, Plate 45, pp. 238-9; Mise en page. Plates 104 and 105, pp. 166-7). Perhaps the manuscript in which the interrelating visual developments of English and Anglo-Norman poetry can first be clearly seen is that of British Library Cotton Caligula A.ix. In English studies this manuscript is known principally for its copies of the two English poems, Lasamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale^ and editions of those poems separately discuss issues of special relevance to them.56 In the context of this book, however, it is the juxtaposition of all texts in the manuscript, their contents and their graphic display, which is pertinent and illuminating. This small book has 261 folios and contains 13 texts. Although Robert Cotton, the eighteenth-century collector in whose collection this manuscript passed to the British Library, was known to bind unrelated manuscripts together, scholars maintain that folios 3 to 261 have always belonged together (folios 1 and 2 are seventeenth-century flyleaves). N. R. Ker, in his introduction to the facsimile of The Owl and the Nightingale., dates the manuscript in the second half of the thirteenth century, as did Sir Frederick 114

The Origin of the English Line

Madden in his first edition of Lasamon's Brut in 1847.57 Writers after Madden, notes Ker, had placed the manuscript earlier, in the first half of the thirteenth century, with the exception of C. E. Wright who dated it somewhat after 1250. In his English Vernacular Hands, Wright lists several manuscripts of early Middle English texts - the Ormulum, Vices and Virtues, the 'Vespasian Hymns', the Ancrene Riwle, the Ancrene Wisse, and the manuscript of Lasamon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale - as being 'almost certainly before 1258' ,58 The significance of this date is that it was the year of an official 'English' document by Henry III, letters patent in English and French (and possibly Latin as well) sent to every county. These letters followed the second baronial rebellion (the first famous rebellion being in 1215, associated with the Magna Carta in Latin) and M. T. Clanchy infers that 'the reason for this unprecedented action was that Henry's sheriffs and other officials could not be relied upon to have them publicly read in the usual way because the letters were explicitly critical of their own conduct.... Henry's letters were ... addressed . . . to all the king's subjects.'59 As Wright notes, this use of English as an official language was only temporary. It does establish however that the manuscript Cotton Caligula A.ix dates from a time when the king needed to give equal importance to English and French when communicating with all his literate subjects. All scholars agree at least to place the manuscript securely in the thirteenth century. The thirteenth century is a good hundred years after the transitional events of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in relation to Anglo-Norman poetry, as discussed already in this chapter. Conversely, it is about a hundred years before the proliferation of English poetic texts in the fourteenth century associated with the so-called 'alliterative revival' in poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman, together with the earliest manuscripts of Chaucer in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the time when English is again securely positioned as dominant in the written Mode.60 In their introduction to the Index of Middle English Verse, Brown and Robbins note that, during the thirteenth century, there were 'not more than a couple of hundred poems of all kinds [surviving], less than five per cent of the total' in their index. Again, of the large number of religious poems listed in the index, 'approximately three quarters were not written [down] until after the Black Death' (1350).61 To what extent are the contents of Caligula A.ix relevant to the issue of written poetry? First, its contents include texts both in English and in AngloNorman. Secondly, as already remarked, the manuscript is considered to have been a unity since its inception, so that to consider the transition from one text to another as they are juxtaposed in the manuscript is not irrelevant to their circumstances of production. Such transitions provide a rare opportunity to chart the evolution of literate conventions in the very process of being transferred from Anglo-French to English, and, especially, from Anglo-French to English poetic discourse. 115

The Written Poem

Ker lists the texts in the manuscript as follows (text numbers of those texts edited in Morris's Miscellany are given also):62 (1)

folios 3r-194v

Lasamon's Brut (English)

(2)

folios 195r-216r

La vie de Seint losaphaz (Anglo-Norman)

(3)

folios 216v-229v La vie de Seint Dormanz (Anglo-Norman)

(4)

229v-232v

A prose chronicle from the Saxon conquest to the reign of Henry III (Anglo-Norman)

(5)

233r-246r

The Owl and the Nightingale (English)

(6)

246rv

Death's wither clench (English)63 (= XX 'Long Life' in Morris)

(7)

246v

An Orison to Our Lady (English) (= XXI Morris)

(8)

246v

Will and Wit (English) (= XXVI Morris)

(9)

246v-247r

Doomsday (English) (= XXII Morris)

(10) 247r-248v

The last day (English) (= XXIII 'Death' in Morris)

(11) 248v

The ten abuses (English) (= XXIV Morris)

(12) 248v-249r

A lutel soth sermun (English) (= XXV Morris)

(13) 249r-261v

Le petit plet (Anglo-Norman)

The page size is 21.5 cm high by 14.5 cm across. For the first poem, Lasamon's Brut, vertical lines are ruled first and extend towards the page edges, three in the centre of the page and a left and right margin.64 This creates two columns for writing, the favoured division in later AngloNorman practice (for example, the Roman de Tristan manuscript of the late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries, Plate 156, Mise en page). The versification of Lasamon's Brut is a later development of the alliterative verse of Old English Germanic tradition. The phonemic versification of the Brut is not represented graphically in lineation, that is the poem is written continuously on the ruled line, from left to right margin, just as poetry had been recorded in Old English manuscripts. However there is more visual information than in Junius 11, that Old English manuscript of about 1025, which has been described as the most 'forward-looking' of the Old English codices in its use of the punctus to separate metrical units.65 For Lasamon's Brut, for an alliterative pair of a and b verses, the a-verse is punctuated with (followed by) 116

The Origin of the English Line

a punctus elevatus (a stroke or ticklike mark above a point) and the b-verse with a punctus (the simple point). The first letter in each verse is rubricated (dotted with red). It is not lineation, but punctuation mark and colour which is graphically representing the phonic patterning of the poetry.66 Overall, space or distribution in space does not appear to be used significantly, for specific characters and colour mark textual divisions. Thus on folio 6r (hereafter f 6r), a paragraph marker, 0, the paraph, is placed ten lines from the bottom of the right column, in the middle of the line. Again the concern with conserving vellum and/or the lack of concern in representing spoken Old English in lineation, leads, as in Old English manuscripts, to words being broken at line-end and completed on the next line (for example, f 115v, column 2: kin/ge). A detailed discussion of the manuscript would show some use of spatial punctuation for larger textual divisions (for example, before a red section marker at f 125r, a line not fully used for text is filled with horizontal pen-marks in black and red so that the new section can begin on a new text line). On f 146v, my eye fell on what looked like lineation; rhetorical repetition in the text led to several lines forming a visual block, as a repeated phrase began each written line. Lasamon's Brut is completed on f 194v. The Anglo-Norman poem de seint Josaphaz then begins on f 195r. It is in rhyming couplets, written over two lines, that is it is lineated. Double vertical margins are now drawn on the left, centre and right of the page. The initial letter of each text line is a capital and rubricated; it is written slightly distanced from the remainder of its line, by being placed within the margin immediately before it, or on the right line of the margin pair. This detachment of the initial letter from its line has already been noted as a developing characteristic of Anglo-Norman manuscripts (moderately for the Chanson de Roland manuscript in the early twelfth century, pronouncedly in the Roman de Tristan manuscript of the late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries), and as possibly derived from Latin conventions for writing the psalms. The first 24 lines of the poem twice end with a punctus elevatus, twice with nothing, and 22 times with a punctus. Then another section begins with a capital O two lines deep and with regular punctuation: an alternation of punctus elevatus and punctus at the end of alternate lines, as had been used for the verse separation in the unlineated Brut. The punctuation continues fairly regularly but with occasional confusion (lines of rhyming pairs both ending with a punctus, for example). Comparable punctuation is seen on the bilingual (Latin-French) lapidary manuscript (B.N. lat 14470) previously referred to: folio 7v, a whole page of French, consistently has a punctus elevatus (a dash, rather than a tick, above a point) at the end of every odd line, the first half of each couplet. As previously pointed out, the French couplet was a translation of the Latin hexameter. So the pair of English alliterative verses is equated visually with, that is punctuated in the same way as, the French couplet, which was equated with the Latin hexameter. 117

The Written Poem

La vie de st Dormanz begins on f 216v, with the same layout, with the same tendency to regular punctuation of alternating punctus elevatus and punctus for rhyming pairs, and the same tendency to irregularity - a punctus where one might have expected a punctus elevatus. The saint's Life ends halfway down the lefthand column; immediately the French prose chronicle begins. In addition to its language, the subject matter of the chronicle would appear to be more to the taste of an Anglo-Norman ruling elite than that of a general English audience. At the same time, the juxtaposition of the Anglo-Norman and English language texts, some poetic, strongly suggests that an elite audience now more commonly understood, even appreciated, entertainment/ readings in English. The Anglo-Norman prose chronicle is completed in the first three lines of f 232v. The English poem of The Owl and the Nightingale follows, but on f 233r, so that most of f 232v is blank. This is a surprising waste of vellum, and one could speculate on its reason (it is not simply a desire to avoid mixing Anglo-Norman and English on the one page, for subsequently they are mixed). The English Owl and the Nightingale, like the two Anglo-Norman saints' Lives, is a poem written in rhymed couplets. French versification is now being used with English language, and not only for the spoken Mode but also for the written. Like the saints' Lives, each couplet is written on two lines. The first word of each line is touched with red. However there is no use of punctus elevatus; each line ends with a simple punctus. Attention is drawn to the opening of the poem by graphic augmentation: the first nine lines of script are much bigger than the previous standard, the next 15 lines of script are of medium size, and the subsequent lines revert to a smaller script, as for the Anglo-Norman poems, though still not quite as small. The visual display leads the reader into the text of the poem; it is, as it were, easier to entice a reader to begin reading such a magnified text until their interest is established. This suggests to me already a growing reversal of that relation of speech and writing earlier discussed: that this written text, with its provision of visual cues, precedes reading, whereas the graphically more dense Old English manuscript recorded a spoken poem. The poem The Owl and the Nightingale finishes on folio 246r. What follows is extraordinary. After such a long poem, without the space of a line break, the poem Long Life, as Morris calls it (Ker's Death's wither clench), begins immediately on the next line, nine lines from the bottom of the page in column I.67 The poem has five stanzas, each of ten lines, lineated in the manuscript as in Morris's edition, with the first letter of each stanza rubricated. In The Owl and the Nightingale, each line had ended with a punctus. Now, for Long Life, the punctuation reverts immediately to that which it had been for the Brut, a punctus elevatus and punctus for each pair of lines, though the rhyme scheme does not correspond to a rhymed couplet or linked alliterative pairs.68 (The rhyme scheme i s a b a b b a a b b/a b. The 118

The Origin of the English Line

rhythm, incidentally, is syllable-based, roughly, as for all the rhymed poems in this manuscript.) From stanza two, perhaps recognizing the inappropriate use, the scribe reverts to a simple punctus at the end of the line (or nothing). Capitals sometimes extend leftward into the double margin, as with the Anglo-Norman poems. The succession of short poems in English on f 246v begins to cause parchment problems (or they are begrudged a spacious use of vellum). An Orison to Our Lady (which follows Long Life) has five stanzas (again marked by red on the first letter) often lines each, and a rhyme scheme a b a b a a b a b a. In stanzas three, four and five, the last two text metrical lines are written as one visual line. However the short poem which follows, Will and Witt has each of its eight verses on a separate line, with a rhyme scheme of a b a b a b a b. The repeated reference to 'will' and 'wit' - with a final line reference to 'wisdom' - also ties the lines in each couplet together with alliteration (and the lines of each couplet are also linked syntactically.) This little poem could be compared to the so-called 'Riming Poem' of the Old English Exeter Book, which combines romantic couplets with alliterating metre. However, 'The Riming Poem', like the rest of its manuscript, is of course unlineated whereas Witt and Wit, two hundred and fifty years later, is written in lines.69 Following Will and Wit, the English poem Doomsday, a rhymed poem of eleven stanzas, is written continuously from the start. Although many lines of writing do coincide with the metrical unit, vellum is not wasted if space is left (remember each page has two columns, and a line of verse roughly fits into a column width) and writing continues into the next verse. The use of the punctus elevatus is resumed but is used consistently only in stanzas two and three. Perhaps this use of punctuation in initial stanzas only, as also with An Orison to our Lady, is designed to guide the reader initially into an appropriate reading practice - though a scribe less familiar with English could also have difficulty identifying lines linked by syntax. Stanzas are clearly marked by red capitals, and the first letter of most odd poetic 'lines' (verses one, three, five and seven) is marked with a red stroke. Whereas Morris had printed the previous poems which are lineated with a single left vertical margin, he now introduces an editorial layout, indenting every second, that is even, line in the Doomsday stanzas. In similar fashion, with a clear scribal tendency to lineation as the preferred but not essential practice for English poetry, Doomsday is followed by three more poems in English, Ker's The last day (247r-248v), The ten abuses (248v) and A Intel soth sermun (248v-249r). Then in column two of folio 249r comes a final Anglo-Norman poem, Le petit plet. The last day has 33 stanzas (marked initially as Doomsday) of eight lines each, The ten abuses is a 14-verse unrhymed 'rhythmic utterance', A lutel soth sermun has a hundred verses, unmarked for stanzas, of an a b a b rhyme sequence. Initially its verses mostly coincide with written lines, but from verse 52, which begins 119

The Written Poem

column 1 of folio 249r, there is little correspondence between verse end and written line. On folio 249, the juxtaposition of this English poem in column 1 with the Anglo-Norman poem, Le petit plet, from the top of column 2, highlights the different practices for the two languages at this time, or perhaps more accurately, highlights the more transitional nature of the practice of lineation for English. In contrast to the unlineated English poem of column one, the Anglo-Norman poem is again written in lines. Its phonic pattern of rhymed couplets is graphically indicated, with one verse written per line. The first letter of each line is in normal ink, but marked through with red - a bigger 'blob' of red than the virtual point or pen stroke through the initial letter of Middle English verses. With some variation, the punctuation of the text returns to an alternation ofpunctus ekvatus at the end of odd lines, andpunctus at the end of even lines. There is much more which could be said on this topic and many more manuscripts which need to be discussed. But I suggest it is already clear that a scholarly focus on language as text alone (looking only at English language texts) makes it impossible to write a coherent - let alone continuous - history of 'English' poetry, and especially impossible to talk about the origin of its classifying sign, the line. But in contrast, a scholarly focus on language as discourse, placing language practices in their social context, that complex medieval environment of Latin, French and English practices, written and spoken, suggests that the history of poetic discourse - and other discourses - in English can be written. Notes 1.

2.

120

Peter Hunter Blair (ed.), The Moore Bede, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 9 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1959), folio 128v; Q. Arngart (ed.), The Leningrad Bede, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile, 2 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1952), folio 107r. On dating, see Elliott van Kirk Dobbie (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, Vol. VI: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia UP and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942), p. xcv; Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), p. 148. Caedmon's story is in Chapter 24 of Book IV of the History (Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (eds.), Latin with an English translation, Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Van Kirk Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, pp. xxxii-xxxiii. Dobbie refers to the edition of Charles Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). The same dilemma of classification into discourse categories (prose or poetry?) still faced the recent editors of Old English Verse Texts from Many Sources: A Comprehensive Collection, ed. Fred C. Robinson and E. G. Stanley, Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile No. 23 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1991). 'The Editors have preferred "comprehensive" to

The Origin of the English Line

3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

the term "complete" in the title of this collection in view of the uncertain borderline between verse and prose and the deliberate exclusion of certain items that are fragmentary or ill-preserved' (p. 11). And again, 'Some texts are on a borderline between verse and prose, and decisions as to what should be included and excluded at times became delicate. All the Chronicle poems printed in Debbie's edition of the miscellaneous poems in the AS Poetic Records are represented here, including the uncertainly metrical Death of Alfred.... The Durham Proverbs in which rhyme and alliteration seem only incidental and ornamental are excluded' (p. 13). Van Kirk Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, pp. xliii-xlv. The date of composition can be established with some accuracy. To quote Dobbie, 'It cannot have been written before 1104, when the translation of St Cuthbert to the new cathedral at Durham took place. The posterior limit for the writing of the poem is provided by the mention of it in Symeon's Historia Dunelmensis ecclesiae ... which appears to have been finished by the year 1109.' On pointing evidence, O'Keeffe disagrees with Kevin Kiernan's later date for Beowulf, of about 1025. See O'Keeffe, Visible Song, pp. 172-9. Kevin S. Kiernan, 'The eleventh century origin of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript', in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981) and Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1981). N. R. Ker had estimated late tenth/early eleventh century in his Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 281. George Philip Krapp (ed.), The Paris Psalter and the Meters ofBoethius, Vol. V: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (New York: Columbia, 1932), p. xi (the dating of the Paris Psalter) and p. xxxv (the dating of the Meters ofBoethius). See George Henderson, 'The programme of illustrations in Bodleian MS Junius XI', in Studies in Memory of David Talbot Rice (Edinburgh UP, 1975), pp. 113-45. Facsimile: Sir Israel Gollancz (ed.), The Ccedmon manuscript of AngloSaxon Biblical Poetry, Junius 11 in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1927). Beowulf (Facsimile), transliteration and notes by Julius Zupitza, 2nd edn, intro. Norman Davis (EETS, London: Oxford UP, 1959). There are many reproductions. See the Facsimile Series of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books). To hand as I write are two popular collections: Hilton Kelliher and Sally Brown, English Literary Manuscripts (London: British Library, 1986), pp. 14-15 (from The Canterbury Tales, British Library Harley MS 7334, ff 102v, 103, in colour) and Verlyn Klinkenborg, Herbert Gaboon and Charles Ryskamp, British Literary Manuscripts, Series I: From 800 to 1800 (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), reproductions 4 and 5 (Troilus and Criseyde, Pierpont Morgan Library M 817, f 120 and The Canterbury Tales, M 249 f 275, in black and white). The Pearl manuscript is British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x. The four poems are reproduced in facsimile by the Early English Text Society, introduced by Sir

121

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10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

122

I. Gollancz (London: Oxford UP, 1923), whose comment on dating is on p. 8, in his discussion of handwriting. See also The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). As in British Library Cotton MS Vespasian B xvi. See folio 64v in colour in Kelliher and Brown, English Literary Manuscripts, p. 3. In contrast, a fifteenthcentury manuscript of Piers, Oxford Bodleian MS Digby 102, an apparently less formal manuscript, is not lineated (Parkes, Plate 23, pp. 200-1). J. J. Bagley, Historical Interpretation: Sources of English Medieval History, 1066-1540 (Middlesex: Pelican, 1965), pp. 41-4. See also David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway (eds), English Historical Documents, Vol. II: 1042-1189 (New York: Oxford UP, 1953, reprinted 1968), pp. 294-6. Bagley, Historical Interpretation, p. 48. Gesta Stephani, edited with an English translation by K. R. Potter (London: Nelson, 1955). Deborah H. Nelson, 'Northern France', A Handbook of the Troubadours, ed. F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 255. Gerald A. Bond, 'Origins', in Akehurst and Davis, Handbook of Troubadours, pp.246-51. For the means and range of Henry IPs influence see Figure 3.2: 'France and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries', in H. G. Koenigsberger, Medieval Europe 400-1500 (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1987), p. 156. H. G. Koenigsberger, Medieval Europe, p. 157. These generalizations are from Koenigsberger, Medieval Europe, p. 155. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 169. Gerald of Wales comments of Henry II, 'he was a prince of great eloquence and, what is remarkable in these days, polished in letters', Douglas and Greenaway, English Historical Documents, p. 386. Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Daibhi 6 Croinin and David Ganz (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, first English edn. 1990), p. 123. Bagley, Historical Interpretation, p. 5 3. See also Douglas and Greenaway, English Historical Documents, pp. 386-8. Bagley, Historical Interpretation, p. 54. For a slightly different translation, see Douglas and Greenaway, English Historical Documents, p. 389. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, p. 137. From my translation of Genevieve Hasenohr, 'Les origines monastiques', Mise en page et mise en texte du lime manuscrit, under the direction of Henri-Jean Martin and Jean Vezin (Editions du Cercle de la Librairie-Promodis, 1990), p. 231. A recent study by David Hewlett has suggested that the 'spectacular flowering of Old French literature occurred only after exposure to Anglo-Latin and Old English literatures'. It associated this expansion with the reign of Henry I and Queen Matilda, and his second wife Adeliza, rather than Henry II and Eleanor. The study provides helpful catalogues of Old French literary activity

The Origin of the English Line

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

in English for the major genres. Its wider claims of origin do not seem to me to pay sufficient attention to the role of the French monastic houses of Cluny and Fleury and the exchange of religious between France and England in the socalled tenth- and eleventh-century Benedictine Renaissance, nor to the versification and/or subject matter of the new literature. I would agree that conditions at the court of Henry I and Matilda contributed to the initial stages of literary development. See Hewlett, The English Origins of Old French Literature (Blackrock, Co. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1996). The result was an Anglo-Norman script of greater 'dignity, harmony and density, as for instance in the type practised shortly before 1100 at Christ Church Canterbury, the seat of the primate'. (Henry I came to the throne in 1100.) See Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, p. 128. For a general account of the interrelation of English and French in England during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Rolf Berndt, 'The linguistic situation in England from the Norman Conquest to the loss of Normandy (1066-1204)', in Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, ed. Roger Lass (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1969), pp. 369-91. See also M. T. Clanchy, 'Languages of record', Chapter 6 in From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). From my translation of Genevieve Hasenohr, 'Les origines monastiques', Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, p. 231. Ibid., p. 231. Kelliher and Brown, English Literary Manuscripts, p. 49. Bischoff includes a section on Latin abbreviations, 'Abbreviations (forms and methods of abbreviation in the high and later Middle Ages)', Latin Palaeography, pp. 150-68. Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, p. 216. See, for example, M. T. Clanchy's discussion in 'Literate and illiterate', Chapter 7 of From Memory to Written Record. The phrase quoted is from p. 227. My account of the early book-trade is taken from F. W. Hall, A Companion to Classical Texts (Chicago: Argonaut, 1970 reprint of 1913 Oxford edn.), pp. 8-13. The Latin glosses of versus/verto are taken from Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879). To examine the vocabulary of Old English in the Field of poetics I consulted/I Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Jane Roberts and Christian Kay, with Lynne Grundy (London: King's College, 1995). See also Pascale Bourgain's discussion of the use of versus and carmen to describe Latin texts in 'La poesie lyrique medievale', in Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, p. 165, and facing Plate 102. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, a Commentary to Hugh's 'Didascalicon' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 89. M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect, An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1992). Chapter 8, 'The layout and punctuation of verse', in Parkes, Pause and Effect. O'Brien O'Keeffe, Visible Song, pp. 26-32. 123

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38. See Chapter 8, note 6. 39. Parkes, Pause and Effect, pp. 301-7. 40. These three modes of graphic display are recognized by Genevieve Hasenohr, in 'Le rythme et la versification', in Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, pp. 235-8. 41. See Pascale Bourgain, 'La poesie lyrique medievale', in Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, pp. 164-8. Essentially, two kinds of layout develop. About AD 1000, classical or quantitative Latin poetry was written with clear word division, in lines, with initial capitals to make lineation more prominent. New genres of rhythmic Latin poetry begin to appear in manuscript from the eleventh century and their layout is less informative, the rhythmical poetry written continuously across the page, with the first word of a metrical sequence (a 'strophe') indicated by a capital, wherever it occurs in the line, and some use of pointing to separate metrical units (comparable to the layout of the vernacular Chanson de Sainte Foy or even, though of course without capitals, the Junius 11 manuscript). It is suggested the contemporary ear could no longer 'hear' the classical poetic metres and so needed more visual information to identify the genre, whereas the versification of the rhythmic Latin poetry - like that of the vernaculars - could be heard. An alternative or complementary explanation is that the non-classical poetry, like the vernacular poetry, had less prestige and so was written in a more economical way on the page. 42. 'French' is regarded as emerging by 813 when a canon of the council of Tours allowed priests to preach in linguam rusticam gallicam aut theotiscam - 'in the vernacular Gallic or Teutonic language'. Michael Zink, Introduction a la litterature franfaise du Moyen Age (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1993), pp. 12-13. 43. Zink, Litterature frangaise du Moyen Age, pp. 31-2. 44. These facts I derive from my translation of Genevieve Hasenohr, 'Les origines monastiques', in Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, p. 231. 45. Zink, Litterature franfaise du Moyen Age, pp. 33-5. 46. See Chapter 1, note 32. 47. Peter Clemoes, 'Liturgical influence on late Old English and early Middle English punctuation', Occasional Papers, Number 1 (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, 1952). 48. Zink, Litterature franfaise du Moyen Age, pp. 38-40. 49. An English example, already mentioned in note 10, can be seen in a late fifteenth-century manuscript of Piers Plowman, a small book with a simple onecolumn ruling (Parkes, Plate 23, pp. 200-1), Oxford Bodleian MS Digby 102. The Latin is underlined in red, and fiiepunctus at the end of each alliterative line is marked through with a red stroke. The caesura is marked by red, which runs through a punctus elevatus. The writing sometimes exceeds the width of the ruling, so vellum is clearly at a premium. On folio 15, for four lines, the scribe manages to lineate, but then reverts to the continuous method. 50. Information about the manuscript and text of The Song of Roland I have garnered from the edition ('reproduction phototypique1} of Comte Alexandre de Laborde, presented to the members of the Roxburghe Club of London in 1922, 124

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51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

from Genevieve Hasenohr, 'Les chansons de geste', in Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, pp. 239 and 241, and from Michael Zink, Litteraturefranc,aise du Moyen Age, pp. 86-97. Zink includes a bibliography on the text. N. R. Ker, English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest, The Lyell Lectures, 1952-3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 42. The manuscript of the Anglo-Norman Roman de Tristan is also in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS French d.16 fol lOr). Joseph Bedier quotes M. P. Meyer, Romania, Vol. 23, No. 1, in his edition of Le Roman de Tristan, 2 vols (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1902-5), p. 33. B.N. MS lat 14470. For a discussion of this (and similar manuscripts), see Anglo-Norman Lapidaries, Paul Studer and Joan Evans (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1924), especially pp. 1-2. The reference to Bodleian MS Selden supra 38 I obtained from Genevieve Hasenohr, 'Le rythme et la versification', in Martin and Vezin, Mise en page, p. 237 (there is no Plate illustration of the manuscript). It is a very attractive book, with an illustration on almost every page (line drawings coloured in, even gold), taking up about one-third of the page. Those interested in medieval dress would particularly enjoy it (for example, the headdresses on folio 20v). Editions include G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, Lasamon's Brut, edited from BM MS Cotton Caligula A.ix and BM MS Cotton Otho C.xiii (EETS vol. IO. S. 250, 1963; vol. II O. S. 277, 1978); W. R. J. Barren and S. C. Weinberg (eds), 'Brut'or, Hystoria Brutonum, La^amon (Harlow: Longman, 1995); J. W. H. Atkins (ed.), The Owl and the Nightingale, parallel texts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1922); E. G. Stanley (ed.), The Owl and the Nightingale (London: Nelson, 1960). N. R. Ker (ed.), The Owl and the Nightingale, facsimile of Jesus College MS 29 and BM MS Cotton Caligula A.ix (London: EETS O. S. 251; London: Oxford UP, 1963); Sir Frederic Madden, Lajawowamon's 'Brut' or The Chronicle of Britain, a poetical semi-Saxon paraphrase of The Brut of Wace (London: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1847). C. E. Wright, English Vernacular Hands from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. xi-xii. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 221-3. C. E. Wright gives a summary account of the re-emergence of English in English Vernacular Hands, p. xii. Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse (New York: Columbia UP, 1943), p. xi. N. R. Ker (ed.), The Owl and the Nightingale, p. xi; Richard Morris, An Old English Miscellany (London: EETS O. S. 49, London: N. Triibner, 1872). This is the title Ker gives the poem on p. xi, but in the subscript to the plate for folio 246, the last plate for Caligula A.ix in his book, the poem is referred to by Morris's title, 'Long Life'. See Plate 6 for f 3r in Wright, English Vernacular Hands, pp. 6-7. The page size is 21.5 X 14.7 cm, rather than X 15.7, as in Wright's measurement. 125

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65. See Chapter 1, note 32. 66. These are my own observations. For a discussion ofpunctus and punctus ekvatus see Clemoes, 'Liturgical influence', pp. 15-18, 20-21 and 22 footnote 45. In his 1847 edition, Madden prints the text in two columns, with one verse per line, that is, with a verse ending in a punctus ekvatus on one line followed by the closing verse ending in a punctus on the next. He prints Cotton Caligula A.ix in the left column, and Cotton Otho C XIII in the right column (the other manuscript copy of Lasamon's Brut, though it lacks the end of the poem) and an English translation across the bottom of the page. The edition of Brook and Leslie (EETS, 1963) is helpful; it prints two verses in a line, in one column, but gives the punctus ekvatus medially. On the other hand, W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg, in La^amon's Arthur (London: Longman, 1989), print the Brut like a printed Old English poem, with space at the caesura between a and b verse, and modernized punctuation. 67. Folio 246 is included in the EETS facsimile, Ker, Owl and Nightingale. 68. Morris's printed edition reproduces the punctuation markings, but for the punctus ekvatus reverses the direction of the 'tick' from the manuscript. Occasionally, as in line 29 of Long Life, a modern comma appears where the manuscript has no punctuation mark. 69. O. D. Macrae-Gibson (ed.), The Old English Riming Poem (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983). The poem is on folios 94r-95v of the Exeter Book. See also E. G. Stanley, 'Rhymes in English Medieval Verse: from Old English to Middle English', Medieval Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward D. Kennedy, Ronald Waldron and Joseph S. Wittig (Woodbridge. D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 19-54.

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7 The Transition to a Literate Subject, 1500-1800

In the previous chapter I argued that the advent of a genetically meaningful appearance for poetic discourse, the poem as visual object, preceded the advent of print. Still, it must be acknowledged that, in the century after the introduction of printing, this visual awareness accelerates. Poets not only write their poems on the page neatly lineated, but also make use of regular indentation for some lines of a stanza. This can be seen in the facsimiles of manuscripts in the poet's own hand in P. J. Croft's collection, Autograph Poetry in the English Language.1 It indicates a stronger consciousness of the literate sense of the poem, that its lines and stanza shape together are 'seen' as a clearly differentiated visual object, interdependent with the rhythm and heard patterns of the speaking of those words. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in George Puttenham's discussion 'Of proportion by situation', Chapter X (XI) in TheArte of English Poesie (published in 1589).2 In speaking of pleasing patterns of sound to the ear, Puttenham draws diagrams of horizontal lines to represent lines of verse, with rhyming lines bracketed, and comments: And I set you downe an occular example: because ye may the better conceive it. Likewise it so falleth out most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible: for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well and e converse: and this is by a naturall simpathie, betweene the eare and the eye, and betweene tunes & colours, even as there is the like betweene the other sences and their obiects of which it apperteineth not here to speake.3 Two hundred years later (1792/6), Peter Walkden Fogg goes even further with similar examples in his Elementa Anglicana, discussed by Richard Bradford. In his section on the appreciation of English verse form, Fogg reflects upon how the mind of the reader finds pleasure in the harmonies and discontinuities of rhythmic verse: 'The traces of these delightful movements frequently remain in the mind, and serve as a kind of inspiration, allowing them no rest till they have filled up the craving void of these blanks of harmony with compositions of their own. The varied and yet regular maze affords numberless objects of comparison, which to perceive is unspeakably pleasant, though to point them out might seem tedious. Nay as was before remarked on the melody of pauses, pleasure may be derived from a view of straight lines in the same variety and proportion' (Volume II, p. 1998).4 127

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Bradford gives an example in which Fogg rewrites lines of words of verse as drawn horizontal lines without words, with spaces or breaks within the line comparable to pauses in the spoken 'line'. Bradford continues: Fogg comments, 'Then the mind glances over the whole with a rapidity that enhances the delight; and the more as we suppose many other proportions still unperceived' (II, p. 199). If his experiments leave us with a message, it is that it is all too easy to regard the processes of reading, seeing and understanding as distinct aspects of our cognitive and aesthetic response to poetry. We would surely not appreciate the proportions of harmony if we did not know that they interconnect with the more familiar medium of language, but as Fogg argues, our sensitivity to the beauty of language is conditioned to some degree by the literal shape and movement of language as material, (p. 17) Bradford then points out the similarity of Fogg's visual 'wordless music' to an avant-garde example of 1924, the poem by Man Ray in which thick horizontal strokes give the appearance of title, stanzas and lines of verse, but without words (and hence also with visual sequence, but without any representation of spoken rhythm, as in Fogg's analyses).5 What is different between the twentieth-century example on the one hand and the eighteenthcentury and sixteenth-century examples on the other is not that the latter show no visual awareness - they explicitly do, in the paraphrases of Puttenham and Fogg - but rather that the twentieth-century avant-garde poem can divorce that awareness entirely from any oral poem. As I discussed in relation to the prose-poem in Chapter 1, the absence of what is expected (lineation in the prose-poem, words and hence the possibility of reading aloud, of rhythm, intonation and phonic repetition such as rhyme, in Man Ray's poem) is a negative device, in Lotman's terms, which may be interpreted as meaningful (in both cases, a subversion of genre). Before the twentieth century then, despite the clear signification of'poetic discourse' by lineation and stanza shape, for the most part the graphic display remains a seen metaphor for the heard poem, that is the graphic arrangement can be correlated directly with some phonic feature, such as metrical regularity or stanzaic rhyme scheme. Rarely does the graphic display 'mean' otherwise. An exception, already touched on briefly in Part One, in the discussion of the semiotic of art, is the use of shapes, such as angels' wings or altars, in so-called pattern poems or technopaegniay rediscovered from classical Greek models and disseminated in print. Puttenham's next chapter on proportion, Chapter XI (XII), 'Of proportion in figure', describes 15 geometrical shapes, whose origin he attributes to the 'oriental parts of the world' (he recognizes only one of the classical shapes, the egg). In Puttenham's account, it is not the graphic representation of the shape of a known object ('what is it?' to the reader) that is important, but rather the discipline required of the poet who will produce such shapes in the 128

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composition of the poem. Subsequent manuals on poetry will show, from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, a comparable change in function - from aids to composition, as in Puttenham's concern, to aids to literary appreciation.6 Such changes can be related to more widespread literacy and to changes in reading habits, as will be discussed in Chapter 8. So the twelfth-century development of the literate text as object precedes printing and similarly, printing does not directly cause a change in subjectivity, but social adjustments which result from the possibility of printing do. In fact, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is in relation to handwriting, rather than printing, that one of the most important social adjustments for poetry takes place. Certainly, as already remarked, printing leads to a more fixed sense of visual layout for printed or handwritten poems but the principal effect of print, up until, say, 1640, was not to make poems fixed printed texts, but rather to 'privatize' handwriting and create a new social space for textual production. Handwriting itself moves from the public to the private sphere. Handwriting now became associated with the author, with the notion of the signature and the autograph as authenticating the text. We see the development of private styles of handwriting, rather than the impersonal 'book-hands' of professional scribes and the less formal courthand which, being used for legal documents, had an important public function and had to be legible. Written language which is deliberately not printed, whose circulation can be controlled more easily, becomes the means of elite genres. 'Subjectivity' (and individual status) resides in the handwritten poem. These generalizations have been well established. In 1633, a little book (18.3 cm in length X 12.9 cm in breadth), of l Poems, byj. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death,, printed by M. F. for lohn Marriot and to be sold at his shop in St Dunstans Church-yard in Fleet-Street', first published John Donne's poetry in print, two years after his death.7 Yet Donne's poetry had been extensively circulated in manuscript. Peter Beal, compiler of Volume I of the Index of English Literary Manuscripts,, comments, 'probably more transcripts of Donne's poems were made than of the verse of any other British poet of the 16th and 17th centuries' (p. 245). Beal quotes Edmund Blunden's translation of Donne's ('playful') Latin verse to a Dr Andrews, whose children had torn up one of Donne's books: What Printing-presses yield we think good store, But what is writ by hand we reverence more: A book that with this printing-blood is dyed On shelves for dust and moth is set aside, But if't be penned it wins a sacred grace And with the ancient Fathers takes its place .. .8 From 1611 Donne made several attempts to gather collections of his 129

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poems but without great enthusiasm for print (Beal describes these efforts, p. 245). As Arthur Marotti notes, in 1619 Donne gave a copy of his works to his friend Sir Robert Ker (Beal prints 'Kerr') with the ambiguous instruction, 'publish it not, but yet burn it not; and between those, do what you will with it'. Marotti comments, In expressing his wish that his work exist in limited manuscript circulation somewhere between the extremes of book publication for a general audience and destruction of the text itself, the ecclesiastical Donne denned a set of socioliterary circumstances he had consistently desired for most of his writing, particularly for his poetry. Even before he became a minister Donne thought of almost all of his verse and much of his prose as coterie literature. Although at least twice, in 1614 and in 1619, Donne collected his poetry with the idea of publishing it, he could not bring himself to commit the body of his verse to print.9

Just why Donne 'could not bring himself to appear in print is made clear in studies such as that by J. W. Saunders, 'The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry'.10 'The leading court poets ... did not write for print. Men like Wyatt, Surrey, Bryan, John Harington and Vaux in the earlier part of the century, or Sidney, Dyer, Fulke Greville, Raleigh and Oxford in the later part, were not addressing the sort of audience a printed book would normally find' (Saunders, p. 139). The class distinction was clear: 'whereas for the amateur poets of the Court an avoidance of print was socially desirable, for the professional poets outside or only on the edge of Court circles the achievement of print became an economic necessity' (p. 141). By the end of the sixteenth century, Saunders suggests, those who lived by poetry included Spenser, Daniel, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Drayton and Jonson. The awkward situation of Ben Jonson is well documented, one who had not been a student at university or at the inns of court, one for whom 'a literary career' would not in time 'yield to the graver demands of church or state', as it did for Donne.11 Yet it was through the publication of The Works of Benjamin Jonson in 1616 that Jonson consolidated his position as 'unofficial poet laureate' to James I, from whom, shortly earlier, he had received a pension. In his biography of Jonson, David Riggs suggests that the motif of social advancement... pervades the folio [of the Works] as a whole and that this is particularly seen in the transition from Epigrams to The Forest within the Works. Many of Jonson's Epigrams and the vast majority of the poems that he discarded in 1616 are addressed to men employed in the law, the army, the civil service, the dieater, the schools and universities, and the arts. The author of The Forest, by contrast, writes for an audience of aristocrats and landowners, and adopts the stance of an amateur poet attached to a noble household ... The Forest ... addresses tensions and ambiguities in Jonson's self-conception as a courtly amateur.12

However, whatever the fashionable stance taken by Jonson to promote his 130

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social acceptability in 1616, his careful supervision of the printing of his Works shows a new professionalism, a concern with the authorized, that is fixed, text which is economically driven and which will become the norm of print-culture by the end of the century. For Jonson, there is the need to control the means of production so that an identifiable 'product' results, one with economic value to its producer. In twentieth-century studies scholars will write of the 'commodification of culture in postmodern society', but such commodification emerges with the earliest use of print to obtain economic value, just as it is linked to the emergence of professional middleclass producers.13 Saunders makes some interesting observations about the handwritten poetry and oral performance of the Tudor court. The best English of the day was, he says, quoting George Puttenham, the Queen's English, the 'usual speach [sic] of the Court'. 'As far as the Court poets were concerned, it was a language kept alive, fluent and natural by the continuous tradition preserved at Court of the oral recitation of poetry The professional poets (in contrast to the Court poets) were not denied the audience of the ear, but... while manuscripts were few and oral recitations from them obligatory, printed books were relatively numerous and apt to encourage the habit of silent reading.' Saunders uses this distinction to explain the 'natural, idiomatic, vigorous' language of the Court poets, whose inheritors are the metaphysical poets, including Donne, from the 'elaborate artificialities' of the professional poets.14 Another feature of these sixteenth-century manuscript poems was the uncertainty of their preservation. Once the poem had been circulated among a small group of friends, the coterie, it had served the purpose of its author. It might or might not be preserved by transcriptions of transcriptions. This function of immediate social purpose is clearly still to be seen in the so-called 'answer poems' of the seventeenth century. The answer poem 'thrived' in the atmosphere of the 'peculiar blend of intimacy and formality of the courts of James I and Charles I'.15 As the name implies, answer poems responded, in debate, imitation and amplification, to a previous poem. Marotti comments on the 'sharing of certain styles of communication' by those who shared in 'games of exchange and answer poetry' and continues: It may be difficult for modern readers to view Donne's poems as coterie social transactions, rather than as literary icons, but this, I believe, is necessary since virtually all of the basic features of Donne's poetic art are related to its coterie character. His creation of a sense of familiarity and intimacy, his fondness for dialectic, intellectual complexity, paradox and irony, the appeals to shared attitudes and group interests (if not to private knowledge), the explicit gestures of biographical self-referentiality, the styles he adopted or invented all relate to the coterie circumstances of the verse. Donne was obviously most comfortable when he knew his readers personally and they knew him.16 131

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Answer poems might be changed deliberately in response, poems might be changed inadvertently in transcription, poems might be lost altogether - the persistence of a fixed text, as assumed in a literate understanding of 'literature' in the twentieth century, is obviously not guaranteed in the usual social context of poetic discourse in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The author shared in this impermanent notion of the text. Harold Love, in his detailed study, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, observes, 'The ideal of creativity... is ... a gradualistic one. Freed from the print-publishing author's obligation to produce a finalized text suitable for large-scale replication, the scribal author-publisher is able both to polish texts indefinitely and to personalize them to suit the tastes of particular recipients.517 Rather than the static 'final intention' usually understood of a literate authorial speaking subject, the subject of the enunciation is more like the everyday speaking subject of conversation, the T who changes and adapts to the varying circumstances of reception. Thus Love's study demonstrates not only the persistence of manuscript culture but also the persistent oral view of communication at this time. We see this, for example, in the dominantly oral transmission of news in the first part of the seventeenth century, which Love describes as particularly associated 'with walking in the nave of old St Paul's Cathedral' (p. 193). This was a centralized physical place/social space of news dissemination (just as the Tudor and early Jacobean Court was the physical place/social space of poetic dissemination). Love points out the fragmentation of this oral transmission in the development of the coffee houses of the later seventeenth century and suggests that, by this time, written and printed information had begun to compensate for the less efficient, more fragmented, circulation of oral news associated with the physical/social dispersion into various coffee houses. The seventeenth century is then a period of transition in the construction of a literate subject. In an earlier study, 'Manuscript versus Print in the Transmission of English Literature, 1600-1700', Harold Love compares contemporary seventeenth-century poets: Shakespeare and Jonson, Donne and Spenser, Marvell and Herbert, Rochester and Dryden. In each case the latter, Love suggests, is print-oriented, the former either script-oriented or at least less print-oriented.18 George Herbert's poem The Temple, first printed in 1633, famously exhibits a marked visual awareness. It foregrounds, I suggest, not only the materiality of the text but also the physical process of reading, of 'passing through' a book, turning the pages with the hands and following the print with the eyes. The equation of the church of the poem's Field or subject matter with the physical book of its Mode or displayed message (as in the first poem 'The Church-porch'), enables the compliant reader to pass through the book as through the church. Besides the basic spatial or visual awareness such an equation shows, there are the famous pattern poems of Greek origin, mentioned in Part One, 'The Altar' and the 132

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two 'Easter Wings'.19 There is also a striking use of indentation and layout, capitalization and italicization, as, for example, the use of capitals and right justification to highlight the end-word letter play on successive lines of each three-line stanza in 'Paradise', as in stanza 2 (p. 129): What open force, or hidden C H A R M Can blast my fruit, or bring me H A R M, While the enclosure is thine A R M? The particular success of Herbert's effects emerges from that consistent alignment of vertical and horizontal type which can be achieved only in print. Such effects could be reproduced in manuscript with great care, but not as accurately, and with variation between different copies. As Love points out, with type, the printer could 'manipulate an impression until it was precisely the intended shape and then take off all the copies from that ideal impression'.20 If one dichotomy of script and print was that of the aristocratic or socially elite practitioner versus the less elevated professional writer, a second dichotomy was that of the licentious and self-aggrandizing (oral because performance-centred) world of the court versus the virtuous and literate world of the good Christian, dedicated to the reading of Scripture (representing the contrast from the latter's point of view). Herbert the country parson fits this description, but the Nonconformists generally, with a more literal attitude towards scriptural interpretation than that of the Catholic tradition, and generally a lower-class status, appear more readily to move towards a print-based, fixed-text subjectivity. It would be interesting to chart the role of literacy in government during the Commonwealth, but certainly commentators agree that, after the Restoration, the court of Charles II functioned in a print-based environment very different from the scriptcentred courts of the pre-Commonwealth Stuarts. If this history of poetic discourse appears disreputable from a modern cultural studies perspective, concentrating too exclusively on the practices of those in power, it has to be acknowledged that literary discourse, so recognized, is exactly that, an elite enterprise until social changes in literacy distribution. Though scholars of reading have properly warned of the dangers of basing descriptions of social literacy on a basic 'signing your name' criterion,21 it is still interesting to note that, in the seventeenth century at the time of the English Civil War, 'more than two thirds of men and nine tenths of women were so illiterate that they could not write their own names'.22 In contrast, Gustav Klaus claims that by the mid-eighteenth century, the English lower classes were comparatively more literate than those of the Continent. In the eighteenth century, he suggests 'the literacy rate amongst the labouring classes alone (excluding urban artisans) remained fairly constant between 35 and 40 per cent, except for a drop in the 133

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third quarter of the century'.23 His concern is with lower-class producers of literary works, rather than merely with readers; he identifies two 'waves' of 'plebeian poetry' and suggests that these may be associated with the two major literacy campaigns of the eighteenth century, that of the charity school movement in the first part, and that of the development of Sunday Schools from the 1780s (p. 10). But his evidence also suggests that 'the further away from the south they lived, the less likely it was that the common people would find ways of taking an active part in literary life' - not one plebeian poet 'came from an area north of the line from Birmingham to Norwich' (pp. 7-8). So, from any perspective, in the eighteenth as much as the seventeenth century, the south - London and the Oxbridge universities - is the literary centre.24 One would predict that a literate subjectivity specifically for poetic discourse, a new poetic habitus, would emerge more rapidly in a Nonconformist milieu. Milton (1608-74) is obviously of interest here. He leaves a 'not inconsiderable' number of manuscripts by and associated with him, including especially the autograph Trinity MS, 'which must be the single most important poetical autograph of the 17th century'.25 Entries by Milton himself date from, probably, 1632 to 1652. P. J. Croft's comments, in his introduction to an autograph facsimile of Milton, suggest the complicated route by which Milton's handwritten copies became the present manuscript 'book'. 'The survival from this period of a poet's "loose papers" - working drafts of poems he was himself to publish - is a remarkable phenomenon ... the sheets which make up the volume are said to have been found scattered among the papers of Sir Henry Newton Puckering, who in 1691 had presented considerable collections to the newly built library of Trinity College: the loose sheets were gathered together by Charles Mason of the college, and in 1736 they were bound at the expense of Thomas Clarke.' The Trinity Manuscript is not at all the coterie manuscript compilation of the early seventeenth century. Croft also comments, 'Milton is not writing here in the first heat of composition, for the manuscript of Comus is almost certainly based on an earlier (perhaps piece-meal) draft no longer extant which the poet revises and expands as he transcribes, probably giving his poem coherent shape for the first time.... Milton continued to revise the Trinity Manuscript here and there even after 1634, probably for the first publication in 1637.'26 This description of'drafts' and revision, ceasing only with print, may be viewing Milton's writing practices with the assumptions of twentieth-century literacy, but the circumstances are suggestive. For Milton, the new literate speaking subject of poetic discourse does not appear to be a shameful positioning - he gave presentation exempla of several of his printed books to persons of influence, and also to other poets, like Andrew Marvell. Rather than the conflict of 'social' and 'economic' value that confronted Jonson when manuscript and print were alternative modes of publication, Milton's practices suggest the increased movement of hand134

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writing into the private sphere for poetic discourse, with the 'natural* mode of publication increasingly being that of print.27 The career of John Dryden (1631-1700) provides a final example of the move, during the course of the seventeenth century, from a primarily oral to a primarily literate understanding of the subject of poetic discourse. Harold Love describes Dryden as 'the supreme professional man of letters of his time' and that (with the exception of Mac Flecknozv) Dryden 'hurried every work composed during his mature years straight into the hands of the printer'.28 The observations of Peter Beal, in his 'Introduction' to Dryden in The Index of English Literary Manuscripts, provide complementary support to Love's judgement. So, 'for all Dryden's prolific literary activity, surviving autographs by him are relatively few' (p. 383) and most of Dryden's original literary manuscripts 'evidently met with the same fate as most such manuscripts in the seventeenth century and were destroyed, either by the author himself, or after having served as printer's copy, or through subsequent neglect' (p. 384). In contrast to Donne, or even Milton, there is little concern to keep handwritten copies once work has appeared in print. The one autograph of poetry surviving (except for some eight unpublished lines) was, extraordinarily, not recognized as such until 1966.29 It is the text of Dryden's elegy on Oliver Cromwell, published in print in 1659, at the beginning of his career. The autograph 'bears no marks of use for the printer and was probably prepared for submission to friends before consigning the poem to print',30 a function more of preliminary review than of manuscript publication, especially relevant to the early stage of his work. From my own observation, the manuscript (on three pages, written on both sides) has originally been kept folded into four, kept in a pocket perhaps? Certainly it has not originally been part of a larger compilation.31 There are small differences between the manuscript and printed versions which indicate slight revision of the manuscript fair copy, but perhaps the most interesting feature is that the printed version varies Dryden's handwritten punctuation. Thus the manuscript first stanza has (Croft, pp. 53-4): And now t'is time; for theire officious hast Who would before haue borne him to the sky Like Eager Romans, e're all rites were past Did let too soone the sacred Eagle fly.32

whereas the printed version omits the comma after Romans, and inserts commas at the ends of the first and second lines. Clearly the printer (if it is the printer's alteration) has a conventional visual understanding of 'lines of poetry' (seen equals heard), whereas Dryden's original punctuation sets the rhythm of the speaking voice, with its punctuated pause after Romans, against the visual arrangement of lines, the cognitive pause of the eye encountering blank space. The printed punctuation changes the formal 135

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(grammatical) relation of 'Like Eager Romans' from a link with what precedes it to a link with what follows it, but it also reduces the complexity of the poetic texture (the interrelation of sound and sight). By 1700 then (and possibly at least since the Restoration), the transition to print being the primary medium for the publication of the poetic discourse of the elite is fully accomplished, and the status of the poem as a visual object which can be reproduced exactly in print is well established. The speaking subject, the poet, now owns the seen as well as the spoken poem. However the association of the seen with the spoken is still much closer than it would later be, and this is somewhat surprisingly indicated by the excess of typographic marking. In the seventeenth century, the function of accidentals such as capitals and italics was an attempt to bring print closer to speech. David Foxon in a detailed, though not fully published, study, comments, 'I have made no attempt to trace the way in which the capitalizing of nouns became standard practice by the end of the century, any more than I have traced the steps by which the use of italics and capitals fell into disfavour as the eighteenth century progressed. What is clear is that the old and new ways co-existed; John Smith in his Printer's grammar of 1755 is explicit about the author's right to choose after what manner our work is to be done; whether the old way with Capitals to Substantives, and Italic to proper names; or after the more neat practice, all in Roman, and Capitals to Proper names, and Emphatical words.'33 The 'most explicit defence' of the old ways which Foxon came across was by Benjamin Franklin in 1773, a defence which makes the auditory function of the typography explicit: Franklin had sent his hoax 'An Edict to the King of Prussia' to the Public Advertiser with a note asking that the editor 'take care that the compositor observe strictly the Italicking, Capitalling and Pointing'. The Public Advertiser did, but the Chronicle, which reprinted the item, did not. Franklin wrote in a letter to his brother, It is reprinted in the Chronicle, where you will see it, but stripped of all the capitaling and italicing [sic], that intimate the allusions and mark the emphasis of written discourses, to bring them as near as possible to those spoken: printing such a piece all in one even small character, seems to me like repeating one of Whitefield's sermons in the monotony of a schoolboy. (Foxon typescript, p 243) These graphic features for 'reconstituting' the author's pronunciation, introduced in the seventeenth century when poetry was first widely printed, were used initially by Alexander Pope but subsequently gradually phased out. Presumably Pope came to recognize that print, visual language, now provided a status, a sphere of power, of its own, relatively independent of the spoken language.

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Pope's attitudes to the typography of his poems is well known. The Bodleian manuscript of the Essay on Criticism is handwritten in expert calligraphy by Pope to resemble print. ('Written in the year 1709' is noted in the margin. The first edition was printed in 1711 .)34 As John Butt observes, the marginal notes in the Essay make clear that Pope was concerned to 'visualize the poem's printed appearance' and to communicate this visualization accurately to the printer.35 Pope writes a neat clear hand, uses capitals, underlines words and indents and punctuates carefully. Most informative however is the 'meta-text' Pope writes on the text of the poem. To the printer Pope writes, on the top left of the first page, 'transcribe from this original that is directly marked'. After line 8 he inserts a mark and puts in the margin 'end the first page here'. Thereafter he marks every page division. By page 2 of his manuscript he is actively revising, crossing out eight lines and writing 'transcribe all these' in the margin. Where he has left an indentation ('In search of wit these lose their common sense'), he writes in the margin 'without a break'. Obviously the genre of poetry for Pope resides as much in its appearance as visual object as in its sound patternings, and accordingly he tries to extend the authority of the poet into control of its graphic realization (the printer, as Butt points out, does not necessarily obey). This manuscript of the Essay on Criticism is thus rather like the performance text of a play, the poet-playwright to the printer-director, the stage the blank page, and the actors on that stage the typographic display of the text. Being fanciful, one might suggest that Pope has imploded the Aristotelian opposition of mimesis (showing) and diegesis (telling), except that this showing, far from being innocent and instantly apprehended, is as much a social convention of language practice as any speech (these were issues raised in Part One, in discussing the semiotic of art). Moreover it is the authority over the visual text, rather than its fixity, which is Pope's concern; he himself became interested in the evolution of his poems as they passed through successive drafts in manuscript and successive revised editions in print - a kind of meta-author (the author studying the author), just as he had produced a meta-text (the text on the text) for the printer.36 Other literary discourses, such as those of drama and of prose, of course did not remain constant in their visual display in this early post-printing period and general conclusions drawn from studies of other genres are relevant in various ways to the development of poetic discourse. Plates 38, 39 and 40 in M. B. Parkes's Pause and Effect illustrate the interrelated developments in layout and punctuation for play texts and narratives in the early eighteenth century, especially in the indication of dialogue.37 These developments graphically strengthen the classification boundaries which separate the recognizable texts of the drama and the (emerging) novel from those of poetic discourse; if Aristotle's discrimination of'genres' was based on who was speaking, the identification of literary discourses from the eighteenth century would be based, in the first instance, on what was 137

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printed, on the Mode of the printed language (printed to be read as a poem, printed to be read as a novel, and so on). Roger Chattier, in discussing the changes of format introduced into later editions of Congreve's plays in the eighteenth century, comments, 'Variations in the most purely formal aspects of a text's presentation can thus modify both its register of reference and its mode of interpretation.'38 Here he is referring to changes in the printed play text which restored to it aspects of its theatrical production, such as scene division by illustration and numbering, characters listed before scenes and in the margin when speaking. Not only is the text easier to read as a play, but this layout, Chartier implies, located the works intertextually, through its graphic display, in a more prestigious literary genre which 'provided a new horizon of reception'. Chartier writes, 'the mechanisms used in the octavo edition of 1710, borrowed from devices used for printed editions of French plays, gave a new legitimacy to Congreve's plays, henceforth "classics" and part of the literary canon, and induced their author to make changes here and there to refine the style of his works and make them conform better to their new "typographic" dignity' (pp. 10-11).39 Chartier has asserted, if I paraphrase accurately the quotation given first in the previous paragraph, that changes in graphic realization may be constitutive of changes in generic recognition and hence of semiotic (meaning-making) practices of interpretation. He goes on to say, in reference now I presume to prose, that 'the same is true, on a greater scale, of the greatest change in the way texts were cast into print between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, "the definitive triumph of white over black"40 - that is, the introduction of breathing space on to the page by the use of more paragraphs to break up an uninterrupted continuous text and by paragraph indentations that make the order of discourse immediately visible' (p. 11). Thus, potentially, an equation of the cognitive and the visual was produced: 'The new publishers suggested a new reading ... that fragmented the text into separate units and echoed the intellectual or discursive articulation of the argument in the visual articulation of the page' (p. 11). On just such assumptions of equivalence, but between the phonic and graphic realizations, poetic discourse had, since the fourteenth century, been able to rely. The reader, recognizing in the printed line an instance of a poetic genre, read with the expectation of poetic patterns of rhythm and rhyme. These new prosaic conventions which equated the graphic and generic facilitated however the recognition of an equivalence between graphic realization and rhetorical structure (dispositio). These material cues of the text as visual object (unlike the scribal innovations of the twelfth century) were well within the control of the author (to the extent that the printer obeyed authorial instruction), so that graphic display could be read as augmenting or guiding interpretation. It will not be until the twentieth century that poetry avails itself of similar possibilities - as already discussed in Part One in relation to the poem as 'visual object' (the use of juxtaposition 138

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by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams), and to the semiotic of visual language (the direct graphic realization of semantics). Notes 1.

P. J. Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language (London: Cassell, 1973). See the facsimiles for John Lilliat, Sir Walter Ralegh, Fulke Greville, all born 1550-54. 2. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, introductory 'Note' on publication in the Scolar Press edition (Menston, England, 1968); also 'The date of the Arte' in the edition of Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936, repr. 1970), pp. xliv-liii. 3. Willcock and Walker, Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, p. 85.1 have replaced archaic long s with short s, and 'u' as consonant with V. 4. Richard Bradford, 'The visual poem in the eighteenth century', Visible Language, Vol. 23 (1989), pp. 16-17. 5. Man Ray's 'poem' is reprinted in The Dada Market, An Anthology of Poetry, ed. Willard Bohn (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993), p. 171. 6. Richard Bradford makes this observation, 'Visual poem in the eighteenth century', p. 10. 7. The information is copied from the title page of the first edition. Three poems had appeared in print in Donne's lifetime: the Anniversaries, Elegie upon ... Prince Henry, and Upon Mr Thomas Coryats Crudities. Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. I (London: Mansell, 1980), p. 245. 8. From Blunden's article, 'Some seventeenth-century Latin poems by English writers', Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 25 (1955-6), p. 11, quoted by Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. I, p. 245. 9. Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. ix. See further by Marotti, 'The transmission of lyric poetry and the institutionalizing of literature in the English Renaissance', in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rosse Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit, Wayne State UP, 1991), pp. 21-41; 'Manuscript, print, and the social history of the lyric', in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993); Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995). Chapter 4 of the last mentioned, 'Print and the lyric', is especially relevant to the concerns of this chapter. 10. J. W. Saunders, 'The stigma of print: a note on the social bases of Tudor poetry', Essays in Criticism, Vol. 1 (1951), pp. 139-64. 11. See Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spencer, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 109. 12. On Jonson's publishing of the Works, see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989), pp. 221-38. 139

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13. Richard C. Newton suggests that Jonson's Works is the first of a new type of collection, the 'critical collection' (the other two being the 'sequence' and the 'miscellany'). The 'critical' collection 'presents' the author, 'represents the self; to paraphrase, the speaking subject of the implied poet can now become the object of attention, that is the subject matter, for the development of literary criticism. 'Making books from leaves: poets become editors', in Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe, ed. Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 246-64. 14. Saunders, 'Stigma of print', p. 162. 15. E. F. Hart, 'The answer-poem of the early seventeenth century', Review of English Studies, N.S., Vol. 7, No. 25 (1956), pp. 19-29; Marotti, 'Answer poetry', Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, pp. 159-71; also Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers, ' "Thus Friends Absent Speake": the exchange of verse letters between John Donne and Henry Wotton', Modern Philology, Vol. 81 (1984), pp. 361-77. 16. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, p. 19. 17. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 53. 18. Harold Love, 'Manuscript versus print in the transmission of English literature, 1600-1700', Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 9 (1985), pp. 95-107. 19. George Herbert, The Complete English Works, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater (Everyman's new edn., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 23 and 40-1. 20. Love, 'Manuscript versus print in the transmission of English literature', p. 100. 'Print-culture' appears to have had a particular role in Herbert's popularity. After the Restoration Donne's poems were little read, whereas Herbert's went through many editions. T. A. Birrell discusses the role of the publisher in creating demand; he infers from the other matter, poetically inferior but religious, which the publisher issued in the same volume as The Temple, that 'Herbert survived through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, not as a metaphysical poet, but as a prayerbook'. 'The influence of seventeenth-century publishers on the presentation of English literature', in Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English for Johan Gerritsen, ed. Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes with Hans Jansen (Groningen: Wolters-Noord Loff, 1985), pp. 163-6. 21. For example, Paul J. Korshin warns against such simplistic criteria in his 'Introduction' to The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 3-4. 22. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980), p. 2. 23. H. Gustav Klaus, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), p. 10. 24. For a wider discussion of European developments from 1500 to 1800, see 140

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

Roger Chattier, 'The practical impact of writing', in Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life, Vol. Ill, English trans. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989), pp. 111-24. Peter Beal, Index of Early Literary Manuscripts, Vol. II, 1625-1700, Part 2, LeeWycherley (London: Mansell, 1993), p. 70. Croft, Autograph Poetry, p. 47. At the same time, Milton did not have as much concern with the typographic appearance of his texts as has sometimes been suggested. Detailed study of Milton's orthography and the punctuation of the printed texts is given by R. G. Moyles, in The Text of Paradise Lost: A Study in Editorial Procedure (Toronto: Toronto UP, 1985). Moyles, p. 115, concludes that Milton did not intend his spelling to function as a system, as some other commentators have suggested. Love, Scribal Publication, p. 101. By Anna Maria Grind, in The Times Literary Supplement, 22 Sept. 1966, and in 'Uno sconosciuto autografo Drydeniano al British Museum', English Miscellany, Vol. 17 (1966), pp. 311-20. Croft, Autograph Poetry, p. 53. Dryden's autograph manuscript is now in the British Library, Lansdowne MS 1045, ff. 101-3v. Croft, Autograph Poetry, p. 54. D. F. Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, first uncorrected draft, unpublished typescript, 1975, pp. 243-4. The typescript is lodged in the British Library. The book of the same name (see following note) excludes the seventeenth-century material. Bodleian Library MS Eng.poet.c.l. For a detailed study of Pope's relations with his printers, see David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, The Lyell Lectures, Oxford, 1975-6, rev. and ed. James McLaverry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Publication dates for the Essay on Criticism are given in the table of Pope's publications, 1709-20, pp. 40-1. Tope's poetical manuscripts', Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 40, pp. 23-39, reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (London: Frank Cass, 1964), pp. 507-27. The subsequent observations are from my own viewing of the manuscript. For lists of editions see McLaverty (ed.), Foxon, Pope and the Early EighteenthCentury Book Trade, endnote 34. For manuscripts, see the entry for Pope in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. Ill, 1700-1800, Part 3, ed. Margaret M. Smith and Alexander Lindsay (London: Mansell, 1992), pp. 1-19. Plate 38 is from W. Congreve's narrative Incognita (1692), Plate 39 from William Burnaby's play The Reform 'd Wife (1700); Plate 40 from Henry Fielding's narrative The history of Tom Jones a foundling (1749). M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect, An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1992), pp. 224-9. Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe 141

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between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), p. 11. 39. In his discussion, Chattier is using the study of D. F. McKenzie, 'Typography and meaning: the case of William Congreve', The Book and the Book-Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Proceedings of the Fifth Wolfenbuttler Symposium, 1-3 Nov. 1977, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg: Dr Ernst Hauswedell, 1981), pp. 81-126. 40. Chartier takes this phrase from French scholars Henri-Jean Martin and Bruno Delmas, Histoire et pouvoirs de I'ecrit (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1988), pp. 295-9. English translation: The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

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8 The Reading Subject and the Writing Subject, 1800-1990

What made possible changes in the framing of poetic discourse in the twentieth century, that is changes in the generic possibilities of the poetic line? It is my contention that it is changes in the subject through the emergence of different interpretative strategies. But which subject? The subject of writing? or the subject of reading? In fact, I will suggest, it is an interrelation of these two which, primarily, provides the appropriate environment for change. Histories of writers, of literary production, discuss the emergence of romanticism in the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 But histories of readers, of reading interpretation, describe the persistence of neoclassical modes of reading well into the nineteenth century, and indeed have suggested that it is not until the late nineteenth century that 'Romantic' assumptions are the norm of reading.2 This latter date coincides with the beginning of the emergence of so-called avant-garde poetry. By 1900, 'Romantic' conventions are dominant in both production and interpretation of poetic discourse and such 'naturalness' of generic practices is the environment against which early twentieth-century poets in English react. As David Perkins has remarked, 'to account for [why poetic change came when it did, and as a revolution rather than a transition] we must keep in mind the extent to which poetic conventions control how and what a poet writes'.3 The phrase 'poetic conventions' has too often been taken as homogeneous, usually as referring to a literary history of writers. But the history of readers and the environment of reception of writing is an important and sometimes contradictory aspect of'poetic conventions'. The remainder of this chapter elaborates on these generalizations. Historians of reading have identified - and elaborated on and disputed three major dichotomies of change (the extreme nodes of transition) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and into the early nineteenth. These are the opposition of 'oral' and 'visual' reading, the opposition between 'intensive' and 'extensive' reading and the opposition between communal and private reading, the first term in each pair representing the earlier stage.4 Each of these transitions in more general literate practices will have the potential to influence the practices specific to poetic discourse, transforming the reading subject into one who can reframe the poetic text in her or his reading of it. And from such reframings, as discussed at the beginning of this book, reclassifications of poetic discourse emerge, even if at very different rates for different readers (that is, readers' assumptions about what social practice you are engaged in when you read change over time). Roger 143

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Chartier's concern, in The Order of Books, is in fact to question the simplicity of these three 'fundamental cleavages' but, as with many reductive (structuralist) accounts, the distinctions are still a useful way (as Chartier himself finds them) of beginning to talk about changes of reading practice.5 I will briefly discuss each opposition in turn. By 'oral' and 'visual' reading is meant an opposition between sounding out the words aloud, or at least mumbling them, in order to comprehend the meaning, and what is sometimes called 'silent reading', when the meaning is comprehended without any external reconstitution of speech. It is clear that until the twelfth-century Renaissance, for the most part, writing appears to have been regarded as a record of speech. The classical or early medieval densely covered page (or monument) of valuable writing surface appears comparatively impenetrable to a modern eye, used to 'sight-reading' and 'skimming'. As a corollary, those who were least familiar with the spoken language of written records were more likely to introduce additional devices to enable speech to be reconstituted Thus the Irish monks of the sixth and seventh centuries, with a native language much removed from classical Latin compared to their European contemporaries, are credited with the introduction of word separation. Later Classical Latin texts, which they would have been attempting to copy, used continuous writing (variously called scriptura continua and scriptio continua) where letters were written in continuous sequence with no space to indicate word division. Such writing assumed a reader who spoke Latin, and who would reconstitute the sound of the language in order to understand it.6 There were exceptions to the general rule of 'oral' reading, the most notable being that of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, described by Augustine of Hippo on a visit in AD 384. As Alberto Manguel quotes, in his History of Reading, 'When he read,' said Augustine, 'his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.'7 The introduction of word division to facilitate the reading of Latin spread rapidly in insular scriptoria, and slowly on the Continent, but wherever it was used it facilitated the emergence of silent reading. The eye can grasp about 15 characters as a single visual unit, so texts with word divisions of 15 or fewer letters can be remembered as a visual display without sounding out the words.8 The first regulations requiring scribes to be silent while copying in the monastic scriptoria date from the ninth century at Tours.9 However this silent writing is 'copy-writing'; our modern use of'writing' blurs together the meanings of 'composing' and 'making visual' for language. The medieval distinction is nicely brought out by the use of the Latin dictare for writing/composing and scribere for writing/making visual or copying, making clear that writing in the sense of composing is still understood as an oral activity, 'dictating'. This 144

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dictating may be recorded roughly on wax tablets by a scribe or by the speaker, for later 'writing' by scribes. In the eleventh century, Eadmer of Canterbury still thought of composing in writing as 'dictating to himself'.10 However, the twelfth century is a period of great change in both reading and writing practices. M. B. Parkes, in 'The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book', describes the changes from practices associated with the culture of the monastery to those associated with the culture of the school, a change from reading as 'a spiritual exercise', with meditation on the text combined with prayer, and reading as 'a process of study', in which the text might be carefully considered as a whole, or consulted for particular reference, but in either case engaged with in a more intellectual way, with a concern to follow an argument, or locate a particular authority." From such needs develops the so-called 'bookish text', with its accelerated use of visual cues. Parkes's article includes several plates of manuscripts copied in England and France from the mid-twelfth to the fifteenth centuries to illustrate the evolution of these innovations, while Ivan Illich describes the earliest stages of this evolution, the transitional practices, in his book In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's 'Didascalicon'.12 The 'bookish text' now records in its page layout of language, not so much the speech of the author as the author's (or commentator's) 'thoughts', with index, argument summary and general display facilitating understanding rather than voicing. Readers, whose needs had brought these changes in the physical object, the book, into being, were in turn reconstituted in their subjectivity, being now literate in a 'scholastic' rather than 'monastic' way, according to Illich (p. 95) - though the examples he gives make clear the intellectually privileged milieu in which such reading, and the associated writing, was established. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century brings notes from which he gives his lectures, fourteenth-century students take dictation of arguments too complex to be followed merely by listening (pp. 91-2). This is reading still associated with very specific social sites of literacy. So did the 'bookish texts' of writers change readers from 'oral' to 'silent'? I suspect that in general the answer is no, until the eighteenth century, and for poetry certainly no, until the eighteenth century. Though the poetic text, from the twelfth century, also became more 'bookish' in the sense that its material display in the book gave more visual information about the organization of the text, this was primarily information about its organization in speech. Printing made the visual cues of the 'bookish text' even more regulated but, as the previous chapter elaborated, even well after the possibility of printing, poetic discourse persisted within a primarily oral culture of performance, to which silent reading is irrelevant. Moreover silent reading for poetry required a different understanding of 'thought' from silent reading in the scholastic tradition, for (with the exception of totally visual poetry, such as some twentieth-century concrete poetry) the reader 145

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must 'hear' the language in her/his 'mind's ear' if the characteristic rhythms and phonemic patternings of poetic genres are to be experienced. Such 'silent hearing' is attested in the eighteenth century. Thomas Barnes, in an essay of 1785, 'On the Nature and Essential Characteristics of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose', wrote: The musicalness and flow of numerous composition, which charms the ear of every judicious reader, is certainly felt most strongly where it is read aloud with taste and expression. But when read with the eye only, without the accompaniment of the voice, there is a fainter association of the sound, the shadow of the music, as it were, connected with the words, so that we can judge exactly of the composition as if it were audible to the ear. This habit of composition associating sound with vision is formed gradually by habit... And some Gentlemen are said to have acquired the art of mental combination so perfectly as to read even the notes of a musical composition with considerable pleasure.13

In the previous chapter we saw that the text as fixed visual object appears to have been well established for writers by 1700 to 1720, though we also saw Benjamin Franklin, in 1773, arguing for the retention in the typography of the printed text of additional cues for speech. Whether this 'speech' is vocalized, or heard in the mind's ear, as Barnes suggests some thirteen years later, is not clear. What is clear, however, is that the eighteenth century is a period of transition in relation to silent reading; by 1798, the publication year of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (the first edition), I conclude that silent reading is the usual understanding of literate practice. As many scholars have recently pointed out, writing 'makes possible the detachment of affirmation from the speaker'.14 But silent reading also detaches the reader from her or his own body and its expressive practices in the external world. It favours introspection, in which the 'internal' world, the atemporal world of the poetic imagination and memory, is 'more real'. The consequence of such 'subjective reality' will intersect with the consequences of the other two reading tendencies, those of extensive and of private reading. The opposition of'extensive' to 'intensive' reading practices was hypothesized by Rolf Engelsing, a German historian.15 This 'reading revolution' is also supposed to coincide with the end of the eighteenth century. The older intensive style was associated with a limited access to books and to literacy. Intense reading and rereading of the same texts, such as the Bible, an almanac or a missal, facilitated a profound knowledge and memorization of those texts, and a profound respect for them. Extensive reading, on the other hand, is associated with access to a much wider range of books, read perhaps only once so that the reader consequently has a more superficial knowledge of a wider range of texts. Engelsing has been criticized for overgeneralizing his studies from 'the well-heeled burghers of Bremen' to 'literate groups in 146

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different circumstances elsewhere in Europe',16 but nevertheless his distinction is suggestive. Extensive reading will favour more individuation of reading experience, and hence of interpretation. Intertextuality- the reading of texts in the context of other texts - rather than intratextuality - the close rereading of the one text - both reduces the authority of the individual text and increases the contribution of the reader's own habitus to the interpretative process. Finally, the opposition of private reading to communal reading. In The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France,, Roger Chartier has pointed out the complexity of relation between 'literate' society and 'illiterate' individual in French culture of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Writing, he claims, was 'present at the very heart of an illiterate culture - in festive ritual, in public places and in the workplace'.17 And he writes in his Introduction, 'Thanks to the various social situations in which reading aloud occurred, there existed in prerevolutionary societies a culture dependent on writing, even among people incapable of producing or reading a written text. Access to the written word was a process much more broadly defined than simply the silent reading of an individual in isolation, literacy in its classic sense' (p. 5). But as the ability to read became more widespread so the need to participate in public readings decreased. In England, Roy McKeen Wiles has argued, literacy was already more widespread in the eighteenth century than generally acknowledged, especially in the provinces, basing his opinion on the many towns with local newspapers of wide circulation, on the many books, pamphlets and magazines available for purchase, and on the lending libraries which proliferated.18 By the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Burt, a working-class boy, was able (in his later autobiography) to describe his private reading of Gibbon's history, 'With youthful glee I read till a late hour. I slept but little that night; the book haunted my dreams. I awoke about four on the bright summer Sunday morning, and went into the fields to read till breakfast-time. The stately, majestic march of Gibbon's periods had some attraction for me even then; but the Decline and Fall, it must be admitted, was hard reading for an unlettered collier lad. Yet I plodded on until I had finished the book ... ,'19 These developments, of silent reading, of private reading and of extensive reading, are established, or becoming dominant, by the beginning of the socalled Romantic period in poetry, the late eighteenth century. They have been facilitated by the growth of literacy and they will be facilitated by changes in the practical economy of the print trade, with an increase in the number of books more cheaply available.20 Their conjunction would lead one to make predictions about the change in subjectivity likely to be produced through such reading: that it would favour personal and various interpretative practices over communal practices. Such generalizations, we will see, are true enough for writers. But, as already suggested, readers' practices will not unmistakably make such a transition until the end of the 147

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nineteenth century, providing a belated context for the avant-garde developments of the twentieth century. Willard Bonn, in The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, already discussed in Chapter 3 on the 'Semiotic of Art', had attributed some of the developments in twentieth-century poetry to developments in the visual technologies of the social environment, such as the cinema and photography. Similarly Jerome McGann, in Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism, had suggested that technological experiment drove poetic innovation, that 'twentieth century poetry in English is a direct function and expression of the Renaissance of printing that began in the late nineteenth century'.21 But one could equally suggest the reverse, that the Renaissance of printing that began in the late nineteenth century, as described by McGann of the work of William Morris and later of Yeats, was a direct function and expression of the changes in productive practices of poets produced through changes in their subjective positioning in relation to the conventions of English poetry. It is a change in the subject which produces a change in the object. This is a position closer to that of David Perkins, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that though technological advances are very significant, it is the reaction of poets to what has gone before as poetic convention which is the most important. Perkins's observations are worth rehearsing. By 1922, he suggests, it was possible to treat almost any subject from almost any point of view. 'The immediate cause of this development lies in the reaction of poets to their late-Victorian predecessors, not in the new experiences and perceptions modern poets may be supposed to have acquired.' The latter have indeed arisen in the context of dramatic changes in the physical and intellectual context of experience. Perkins cites as usually mentioned features of social change industrialization, urbanization and technological innovations such as the motor car, and the new facts and theories of Darwin, Freud and Marx. These changes certainly brought into being new possibilities of social situation to be realized in language. But, Perkins says, these changes took place over a long period of time and do not explain why poetic change came when it did, and as a revolution rather than as a transition. 'To account for these facts we must keep in mind the extent to which poetic conventions control how and what a poet writes.'22 Perkins goes on to suggest that the conventions which dominated English and American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century had developed in the Romantic period, a hundred years previously. They were, he says, in keeping with what 'thinking people then thought of as "reality"'. A study of the history of reading fleshes out that notion of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century 'reality' in relation to literate interpretation - it is one which will be more readily construed by silent, private, extensive reading. The subjectivity one would predict from such reading practices, however, turns out to be more probably associated with the writers of the 'Romantic' period, rather than with the generality of contemporary readers. It may be 148

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invidious to select just one work on a period about which so much has been written, but I would like to look closely at a study by A. D. Harvey on the transition from Augustan to Romantic writing, English Poetry in a Changing Society, 1780-1825, for it provides many complementary observations.23 Harvey begins with comments about the Romantics which parallel Perkins's views about the twentieth-century developments: the Romantic movement was not 'caused by' the French Revolution or by the industrial revolution. 'Merely intermixing a potted history of social change with a few samples of contemporary comment ... does not satisfactorily explain the mechanisms of cultural response to socio-economic developments' and 'the essential dynamic [for the development of art] comes from within, from the continuing dialogue of individual artists with their cultural heritage and the contemporary cultural scene ... With regard to poetry written in 1800, the most important factor to be considered is the corpus of poetic writing ... written before 1800' (p. 7). This statement has now been elaborated, through the discussions so far given in this book, from a textual focus, 'the corpus', to a discursive focus. I would paraphrase: 'With regard to poetry written in 1800, the most important factors to be considered are the social practices of language through which poetic discourse has been framed and classified.' To rehearse what has been implicit in the discussion throughout this book: these social practices are threefold (at least) - changes in the techniques for the reproduction of texts, that is changes in technological processes (from oral to chirographic to print to electronic culture), changes in the form of the book itself and the visual appearance of the printed page (or computer screen), that is changes in the object, and changes in reading and writing practices, that is changes in the subject. As Roger Chartier, with a similar tripartite concern, observes, these different evolutions 'did not develop at the same pace and were not punctuated by the same breakingpoints'.24 The breaking-point which punctuates poetic discourse in the transition from Augustan to Romantic framing is that of the evolution of the subject. It is interesting to consider Harvey's comparison of Augustan and Romantic poetry in the light of these last remarks. Harvey contends (he is writing in 1980) that 'no adequate attempt has ever been made to understand the general change of literary standards to which the better-known romantics made only a partial contribution. The basic fact about any culture, which tends to be neglected by students of literature, is that the contributors to a cultural environment are to be numbered in scores and hundreds, not in ones and twos.' The traditional literary study to which Harvey refers, focused on 'ones and twos', makes it impossible to discuss the possibilities for the authorial subject which are socially produced, and excludes altogether observations about the different subjects of reading, historically produced. To provide an analytic framework for the study of the 'great and lesser' 149

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Romantics, Harvey uses the terms 'subject matter' and 'diction'. Romantic subject matter, he says, is of nature, of the supernatural or the praeternatural, of strong feeling. Romantic diction uses a more 'vehement and varied metre' rather than the 'measured heroic couplet'. Its 'vocabulary and imagery' are 'aimed at immediacy'. It is not concerned with general statements that might refer to anyone's experience at any time, as was Augustan poetry, but is concerned with the experiences of one particular person in one particular set of circumstances, 'so that the reader was ... swept up and involved in what he was reading' (p. 9). Even these brief statements are already illuminating in relation to the changes in reading already discussed to silent, private, extensive reading. Particularly noticeable is the change from the social to the individual as the source of meaning and authenticity. Pope owned the graphic display, the printed text, of his poems in a way that seventeenth-century poets, on the whole, did not. He also owned the meaning to the extent that one socially shared, communal meaning was assumed to exist for the text, authorized by the poet's intention, but that meaning was not associated with Pope's experience as an individual, let alone as an isolated or alienated individual. Harvey comments that 'During the eighteenth century, artists (painters as well as poets) actually suppressed their most individually intimate experiences in order to provide a generalized picture for public consumption; instead of trying to capture the uniqueness of a single experience, they attempted to bring out what it had in common with all such experience' (p. 9). Again, 'the typical Augustan poet 'merges himself in the general consciousness of his readers, pointing to what they have in common and ignoring what separates them' (p. 10), And, 'Whereas the Augustan poet stressed community of experience, the Romantic confronted each reader individually, with a representation of the poet's individuality. By communicating a sense of his own self, the Romantic poet enhanced his reader's own awareness of self and the way in which this sense of individuality was communicated was through a stress on the uniqueness of specific experiences.' This change did not suddenly emerge in 1798, rather 'from the mid-eighteenth century onwards there was a striving for the more specific but it was some time before writers learned to distinguish between uniqueness and mere detail' (p. 10) [my italics]. I am labouring these points, because Harvey's comments so exactly parallel what one would predict from the history of reading from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, in particular the movement from the communal shared experience of language to the private, individual experience of it. The Augustan poet is not experiencing language in the market-place from public readings, like the illiterate French peasants of Chartier's studies, but is assuming a communality of experience. Meaning resides in the social and the shared rather than in the individual and particular. In contrast is the Romantic emphasis on uniqueness and specificity. Again the emphasis on the sense of self, on the awareness of self, is what 150

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you would predict from the development of silent reading, of language which has no material presence in the body, in breath in the chest or the movement of lips. David Olson describes the way in which 'writing brought spoken language into consciousness'. The objectifying of language, from its obvious presence in the body in an oral culture, to an external existence outside the body in a written one, also brings into being the awareness of what is said and what is thought. This awareness is associated with the development of notions of 'idea', and of the 'mind' (in a mind/body dualism) as the 'place' of ideas (after the Homeric Greeks and by the time of Socrates and Plato).25 So if writing brings consciousness of mind, silent reading brings the consciousness of another mind into the mind, facilitating the identification of the reader with the other's disembodied experience. Again, the movement to extensive reading diminishes the sense of communal or shared textual experience and interpretative practices and favours the sense of individual and unique experience and interpretation. In rough summary, we can trace the 'commodification' of the poem in the 'economy of literature' (to use one of Bourdieu's phrases) as it becomes a text of public value but private ownership. The seventeenth-century court poet is comparatively casual about ownership of the words on the page. By 1720, poets own a printed text, fixed except for their authorial redraftings, but the meanings are assumed to be common to writer and reader. The subject of Augustan poetry has a literate but external social subjectivity. The Romantic poet, however, owns the meaning of the poem as well as the material wording - it is the poet's unique and personal experience. The Romantic subject, with the development of silent, private, extensive reading, moves towards a literate but internal subjectivity. In his subsequent discussion, Harvey appears to assume, as literary studies typically do, an identification of writing and reading subject. He suggests, for example, that the initial warm reception of the Romantics was because 'readers did identify themselves as individuals and found this identification exciting' (p. 10). But, as I earlier mentioned, readers' perceptions may lag considerably behind writers' intentions. In 'From Noble Sentiment to Personal Sensibility', Chapter 8 of In the Public Eye, James Smith Allen offers a particularly pertinent study of French readers in the nineteenth century. His study here is of personal correspondents, those who wrote to authors about their works, and he suggests that, during the nineteenth century, 'this interpretative community evolved in their response to literature from a presumed nobility of sentiment to a more profound personal sensibility'. The former response emphasized 'neoclassical literary values and poetic truths', and a persistence of pre-nineteenth-century aristocratic and elitist values despite the social reality of the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie. In an intermediate stage in the mid-nineteenth century, Smith Allen suggests, correspondents spoke of a work's 'energy, strength and power' (characteristics more associated with 151

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the bourgeoisie than the aristocracy) rather than, as earlier, its 'refinement, taste and subtlety'. Most important however, as the century progressed, was the reader's identification of the 'author's stylistic and social individuality' so that 'by the end of the century,... correspondents no longer felt threatened by innovation or diversity, either in literature or in their responses to it'. The predictable results of extensive reading - the experience of innovation and diversity in a wide variety of texts - have taken some time to be comfortably accommodated in these readers' experience. By the early decades of the twentieth century, 'the social dimension of literature had given way to more purely individualistic features' with a 'sharpened interest in the author's aesthetic persona' and 'elite social ideals gave way to authorial integrity'. In summary, it was only by the end of the nineteenth century that this particular 'interpretative community', those who wrote personal letters to authors, became 'introspective and interested in self-discovery to the same extent that authors had been several decades earlier'.26 Of course it would be dangerous to generalize from one particular group of French readers to all French readers, or to English readers in general, but at least this example illustrates the dangers of inferring the social function of literary discourse from a consideration only of authorial practices. In the same way, a consideration of seventeenth-century manuscript circulation illustrated the dangers of inferring social change only from the available possibilities of technology. By the early twentieth century then, a literate public, for the most part, reads silently, in private (or isolated, as the absorbed reader in public transport today) and extensively. But not, I would suggest, consistently for all texts. The Cartesian mind/body dualism, a self-contradictory habitus in its interpretative disposition, is inscribed in the reading practices of an educated person by the late nineteenth century. This dualism positions his (probably his) reading practice of texts recognized (classified) as 'nonliterary' as the rational man of science, a practice which gives social value to a discourse of universality and generality as in the 'laws of science'. At the same time this dualism within the habitus positions the reader's reading practice of texts recognized as 'literary' within a romantic sensibility which values the personal and individual, whether the authorial 'voice' or poetic persona or the 'fully-rounded' 'realistic' 'character' of prose fiction. Poets did not have to be 'avant-garde' to sense the potential danger in this dualism. John Masefield, at the beginning of the twentieth century, felt that, with Romantic, individualistic assumptions now the 'natural' mode of interpretation, poetry had lost its appeal to a wider audience.27 David Perkins's discussion of the decline of the 'long narrative poem' and the associated rise of the lyric, the short poem of intense feeling, is illuminating of this retreat of poetry from the social to the private sphere. Perkins suggests that this decline may be explained by two circumstances, one of a reduction in poetic genres from the eighteenth century, the other associated with the 152

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rise of prose fiction in the nineteenth century. In Bernstein's terminology, the former is a change in framing, that is in the recognition of genres, and the latter a change in classification, that is in the differentiation of poetic discourse from other discourses. First, the reduction in genres: 'in the eighteenth century there was a rapid disappearance of the kind of thinking that judges a poem by the expectations derived from the genre to which it belongs. For practical purposes' - which Perkins glosses as 'the guiding expectations of the writer and the expectations of the reader' - 'the traditional genres [associated with the long poem] of epic and mock-epic, epistle and satire, vanished, leaving the poetic scene to the lyric or to the indefinite and amorphous genre of the descriptive-meditative poem, such as Thomson's Seasons.'28 Secondly, the rise of prose fiction: 'since the eighteenth century, poetry has existed in competition with imaginative prose, and prose has increasingly devoured the possibilities open to verse ... So poetry comes to mean the lyric - the short intense utterance. This shift of expectation is complete by the mid nineteenth century, so poetry reading is relegated to rare and particular moods.' Perkins goes on to imply that, by the early twentieth century, two modes of reading have developed, one appropriate to prose fiction and the other to poetic discourse. He describes these two modes in terms of the text read: readers of poetry, including poets themselves, are 'looking for condensed and heightened uses of language'; in my usual translation from text to discourse (that is, from language forms to practices of interpretation) I suggest this means that poetic discourse is now assumed to require practices of reading which give close and intense attention to the text. And where has one encountered such reading practices before? It is of course in the intensive reading of the primarily oral culture. By the twentieth century, in a highly literate culture, the dominant reading subjectivity is literate and associated with silent, private, extensive reading practices. Such practices both develop through the proliferation of printed books, especially those of prose fiction, and also facilitate the reading of such works, as in the reader's identification of her/his own interests in the events and characters of the novel.29 But in that same literate culture, the reading practice seen to be required for poetry is private - the poem read in solitude rather than in a group - silent and yet aural - the poem heard with the 'inner ear' - and intensive - the text reread and reread - thus providing, as religious texts had in a previous age, the context for its own interpretation. Reading poetry is now reading against the contemporary grain, against the more general habits of interpretation. It is therefore more difficult, less accessible, as Masefield had feared. Such intensive reading promotes, as it did for religious texts, the intratextual reading of patterns and symbolic possibilities,30 which would probably go unread in the more hasty and varied habits of extensive reading associated with other discourses (this is not to say that some practices of reading associated with poetry cannot be transferred to other discourses, as 153

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in the academic close reading of novels as compared to the 'everyday' reading of novels). It is this combination of literate culture, private reading and intense attention which provides a reading practice in which all levels of language of the text - its material or substantial realization in sound and appearance, its formal choices of words and grammatical structures, its semantic structures as a use of the English language - are subject to an historically unparalleled close scrutiny. And thus the visual language of poetry, its graphic realization, can become meaningful in its own right, as discussed in Part One, Chapter 5, 'The Semiotic of Language'. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the twentieth century has been singled out as one of the four great periods for visual poetry, by which is usually meant poetic discourse which also employs the semiotic of art. But the visual poetry of the twentieth century falls into two distinct periods, differently motivated even while the second has some notions of being a nostalgic return to the first. The first is that of the so-called early twentieth-century avant-garde from the Italian 'futurists' through the 'Dada' artists of the 1920s, usually associated with some sort of political statement in their repudiation of traditional values (see Chapter 3, note 28). The second is that from the 1950s, with the revival of so-called 'concrete poetry' (see Chapter 3, note 38). Throughout both periods, however, poets who locate themselves in the field of experimental poetics, the field of avant-garde practice, have focused attention on the medium, on the text as an object of material production. In theory, to draw attention to the medium, one could invoke semiosis associated with any of the human senses. In practice, whether influenced by the theories and exhibitions of modern art or by the media through which modern life is experienced day by day, the avant-garde in literature has typically equated 'material' with 'visual object'. It is a truism now to point out that, for many people in different parts of the world, life in the twentieth century is awash with visual signs. Massin begins his study of Letter and Image with photographs of Broadway and Times Square in New York, shop windows and pillars in Paris, street scenes in Las Vegas and Hong Kong.31 These urban environments are full of Chinese characters and Roman letters. The Mode of English and French signs in these photos is tightly framed in its grammatical realization: words, printed large, usually nouns or nominal groups (such as adjective plus noun: 'GOOD TASTE', 'LIQUIDATION TOTALE'), some few prepositional phrases, usually in smaller type ('FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE', 'PAR AUTORISATION PREFECTORALE') and the infrequent clause ('WHY PAY MORE'). Thus language is for the most part reduced to the noun, in which the semantic structure of English typically construes some aspects of external reality as 'things' (discussed in Chapter 1, with note reference 9). Such a construal facilitates the slippage between static language-thing and spatial image-thing (the object constructed through art or drawing), and represses the dynamic and relational possibilities of language, meanings 154

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construed through the clause and relationships between clauses (as in the process meanings of verbs, the logical relations between clauses). Massin's discussion of 'the image' gives it an immediacy with which I have already disagreed (the realization of the semiotic of art is just as conventional as that of language, the pictorial image and the noun-word are both understood in the historical time and social place of their framing and classification). His conclusion however is echoed in many postmodernist laments: 'Modern mythology proclaims the supremacy of the image. The better to impose its fables and slogans it tries to eliminate the spirit which has animated the letter. Advertising today makes an image of the letter itself.' It is interesting to see the idealism in Massin's statement, its intertextual echo of the Pauline discourse of the Christian New Testament (the spirit animating the letter) being invoked to suggest the emptying of language by modern advertising. Such a postmodernist concern has more usually been expressed in the Saussurean dichotomy of signifier (letter) and signified (spirit). The void at the heart of contemporary culture (the loss of the assurance of a transcendental logos whose underlying presence assured the coherent meaningfulness of cultural practices), it is assumed, results in a secular movement from signifier to signifier, as in advertising's juxtaposition of'images' (verbal or non-verbal) in order to associate the 'product' with the conventional symbolic values of the 'images'. In effect, Massin is suggesting that the semiotic of written language is being displaced by the semiotic of art, with all the reduction in the possibilities of argumentation and sequential (rational?) thought which that implies. This would be visual imperialism by the semiotic of art (though art itself does not have to be dominated by the single image, as witness the narrative of medieval manuscript illumination or stained-glass windows, such as those in Canterbury Cathedral). But it is not that simple. Visual poetry, as Part One of this book has described, has the potential simultaneously to be realized as several kinds of semiosis. Marjorie Perloff, in her 1991 book, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, takes up this issue, the writing of poetry in the context of contemporary culture, including the pervasive presence of advertising and multimedia discourses - the 'transformation of the speech model' which goes 'hand in hand with the changing status of the Image in poetic discourse'.32 The street sign of Massin's illustrations, it could be argued, is constrained by its physical location, but Perloff charts the way the page of advertising in the newspaper or the magazine has seen a comparable reduction of narrative, of story, and then of text itself in comparison to pictorial content, during the twentieth century, especially in the period of technological change from dominance by radio (the heard text of language) to the dominance of television (the visual). Gradually denuded of first its social context of discourse (the word in a narrative text read as a traditional transparent telling of reality or 'truth') and then its grammatical context (the word or phrase functioning within the syntax of its clause and sentence), the 155

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word, cut adrift from its linguistic moorings, is given instead the context of the image of artwork or photograph. Thus, as Massin had concluded, 'advertising today makes an image of the word itself. In PerlofFs account then, this focus on the words of language as not-language but image provides the social context for the production of much post-World War II poetry, especially the various types - there is certainly not one genre - since the 1970s grouped (ironically?) under the -ism 'language poetry'. In such poetry the reader's attention is forced onto the physical or material substance of language, usually its graphic or visual realization,33 because the text is not semantically transparent, is nonsensical, incoherent or contradictory by the traditional linguistic criteria of grammatical and textual context. Has the literate private intensive reading of poetry been too tall an order? Given the apparent inclination of poets to produce poetry which is incomprehensible if read with the established 'natural' practices of reading poetry, has the desire to react against the now established reading practices of twentieth-century poetry - admittedly established only among a small and educationally elite group of readers - led inevitably to the poetry of the 'language' poets? What now? The Epilogue, following, considers some positive directions for the future, including some technologically new practices which might, on the face of it, look like the very death of the material signifier itself. Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

156

Understandably, this is the perspective of editors introducing editions and anthologies of poetry, such as Duncan Wu's introduction to the monumental collection. Romanticism, An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). See James Smith Allen, 'From noble sentiment to personal sensibility', Chapter 8 of In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800-1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991), esp. pp. 248-9. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, Vol. 1, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1976), pp. 300-2. These are variously identified, but most clearly outlined, for the purposes of critique, in Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994), p. 17. Chartier usefully employs these distinctions, especially that between 'private' and 'public' reading, in his account of developments in European reading practices in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989), pp. 124-56. See Chapter 1, 'Antiquity: aids for inexperienced readers and the prehistory of punctuation', M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect, an Introduction to the History of

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7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

Punctuation in the West (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1992) and Plates 8 and 9, of seventh-century Irish manuscripts. See also Michelle P. Brown, A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600 (London: British Library, 1990, 1993), pp. 48-9 and relevant plates. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 42 (St Augustine, Confessions (Paris, 1959), VI, 3). Paul Saenger discusses this nexus of word division and silent reading on pp. 377-9 of his long article, 'Silent reading: its impact on late medieval script and society', Viator, Vol. 13 (1982), pp. 367-414. Manguel, History of Reading) p. 50, referring to Carlo M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (London, 1969), which I have not viewed. Saenger, 'Silent reading', gives several relevant references in footnote 63 on p. 379. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 271. M. B. Parkes, 'The influence of the concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the development of the book', in Scribes, Scripts and Readers: Studies in the Communication, Presentation and Dissemination of Medieval Text (London: Hambledon, 1991), pp. 35-70. Parkes comments on the later effects of these scholastic developments on the layout of non-academic books, including manuscripts of Piers Plowman, the English Brut and the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales (pp. 64-5). Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's 'Didascalicon' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Thomas Barnes, 'On the nature and essential characteristics of poetry as distinguished from prose', Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Vol. 1 (1785), pp. 54-71, quoted by Richard Bradford, 'The visual poem in the eighteenth century', Visible Language, Vol. 23 (1989), p. 16. I quote David Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 183. I have not read the original, which is referred to by several scholars (for example, Roger Chattier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modem France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), pp. 222-5), with the reference 'Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit: Das statistische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lekture', Archiv fur Geschichte des Buchwesens, Vol. 10 (1970), pp. 945-1002, and also Der Burger als Leser, Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500-1800 (Stuttgart, 1974). Smith Allen, In the Public Eye, p. 17. See Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print, p. 343, for a brief account. Roy McKeen Wiles, 'The relish for reading in provincial England two centuries ago', in The Widening Circle: Circulation of Literature in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Paul J. Korshin (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 88. Quoted by Richard D. Altick, in The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1957), p. 258. James Smith Allen gives an account of the expansion of the availability of 157

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

158

printed works in France in the nineteenth century, in Chapter 1, 'The printed word'j in In the Public Eye. In particular, there is a 'remarkable expansion' in the printing of literary works over this period, from 5.7 per cent of the total printed works in the earliest period (1840-75) to 19.4 per cent in the last (1922-5); it is clear that fiction shows the greatest increase, but even poetry goes from 0.8 per cent to 3.7 per cent of the total printed works (Table 1.2, p. 50). Of course availability did not necessarily mean accessibility. In England, although the volume of publication increased in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, it was not until the latter half that working-class people had reasonable access to contemporary writing, with the advent of 'cheap periodicals that printed the new work of outstanding writers, truly cheap reprints of contemporary literature, and free libraries'. Altick, English Common Reader, p. 250). Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. xi. Perkins, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, pp. 300-2. A. D. Harvey, English Poetry in a Changing Society, 1780-1825 (London: Allison & Busby, 1980). Chartier, Order of Books, p. 18. Olson, Chapters 11 and 12, 'Representing the mind: the origins of subjectivity', and 'The making of the literate mind', The World on Paper, pp. 234-82. Smith Allen, In the Public Eye, pp. 248-9. Cited by Perkins, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, pp. 79-80. Perkins, From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode, p. 129. James Smith Allen comments on the way in which 'complexities of interpretation' changed between 1800 and 1940, 'men and women were less and less given to seeking out identifiable individuals, most often the author, in the books they read; meanwhile they came more and more to look for themselves. ... Over time readers' predispositions evolved from the expectation that the novel, most notably, would represent and explain external reality, to the expectation that it would provide new sources of inspiration for self-discovery' (In the Public Eye, p. 6). Rosemary Huisman, 'Displaced belief: the role of religious textual conventions in the practices of production and interpretation of meaning in English literary texts', in Michael Griffith and James Tulip (eds), Religion, Literature and the Arts Project, Australian International Conference 1996 Proceedings (Sydney: RLA Project, 1996). (Robert) Massin, Chapter 1, 'Environment', Letter and Image, trans, by Caroline Hillier and Vivienne Menkes (London: Studio Vista, 1970). Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 54. Perloff describes in detail an example of a poem combining, through modern technology, aural and visual substance in John Cage's 'poetic construct', Lecture on the Weather. This is a 'mathematically planned' collocation of

The Reading Subject and the Writing Subject

randomly chosen texts by Thoreau, read by twelve 'speaker-vocalists', together with taped sound events of breeze, rain and thunder, and a film representing 'lightning by means of briefly projected negatives of Thoreau's drawings' (Perloff, Radical Artifice, p. 21-6).

159

Epilogue The Postmodern Subject and the New Media Poem

In 1982 I saw my first personal computer. In 1984 I bought my own machine, choosing, loyally, a portable 'made in Australia' computer, the Portapak, long since sent to the cleaners by international competitors. As I first successfully loaded its word-processing package, its green-lit characters against black screen recording the entry sequence, as if one were entering into some neon-lit and underground aquarium, I decided to assert the order of things, to make a discursive gesture about my priorities with this new technology. So the first thing I typed in, when its word-processing cursor at last invited me, was a poem, composed with all the writing as rereading, the deletion and insertion, which the new medium allowed, and the typewriter had not, on the way to a complete and finished product, the text of the poem. A noble gesture. But in retrospect, not enough. For in retrospect, it is clear that, though I used the new technology, I inserted into that use the subjectivity of my old habitus, a subject produced through the experience of printed books and typewriters. Thus, though the capabilities of the new technology greatly facilitated my production of a text, the text produced could equally have been the end product of earlier technologies. I had not explored the new potential of the field. It is exactly this distinction which is employed to define 'New Media Poetry' in a special 1996 issue of the periodical Visible Language (Number 2 of Volume 30). I quote from the Introduction, 'Technology has undoubtably changed artistic practices in a profound manner in this century. In most cases, however, what one sees is the impact of technological innovation reflected on traditional forms, as exemplified by the current use of the Internet to publish lines of verse. This anthology, on the other hand, reveals poets that appropriate the new writing tools of our time, and with them give life to new and differentiated poetic forms' (p. 99). The New Media poetry cannot be presented directly in books - the poems must be 'stored in computer disks, video tapes and holograms'. They can only be read at a computer terminal or experienced in a holographic display because 'the work of [these] poets takes language beyond the confines of the printed page and explores a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinks, interactivity, real-time text generation, spatiotemporal discontinuities, self-similarity, synthetic spaces, immateriality, diagrammatic relations, visual tempo, multiple simultaneities, and many other innovative procedures' (p. 98). 160

Epilogue

Obviously the poets in the print medium of this anthology can only talk about what they do, not reproduce it, but from a reading of their papers a common concern emerges. I paraphrase from the French poet, Philippe Bootz, a PhD in physics who produces animated computer poetry: 'the "production procedures" and the "to-be-read aspect" ([which] in almost all paper literature [together form] an entity that makes up the text) are [in New Media poetry] the complementary aspects of the same object, but [they] are not perceived in the same space, with the same relationship to the text. One belongs to the author's private sphere (the production procedures) - the other to the reader's (the to-be-read aspect)' (p. 129). For example, an author like Jim Rosenberg sets up a network of relations, writing with HyperCard ('The Interactive Diagram Sentence: Hypertext as a Medium of Thought', pp. 102-17). The individual reader follows an individual path, reads a product which is their reading, and yet has not destroyed the writing of the author. Thus, quoting Bootz again, the 'independence between text/ author and reader/text relationships naturally leads to the text's perceptual split' (p. 129). Or again, quoting from Eduardo Kac, who writes so-called holopoetry: 'The writer that works with holography must give up the idea of the reader as the ideal decoder of the text and must deal with a reader that makes very personal choices in terms of direction, speed, distance, order and angle he or she finds suitable to the readerly experience. The writer must create the text taking into account that these decisions, being personal, will generate multiple and differentiated experiences of the text and, most importantly, that all of these occurrences are equally valid textual encounters' (p. 197). Compare the superficially similar pre-1920 recipe of the Dada movement on 'how to compose a poem: cut up a newspaper piece, shake the words in a bag, and reassemble them in the order they are removed.'1 In the Dada 'instructions', the notion of 'validity' is either irrelevant or directly subverted. I find these papers by the New Media poets fascinating to read because they are so explicit about the epistemic change (social change in discursive formations) instantiated in their work. As the last quotation may suggest, the poets are acutely conscious of what they are doing and why, because the new poetics in which they are working foregrounds the practices of production. Here I want to focus on two aspects of their work. The first is their positive affirmation of the postmodern subject (though I think post postmodern is more accurate - or let us say twenty-first-century subject). The second is their essential quality of immateriality (an Aristotelian oxymoron!). I used the term 'positive affirmation of the postmodern subject' to contrast the approach of these poets to the Cassandra-like, that is negative, utterances now conventionally associated with creativity and postmodernism. Marjorie Perloff gives a convenient summary in Radical Artifice: Writing 161

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Poetry in the Age of Media.2 Avant-garde activity in the first two decades of this century had a political point but its disruptive gestures have now been taken into the dominant field so that, quoting, 'the contemporary avantgarde ... has become a commonplace of postmodern theorizing'. Perloff quotes the well-known comments of Hal Foster and Fredric Jameson on the contemporary recycling of the 'popular past' and the 'blank parody' of 'pastiche', on which Jameson said 'in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum'. And finally Perloff quotes Andreas Huyssen, 'The American postmodernist avant-garde ... is not only the end game of avant-gardism. It also represents the fragmentation and decline of the avant-garde as a genuinely adversary culture.' What is clearly assumed in that last quotation is that 'fragmentation' correlates with 'decline' (used of'culture') just as Jameson had equated the reconstitution of fragmentation, the postmodernist 'pastiche', with 'the imitation of dead styles'. Fragmentation equals loss. This is certainly true of print-culture, and indeed of manuscript culture before it. Books which have worm holes or are torn, bindings which disintegrate so that pages are lost or wholly scattered, fragmentation of the book or the page - those of us who work in the medieval period are acutely aware of the loss of text which results. And even the technology of print does not ensure the survival of the book, especially the book of the individual owner. Of course in the context of such materialist value, a 'genuinely adversary' gesture could be exactly to tear into strips, scatter and so on, as in the Dada poetry recipe. However, for the New Media poetry, fragmentation equals gain. Neither the writer nor the reader 'owns' a text. The poem is the processes of production written by the poet, whose 'pastiche' brings together a field of possibilities - the reader may pursue different trajectories reading a poem which is truly 'under erasure', in the Derridean phrase, that is, no one reading is 'authorized'. Of course the reader may choose to print out a particular screen version, knowing that a subsequent reading may produce a different visual text which is equally the reader's poem. This is not the place to go into hypotheses of ideology, but to me there is a rather Zen-like quality to these pursuits - the giving up of the need for control and that desire for interpretative authority which has been a fairly consistent feature of Western culture. (This is not naively to deny the control of the New Media poet who chooses the 'field of possibilities'.) Reading the papers of the media poets, I was frequently struck by the from a conventional viewpoint - extraordinary juxtaposition of register, as in the bringing together of the technical language of computing and the figurative language of desire, especially that of aesthetic desire. For example, the Brazilian poet Andras Vallias writes, Although I was fascinated by the computer, by the breadth and flexibility of this new 162

Epilogue

tool for graphics, the fact that I had perceived no significant alteration in my own poetic procedures drew me into a creative crisis which lasted from 1988 until 1990. I put this period of silence to good use, and started research into three-dimensional space; it was there that the potential of the computer seemed to make itself most clearly evident. I exchanged the simulacrum of blank page and palette of colors - available to me through desktop publishing programs - for the black infinity and the austere and complex interlace of computer-aided design; the AutoCad program became my Ariadne and the coordinates xyz my magic ball of thread. The open architecture of AutoCad also led me on to my first stammering efforts in programming (AutoLisp), an experience which was to prove useful after 1994, when I started to work with multimedia authoring systems. ('We have not understood Descartes', p. 152) What has sometimes been regarded as fragmentary in twentieth-century Western culture, the divergence of the discourses of science and the humanities, does not appear to be a problem in this textual practice! - surely another positive in the face of Jameson's and Huyssen's gloomy prognosis. My last quotation of Andras Vallias was taken from his paper, called 'We have not understood Descartes'. This is the title of a poem he wrote in 1990 (or rather, the French 'Nous n'avons pas compris Descartes'). This title takes me rather nicely into the second topic, the immateriality of the New Media poetry, for Vallias's title intertextually introduces a little history of visual poetry relevant to materiality. Vallias took his title from a text by Stephane Mallarme, written in 1869. Mallarme is usually cited by those writing on the history of the avant-garde as the formative influence on the resurgence of visual poetry in the twentieth century. Next usually mentioned in apostolic succession is Guillaume Apollinaire. And Apollinaire had particular influence on the so-called avantgarde, especially in New York. Avant-garde literature would expand its repertoire in many directions. The names of schools and isms, often associated with manifestos, make an open-ended list of territorial imperatives, whether of poets themselves or of critics: futurism cubism constructivism Dadaism lettrism spatialism concrete poetry L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E beat visual poetry fluxus process-poem3 163

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And, associated particularly with concrete poetry, a renewed interest in pretwentieth-century pattern poems (technopaegnialcarmina figurata and so on). I am scarcely original in pointing out that, in their different ways, these avant-garde approaches focused attention on the medium, on the text as an object of material production. They would not allow the traditional illusion of the transparency of written language, the reader looking through it to the 'meaning', perhaps enhanced by aural patterns of rhythm or rhyme. In theory, to draw attention to the medium, one could invoke semiosis associated with any of the human senses.4 In practice, the twentieth-century avant-garde in literature, often much influenced by contemporary developments in art, has typically equated 'material' with 'visual object'. The New Media poetry is described as 'inserting itself in the field of experimental poetics' (p. 98), that is, the field of avant-garde practice, because it also focuses attention on the text as an object of production. However it is at the same time produced through a quite different poetics for it does not focus on the text as an object of material production. It offers the reader a visual process, not a visual object - what has been referred to as a 'visual temporality'. This is a direct consequence of the immateriality of media poetry, its 'virtual reality', to use the fashionable phrase. It is specifically in relation to this aspect that Eric Vos distinguishes New Media poetry from that (he says is) discussed by Marjorie Perloff in Radical Artifice. (Vos's paper, 'New Media Poetry - Theory and Strategies', is the final paper in the Visible Language 'Anthology on New Media Poetics'. His comment is rather unfair to Perloff; consider for example her discussion of John Cage's work, Lecture on the Weather.)5 Vos writes: PerlofFs is an eminent analysis of the ways in which contemporary experimental poetry addresses new media and communication technology and confronts itself with the semiotics of (electronic) mass media. But the poetry discussed is invariably print poetry. The writing is done on the page. Concepts like tentativeness} fluidity and change may very well become relevant for both the reading processes and the reconsiderations of habitual thoughts on language, poetry and verbal communication to which this writing gives rise - but the written poetic text itself is given, static and fixed. That is what print tends to do to writing, (p. 219)

Perloff points out in her discussion the gradual contraction of print in advertisements, and the corresponding reduction of narrative and the rise of the image, as the social context changes from that of radio, dominated by the voice, to the visual media. But the visual media has not remained constant either, and the interactive possibilities which have developed since the 1980s present very different possibilities from the fixed sequence of film or television. Thus printed poetry, however avant-garde its origins, remains fixed in an historically previous moment, in terms of its present technological 164

Epilogue

context. Qohn Cayley describes that previous moment as 'codexspace' 'Beyond Codexspace: Potentialities of Literary Cybertext', pp. 164-83.) However resolutely the text draws attention to its mode of production, its material realization means it will be read as a subject construed through traditional literate practices (how can I make sense of this page?). Thus the anxiety of those who talk about a 'crisis of language' in relation to modern poetry (for example, Jerome McGann on Susan Howe's work, mentioned in Chapter 2 of this book) will be confirmed - for the post-structuralist critique of the subject/object dichotomy, that intellectual 'decentring' of authority which underwrites any so-called postmodernist work, can be invoked to deconstruct any interpretative statement.6 In contrast, as I have already discussed, the immateriality of New Media poetry allows a post-structuralist positioning of the subject, one in which the relation between the processes of interpretation and the interpreting subject does not exclude, nor is excluded by, the relation between the producing subject and the processes of production. (The birth of the reader does not have to be at the cost of the death of the author.) Far from being a theory which hypothesizes a breakdown in the function of language, postmodernism's description of 'tentativeness, fluidity and change' turns out to be a prediction of the social reality of immaterial communication. None of the above, I hasten to add, implies that written or printed poetry is dead, or one of the other melodramatic anthropomorphic words of the traditional manifesto. Rather, for the postmodern subject, the visual text, an immaterial trace of the author's processes of production, has been made material in the written or printed poem. But the interpretative relation was always between reader and trace, not between reader and poet. Postmodern subjectivity, which recognizes the different positionings of writing and reading subjects, takes away, not meaning, but the illusion of objective meaning 'in the text'. And the linguistic and social theory utilized in this book point to the way in which semiosis nevertheless does take place - in practices of meaning-making which are historically and socially situated. What is dead, however, is any contemporary claim of the kind traditionally made by the avant-garde - that avant-garde poetry of its nature must draw attention to the materiality of the text. Such a claim usually emerged from a Marxist positioning, in which the repressed dominance of the bourgeoisie over material production was seen to be reinscribed by a traditional poetics that focused on meaning and so disregarded the material text. Therefore, in an avant-garde poetics, foreground the material and you raise the consciousness of bourgeois repression. But Marx had formulated his theories in a nineteenth-century context of culture where material contrasted with transcendental - that blend of Platonic and religious orthodoxy which informed scientific thinking as much as social theorizing. His response is very apt in its time. But in the late twentieth-century 'Western' context, material contrasts with immaterial within the same human world of experience. Virtual reality 165

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is not transcendental. Information technology networks are real though they are not things (albeit our language with its noun-things constantly undermines this insight). Thus to ask the traditional avant-garde questions, what power has been repressed? who controls the means of production? the artist must explore the immaterial as much as the material. Otherwise poets, and literary critics with them, are doomed to repeat the same socially ineffectual gestures as Jameson and others have foretold.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

166

Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), 'American poetry', The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 269. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 9-10. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics glosses all the terms (culled from various sources) except 'spatialism', 'fluxus' and 'process-poem'. 'Spatialism' I have no reference for, 'process-poem' is associated with the compositional techniques of Olson et al, and a whole issue of Visible Language (Vol. 26, Nos 1/2,1992) is devoted to 'fluxus', a theory whose principal tenet is reminiscent of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus - the only constant is change. I hope someone has created olefactory poems, though I suppose that is the concern of the whole French perfume industry, with its highly developed intertextuality of advertising copy and image locating its 'poems', usually, in the Field of 'romance', combined with the 'test patch' for sniffing in the physical fold of the magazine. Perloff, Radical Artifice, pp. 20-8. Frederick Garber had praised Barbara Kruger's 'your life is a perpetual insomnia' (a juxtaposition of large photographed image and slogan) as subverting advertising techniques by using advertising techniques. Perloff questions Garber's reading of this 'billboard discourse': 'My difficulty with this and related readings is that the alleged deconstruction of the stereotype often seems just as stereotypical as its object' (Radical Artifice, pp. 129-33).

Bibliography

The bibliography lists works which I have found of particular help in the preparation of this book in reference to 'seen' poetry, in both manuscript and print, and to historical practices of reading and writing. Works of linguistic, social and general literary theory and general historical accounts, mentioned in the endnotes, are omitted. Books Akehurst, F. R. P. and Davis, Judith M. (eds), A Handbook of the Troubadours. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Allen, Donald and Tallman, Warren (eds), The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Evergreen, 1973. Allen, James Smith, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in France, 1800-1940. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Apollinaire, Guillaume, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War,, trans. Ann Hyde Greet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Barren, W. R. J. and Weinberg, S. C. (eds), 'Brut' or, Hystoria Brutonum, Lazamon. Harlow: Longman, 1995. Beal, Peter et at., Index of English Literary Manuscripts. London: Mansell. Vol. 1 -, 1980-. Bennett, H. S., English Books and Readers, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Vol. 1, 2nd edn., 1969; Vol. 2, 1965; Vol. 3, 1970. Bernstein, Charles, A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Blake, N. F., William Caxton and English Literary Culture. London: Hambledon Press, 1991. Bohn, Willard, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Bohn, Willard, The Dada Market, An Anthology of Poetry. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993. Boyarin, Jonathan, The Ethnography of Reading. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Bradford, Richard, The Look of It: A Theory of Visual Form in English Poetry. Cork: Cork University Press, 1993. Bradford, Richard, Silence and Sound: Theories of Poetics from the Eighteenth Century. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1992. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, Pan of the Climate, American Cubist Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

167

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Brogan, T. V. F., English Versification 1570-1980. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Annotated bibliography of Visual (Typographic) Structures', pp. 463-8. Brown, Carleton, and Robbins, Rossell Hope, The Index of Middle English Verse. New York: Columbia UP, 1943. Brown, Cynthia J., Poets, Patrons, and Printers, Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval France. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Brown, Michelle P., A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. London: British Library, 1990, 1993. Burke, Clifford, Printing Poetry: A Workbook in Typographic Reification. San Francisco: Scarab Press, 1980. Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987. Chartier, Roger (ed.), A History of Private Life, English translation. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. Chartier, Roger, The Order of Books, Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Chaytor, H. J., From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1966 edn. Clanchy, M. T., From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-130?', 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Croft, P. J., Autograph Poetry in the English Language, Facsimiles of Original Manuscripts from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century. London: Cassell, 1973. Cummings, Michael, and Simmons, Robert, The Language of Literature, a Stylistic Introduction to the Study of Literature. Oxford: Pergamon, 1983. Darnton, Robert, The Kiss ofLamourett, Reflections in Cultural History. New York: Norton, 1990. de Laborde, Comte Alexandre (ed.), The Song of Roland ('reproduction phototypique'). Presented to the members of the Roxburghe Club of London in 1922. Doane, A. N., and Pasternack, Carol Braun (eds), Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Dyson, A. E. (ed.), Poetry Criticism and Practice: Developments since the Symbolists. London: Macmillan, 1986. Edmonds, J. M., The Greek Bucolic Poets. London: Loeb, 1912. Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. 168

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Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Eliot, Valerie (ed.), T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, a Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Ernst, Ulrich, Carmen Figuratum: Geschichte des Figurengedichts von den antiken Ursprungen bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters. Cologne: Bohlau, 1991. Ezell, Margaret J. M. and O'Keeffe, Katherine O'Brien, Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning, the Page, the Image and the Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Ferguson, Margaret, Salter, Mary Jo and Stallworthy, Jon, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4th edn. New York: Norton, 1996. Finlay, Ian Hamilton, Poems to Hear and See. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Fowler, Alastair, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Foxon, David, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade. The Lyell Lectures, Oxford, 1975-6, rev. and ed. James McLaverty. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Franklin, R. W., The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981. Fussell, Paul, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: McGraw-Hill, rev. edn., 1979. Gellrich, Jesse M., The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages, Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Goldschmidt, E., Medieval Texts and Their First Appearance in Print. London: for the Bibliographical Society at Oxford UP, 1943. Gollancz, Sir Israel (ed.), The Ccedmon manuscript of Anglo-Saxon Biblical Poetry, Junius 11 in the Bodleian Library. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1927. Hadfield, Andrew, Literature, Politics and National Identity, Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Halliday, M. A. K., Spoken and Written Language-, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Halter, Peter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Hamer, Richard, A Manuscript Index to the Index of Middle English Verse. London: British Library, 1995. Hartley, George, Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Hartung, Albeit E. (general ed.), A Manual of the Writings in Middle English 1050-1500. New Haven, Connecticut: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vol. 1-, 1967- . 169

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Index

Note: The index lists only those terms or topics which appear in the text; the notes are not referred to. Page numbers in bold type refer to definitions or discussions central to a topic. The names of artists briefly mentioned are excluded from the index but all poets, and poems from Old and Middle English, however briefly mentioned, are included. The general topics 'layout', 'line', 'print' and 'writing' are excluded from the index because of their pervasive presence. abbreviation (Latin contrasted with vernacular) 106-7,110 advertising 26,46,154-6 alliteration 59, 99, 101, 119 Ambrose, Bishop of Milan 144 Ancrene Riwle 115 Ancrene Wisse 115 Anglo-Norman/ Early French texts 20, 104-20 Anglo-Saxon see Old English answer poetry 131,132 Anthony, Stephen 90 Apollinaire, Guillaume 45, 46, 48, 49, 52, 53,70,87,163 Aquinas, Thomas 145 Aristotle/Aristotelian 12, 41, 137, 161 Arp, Hans (Jean) 47 art 22, 26, 35-9 passim, 41-50, 51-2, 70, 78,87 artwork 75 influence on William Carlos Williams 47-8, 62, 77 assonance 16, 111, 112, 113 Atwood, Margaret 26 Augustan Poetry, contrasted with Romantic poetry 149-51 avant-garde art/literature 7, 22, 23, 37, 45-50, 60, 143, 148, 152, 154, 162,

Beale, Peter 129, 130, 135 beat poetry 163 Beaumont, Joseph 44 Bede, the Venerable 99,109-10 Bee, Susan 74, 75 Beowulf 100,101,113 Bernstein, Basil 9, 11-15, 18, 19, 34-8 passim, 49, 92, 111, 153 Bernstein, Charles 74-5 Bertrand, Aloysius 22 Bill, Max 48, 49 Bischoff, Bernard 104,105,107 Blunden, Edmund 129 Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy (Old English) 100 Bonn, Willard 17, 33, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 70, 148 Bootz, Philippe 161 Bourdieu, Pierre 9, 22, 25, 36, 37, 38, 64, 151 Bradford, Richard 25, 44, 48, 127, 128 Breton tradition 103 Brown, Carleton and Robbins, Rossell Hope 115 Browning, Robert 15,81 Bryan, Sir Francis 130 Burns, Joanne 21, 22, 23 Butt, John 137

BagleyJJ. 102 Bakhtin, Mikhail 9 Barnes, Thomas 146 Battle ofMaldon 99 Baudelaire, Charles 22

Caedmon 99 Cage, John 73, 74, 76 Caligula A.ix, British Library Cotton MS 102, 114-20 Cam, Heather 84 carmen figuratum/carminafigurata 43, 164

163-6

179

Index Cartesian tradition/dualism 71,152 Chanson de Roland/Song of Roland 106, 112,117 Chanson de Saint Alexis/Song of St Alexis 106,112 Chanson deSainteFoy 111, 112 chansons de geste 112 Chaplin, Charlie 63 Chartier, Roger 138, 144, 147, 149, 150 Chaucer, Geoffrey/Chaucerian 10, 15, 59, 101, 109 Clanchy, M.T. 115 classification (Basil Bernstein: the differentiation of poetic discourse from other categories of discourse) 9, 12-13, 14-26, 33, 111, 149, 152-3, 155 difficulty/violation of 25, 35, 46, 48 reclassification 65, 99, 143 strong/strengthen 34, 137 weak/weaken 23, 34, 35 Cleanness 101 Clemoes, Peter 112 colour (in manuscripts) 20, 101, 110, 117 blue 101 red/rubricated 101,110,113,114, 117-20 (passim) communal reading 143, 147, 150 concrete poetry 33, 45, 48-50, 64, 77, 87, 145, 154, 163, 164 Congreve, William 138 constructivism 163 Cook, Geoffrey 37, 41, 44 Cotton, Sir Robert 114 couplet 118,119,120 Augustan heroic 150 Latin elegiac 109,113 Middle English 59, 118, 119, 120 Romantic/Anglo-Norman 59, 114, 117, 119,120 Creeley, Robert 60,61,63-4 Croft, P.J. 16-17, 127, 134, 135 cubism 77, 163 cummings, e.e. 49 Dada 74, 76, 154, 161-3 passim Daniel 100 Daniel, Samuel 30 Davies, Alan 34 de Saussure, Ferdinand 13, 18 Saussurean structuralism/ dichotomies 18-19,71, 155 de Zayas, Marius 46 Death see The last day The Death of Edward 99 Death's wither clench (Long Life} 116, 118

180

Derrida, Jacques 19, 50, 60, 67, 71, 72, 162 Dickinson, Emily 44, 77 Dobbie, Elliott van Kirk 99, 100 Domesday Book 104 Donne, John 129-30, 131, 132, 135 Doomsday 116, 117 drama 10, 12, 41, 42, 137-8 dramatic monologue 81, 83 Drayton, Michael 130 Drydenjohn 33,132,135 Duncan, Robert 60 Durham 99, 100 Dyer, Sir Edward 130 Edmunds, J.M. 42, 43 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 38 Eleanor of Aquitaine 103,104,106 Engelsing, Rolf 146-7 enjambment 59, 76, 77-8, 91 Ernst, Ulrich 42, 43 Evangile de I'enfance 114 Exeter Book 100,119 Exodus 100 extensive reading 143, 146-7, 150-3 pas-

Feirstein, Frederick 74 Fenollosa, Ernest 65, 66 field (Charles Olson) 61 Field (M.A.K. Halliday) 10, 36, 67, 71, 72, 73, 76, 86, 91, 132 first- and second-order 80-1, 84 realized as Graphic Iconicity 87-9 see also systemic functional linguistics field (Pierre Bourdieu) 22, 36-7, 38, 64, 65 field/figure theory 49-50, 77 Finlay, Ian 64 fluxus 163 Fogg, Peter Walkden 127, 128 Foster, Hal 162 Foucault, Michel 9,22,37,41 epistemic change 161 'found poem' 7, 24 Fowler, Alastair 7, 11 Foxon, David 136 framing (Basil Bernstein: the recognition of genres 9, 12,13-14, 15-26, 39, 47, 49, 58, 70, 143, 153, 155 difficulty/violation of 22, 46-7, 49, 74 reframing 24, 65, 92, 99, 143, 149 strong/'tight' 34, 154 weak/weaken 34-7 France, medieval 103-4

Index Franklin, Benjamin 136, 146 free verse 8, 18, 19, 24, 51, 60-1, 62 French Early French texts see Anglo-Norman influence on avant-garde 38, 46 readers in the nineteenth century 151-2 futurism 154, 163 Gallagher, Katherine 85, 87, 88 Genesis A &B 100 genre as used by Basil Bernstein 12 different understandings of 9-11 recognition of 7-8 traditional, for long poem 153 use in this book 12-14 see also framing; realization rules; symbolic reading Geoffrey, Count of Anjou 103 Gerald of Wales 104 Gesta Stephani 102 Ginsberg, Allen 17, 63 Gollancz, Sir Israel 101 Graphic Iconicity 87-9, 92 Graphic Theme 89-91, 92 Graphic Voice 81-7, 92 graphology 14-15, 19 contemporary use in poetic discourse 76-92, 154 inter-relation with syntax and metre 5960 JuriLotmanon 18 see also abbreviation; indentation; Mode; punctuation; systemic functional linguistics; word-division Greville, Sir Fulke 130 habitus 19,20,152,160 Halliday, Michael (M.A.K.) see systemic functional linguistics handwritten poetry (after print) 17, 70, 77, 129-37 Harington, Sir John 130 Harvey, A.D. 149-51 Harwood, Gwen 81-2, 84 Hasan, Ruqaiya 9 Hasenohr, Genevieve 106-7, 110, 112 Hawes, Stephen 43 Healy, Jack 88 Henry I, King of England 102-3, 106 Henry II, King of England 103-6 Henry III, King of England 115 Herbert, George 44, 132-3 Herkt, David 86-7 hexameter verse 108, 109, 114 , 117

Higgins, Dick 43, 44 Hollander, John 33, 43, 44, 66, 67, 89 Howe, Susan 34 Huyssen, Andreas 162,163 Ideogram 53,65-6,71,73 Illich, Ivan 108, 109, 145 Image/Imagism (in Ezra Pound's sense) 63,65 immateriality of the text 39, 161, 163-5 indentation 15, 16, 17, 22, 33, 75, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 127, 133, 137, 138 Anglo-Norman 113, 114 Latin poetry 109 modern editor 119 'out-dentation' 78 intensive reading 143, 146, 153, 156 Internet 160 Isidore of Seville 108 Jaireth, Subhash 89 Jakobson, Roman 15,23,34,45,71 Jameson, Fredric 162, 163, 166 John, King of England 105 Jonson, Ben(jamin) 130-1, 132, 134 Joyce, James 49 Judith 100 Junius 11, Bodleian Library MS 100, 112, 116 Kac, Eduardo 161 Keats, John 16-17,78-9 Kellas, Anne 87 Ker, N. R. 100,113,114,115,116,119 Ker(r), Sir Robert 130 Kerouac, Jack 63 Koenigsberger, H. G. 103 Lasamon's Brut 114-18 laisse 112,113 language poetry 23, 60, 64, 67, 74-6, 92, 156 L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E 163 lapidary manuscript 114 The last day (Death} 116, 119 Latin, texts and influence 20, 99, 104-20 passim

Lawrence, D. H. 60 lettrism 163 literacy 14 16th to 19th century 25-6, 133-4 19th and 20th century 25-6, 63, 76, Chapter 8 Old English to Middle English 20, 40, 101-10, 145 origin of 'mind' 151

181

Index literary pragmatics 8 liturgy 110,111,112 Long Life see Death's wither clench Lotman, Juri 14,18-20, 22, 23, 100, 128 Love, Harold 132, 133, 135 Loy, Mina 46 A lutel soth sermun 116, 119 lyric poetry 41, 51, 60, 76, 80-1, 152-3 Latin 108-9 McGann, Jerome 24, 34-5, 38, 44, 50, 62, 70-4, 75, 77, 148 Macken-Horarik, Mary 11 Madden, Sir Frederick 114-15 Mahon, Derek 78 Mallarme, Stephane 45, 49, 50-3, 60, 70, 77, 163 Map, Walter 104 Marinetti, Filippo 46 Marlowe, Christopher 130 Marotti, Arthur 130,131 Marvell, Andrew 132,134 Marx, Karl 165 Masefield, John 152-3 Massin, Robert 43,154-6 materiality of the text 156, 165 Matilda, daughter of Henry I 103 'Melvillian' (Herman Melville) 63 mesostics 73-4 metaphor 18, 45, 46 spatial 15, 49, 52, 53, 63, 79, 128 metre/meter 15, 17, 24, 44, 74, 75, 150 classical 108-10 Old English 20, 59, 99 romantic/Chaucerian 59 syllabic metre 78 Middle English texts 101, 109, 114-20 Milton, John 25, 26, 59, 134-5 Mode (M.A.K. Halliday) 36, 42, 49, 58, 67, 71, 72, 73, 80, 102, 115, 118, 132, 138,154 realized as Graphic Theme 89-91 see oho systemic functional linguistics Moore, Marianne 46, 78 Morris, Richard 116, 118, 119 Morris, William 71-2, 75, 148 narrative 23, 152, 155 New Media Poetry 160-5 Norman Conquest, effects of 103-4 Norman-French see Anglo-Norman Novack, Carol 87 Objectivist theory of the poem 24, 62 O'Keeffe, Katherine O'Brien 99-100, 109, 110,112

182

Old English/Anglo-Saxon texts 20, 23-4, 26, 41, 59, 77, 99-101, 108-13 passim, 116, 118, 119 see also punctuation, punctus/po'mting Olson, Charles 17, 60, 61, 62, 92 Olson, David 151 Ong, Walter 38 'oral'reading 143-4,153 orality 20, 38, 107 in Anglo-Saxon society 20 loss of Latin orality 110 oral conventions of poetic discourse postprinting 131-2 oral origins of poetry 14-15 An Orison to Our Lady 116, 119 Ormulum 115 orthography see abbreviation, word-division The Owl and the Nightingale 114-16,118 Oxford, Sir Edward De Vere 130 Page, Geoff 82,86 Parkes, M. B. 109, 110, 111, 114, 137, 144, 145 pastiche 26, 162 Pater, Walter 24,26 Patience 101 pattern poetry 42-5, 87, 89, 128, 132, 164 Pearl 101 Peirce, Charles Sanders 10, 66 Perkins, David 24, 34, 46, 47, 62, 66-7, 76, 143, 148, 149, 152, 153 Perloff, Marjorie 26, 46, 60, 73-4, 155-6, 161-2, 164 Peter the Venerable 109 Le Petit Plet 116,119,120 phonology 14-15 see alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm Picabia, Francis 47 Piers Plowman 101, 109, 115 Plummer, Charles 99 Pope, Alexander 136-7,150 postmodernism/postmodern subject 23, 26, 155, 161-2, 165 post-structuralist positioning of the subject 13, 19, 21, 23, 165 Pound, Ezra 49, 65-6, 67, 71, 72-5, 139 private reading 143, 146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156 process-poem 163 Projective Verse 61, 62 prose 10, 12, 13, 18-26 passim, 34-5, 46, 63, 64, 109, 130, 137-8, 146 chronicle, Anglo-Norman 116, 118 fiction, rise in nineteenth century 152-3 layout 78, 81

Index rhythm 63 prose-poem 13, 21-3, 24, 26, 46, 51, 66, 85, 128 Psalms/Psalter 106, 109, 113, 117 Paris Psalter 100 St Albans Psalter 112 public readings 147 punctuation in manuscripts 110 paraph 117 ptwaws/pointing 20, 23, 100, 111-20 passim punctus elevatus 117-20 reduction in free verse 77 Puttenham, George 43-4, 47, 127, 128-9, 131 Ralegh (Raleigh), Sir Walter 130 Ray, Man 128 realization rules 8,9, 10, 12, 14 correlation of visual and aural 17; see also metaphor, spatial negative devices 18, 23 see also framing recognition rules 9, 12, 15, 26 see classification reading practices Chapter 8 activation of 18, 23-4 Augustan to Romantic 151-2 twentieth century 152-4 see also symbolic reading reading, object and subject of 38 for object, see graphology; technology of language for subject, see literacy rhyme 14-19 passim, 24, 25, 44, 48, 59, 71,74,75,79, 111, 114, 118-19, 128, 138, 164 near-rhyme 17 unrhymed 24, 119 rhythm 14, 17, 19, 24, 25, 26, 49, 59, 60, 62-4, 71, 74, 100, 110, 118-19, 127-8, 135, 138, 146, 164 rhythmical prose 99 Riggs, David 130 The Riming Poem 119 Robbins, Rossell Hope 115 Rochester, John, Earl of 132 Roman de Tristan 113, 114, 116, 117 Romantic poetry (nineteenth century) 143, 147, 148 contrasted with Augustan poetry 149-51 'dangers' of Romantic reading practices 152 Rosenberg, Jim 161

Russian Formalism

71

Saunders, J. W. 130,131 Scott, Clive 52, 62 scriptoria 20, 104 semantic concentration 76 La Sequence de sainte Eulalie 111 Shakespeare, William 59, 130, 132 Sidney, Sir Philip 130 silent'hearing' 146 silent reading 144-7,150-3 Silliman, Ron 34 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 101, 115 'Skeltonic' (John Skelton) 43 Smith Allen, James 151 social semiotic, language as see systemic functional linguistics sociology of literature 8 Song of Roland see Chanson de Roland Song of St Alexis see Chanson de Saint Alexis Song of St Faith see Chanson de Sainte Foy Sparrow, John 26 spatialism 163 Spenser, Edmund 130,132 stanza 15, 33, 43-4, 47, 61, 64, 74-9 passim, 84-8 passim, 90, 127-8, 133, 135 French 112 Latin 109 Middle English 101, 118, 119 Stein, Gertrude 62 Stephen, nephew of Henry I 103 Stieglitz, Alfred 47 Subject/subjectivity 19,25ff. Surrey, Henry, Earl of 130 symbolic reading 7,17-18,153 syntactic ambiguity 76 systemic functional linguistics/grammar 89, 10, 11, 14,36,58,71,72,73 direct realization of meaning in graphology 80-92 need for functional theory 68 see also Field, Mode, Tenor technology 63, 148-9 technology of language 14, 38-9, 92, 149, 155, Epilogue codicology 72-3,74-5 typography 70-2, 136 technopaegnia 33, 42, 128, 164 The Ten Abuses 116,119 Tenor, Halliday's sense 36, 71, 72, 73, 80, 91 realized as Graphic Voice 81-7, 92 see also systemic functional linguistics Tironian notae 107

183

Index Tomashevsky, Boris 17 troubadour poetry 103 Turner, Frederick 74 Vallias, Andras 162-3 Vaux, Thomas, Baron 130 Vercelli Book 100 verse, etymology of the word 108 Vespasian Hymns 115 Vices and Virtues 115 La Vie de Seint Dormanz 116, 118 La Vie de Seint losaphaz 116, 117 visual/seen poetry 33, 37, 39ff. more than the semiotic of art 41-2, 44-5ff., 67 visual semiosis 34, 35-6 (catalogue), 64-5 'visual reading' 143,144, 156 vorticism (Ezra Pound) 65 Vos, Eric 164 Wallace-Crabbe, Chris

184

84, 85

Weinfield, Henry 50, 52 Werkman, Hendrik Nicolaas 47 Whitman, Walt 60, 62 Will and Wit 116,119 William the Conqueror 102, 103 William of Malmesbury 102, 112 William Rufus 102 Williams, William Carlos 47-8, 50, 60, 61-2, 63, 66, 67, 76-7, 78, 139 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 34 Woodford, Samuel 25 word-division (Latin) 110,144 Wordsworth, William 60, 79, 146 Wright, C. E. 115 writing as composing or copying 144-5 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 130 Yeats, William Butler

24-6, 74, 148

Zink, Michael 111 Zukofsky, Louis 24, 60, 62, 63