An Experience with Rhythm: W.S. Graham
My article analyses the intersection of two competing conceptions of rhythm, both within some influential twentieth-century contributions to poetics, and in the work of the Scottish poet W.S. Graham. The purpose is twofold: to set this problematic into motion, and to provide an insight into the stak...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2010-12-01
|
| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2803 |
| Summary: | My article analyses the intersection of two competing conceptions of rhythm, both within some influential twentieth-century contributions to poetics, and in the work of the Scottish poet W.S. Graham. The purpose is twofold: to set this problematic into motion, and to provide an insight into the stakes and themes of Graham’s own work. On the one hand, rhythm describes the temporal intelligibility of experience; on the other, it denotes a “measure” of suprasegmentals in prosodic lines. The question for poetry is how its prosodic movement can grasp this wider rhythmicity of experience. Graham approaches this through his figure of “the language”, which first renders the world intelligible and human life communicable, and yet “swings away” from the words we use. Graham aims to capture this swinging away, and thus grasp the “rhythm” at the core of language, through a contrapuntal density in his own prosody. It is this that my article characterises as an “experience with rhythm”. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |