Reader! No time for pleasantries.

The study of poetry is still obstructed and dominated by

the unsolved question as to what poetry is. Most have concluded that
it is unproductive to try to answer this question too quickly or even,
perhaps, to ask it. Tis creates a block. Where terms such as poetry,
lyric, and form remain academically current, they may do so as a
kind of revered but disbelieved magic. Lyric sufers from some of the
same difculties as poetry (Culler; Prins; Terada). Tese difculties
go further than those attending any indistinct yet prevalent cultural
concept. Tey concern also the long war embrace between poetry
and philosophy, an antagonistic cooperation (Coleridge 191).
It is hard to know what poetry is. What poetry is, is, therefore, a
philosophical question. But what philosophy is, is not a poetical ques-
tion. So antagonistic cooperation ceases. Coleridges war embrace has
become a patron-client relationship, in which poetry is the client.
Tis is why I am interested in the potential of a long-disprized
term: verse. Wherever I use terms like poet, poetry, and poem, I am
primarily thinking of the verse-making practice, performed by both
writers and readers of verse, of cutting up language into segments
(At tridge, Poetry; Tynianov 16). Verse possesses a specifcity that is
irritating to philosophers and theorists alike. But this is just its trans-
fguring grit. If poems are invited to display only those ideas that a
philosopher or theorist could have made earlier, the relation between
philosopher or theorist and poem becomes not a war embrace but a
vacant commerce. Philosophical poetics is productive precisely when
it operates across a deep unlikeness of kind (Jarvis, Unfree Verse).
Philosophical poetics is historical insofar as it takes technique
to be at once the way in which art thinks and the way in which the
work of art most intimately registers historical experience (Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory). The opinions of the poet, the political history
represented or not represented by the poet, the learning, attitudes,
friendships, lives of the poet, all these may be of interest, but the
pressure point, the point of historical formation and action in the
poem, is always that of technique, because this is where the poem
correspondents at large
For a Poetics of Verse
simon jarvis

SIMON JARVIS is Gorley Putt Professor of
Poetry and Poetics at the University of
Cambridge. Among his publications are
Wordsworths Philosophic Song (Cambridge
UP, 2007) and, in verse, The Unconditional:
A Lyric (Barque, 2005). He is working on a
study of the poetics of rhyme.
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931
gets made, the point at which the voices of the
many living and dead (S. Stewart) that are the
poets repertoire or material are selected from,
cut into, distorted, twisted, and precipitated
into this or that compositionwhere their
natural-historical antagonisms are exposed,
concealed, exacerbated, or fudged.
In order to interpret all this, poetics, not
excluding philosophical poetics (Adorno,
Para taxis), has to be minutely expert in
verse technique. Meter and rhythm were,
mostly, the elephants in the room in PMLAs
recent roundtable on lyric (see, e.g., Terada).
We must stop considering formalist those
studies (Attridge, Rhythms; Bradford; Grif-
fiths; Roubaud; Scherr; Scott, Poetics, Vers,
and Riches; G. Stewart; Tarlinskaia; Wachtel;
Wes ling; Wright; irmunskij) that offer us
minute expertise in verse. Tis sort of study is
indispensable to any historical poetics (for a
recent revival of the term, see Prins; the phrase
seems frst to have been used in the nineteenth
century by A. N. Veselovskij). Poetics does not
get more historical by tying cultural-political
labels onto whole meters. Te historical force
of verse thinking may at a particular juncture
depend upon rendering the metacommunica-
tions of verse less immediately legiblethat
is, upon preventing verse efects from shrink-
ing to no more than a series of mere badges
of belonging, of social, political, cultural, or
poetical afliationso that verse can be rean-
imated as a repertoire of historically and af-
fectively saturated paralinguistic gestures (for
a more detailed account of this topic, which
cannot be treated in full here, see Jarvis, Me-
lodics). Te formula politics of style, as usu-
ally wielded, empties both the terms it glues
together. It diminishes politics to its least
complex moment, that of wearing a badge,
and then makes style be that badge.
Poetics demands the most exacting kind
of historical inquiry imaginable: that which
seeks to use all available partial and frag-
mented sources of evidence to recover habits
and practices of thinking and making that
have in many cases become lost. Te history
of verse thinking is not the same as the history
of representations of verse thinking. Indeed,
those representations very often are written
just so that the persisting part- infantile (see
Blasings audacious explanation [27]) or even
perverse (Barthes 228) elements of verse think-
ing, its embarrassing overinvestments in mere
clicks, pitches, and echoes, should be concealed
or rationalized. In this inquiry, some poets
will necessarily be of more importance than
others. Tat we study Pope more intensively
than Charles Churchill (who really should
be worked on more, by the way) need attract
no more suspicion than the fact that we study
Hegel more intensively than Karl Rosenkranz,
and this because the criterion of signifcance
is not merely one of taste but of the depth to
which in each case, in the case of both the
poets and the philosophers, signifcantly new
thinking is taking place (Jarvis, Wordsworths
Philosophic Song 132). Historicism has not
been thought to entail relativism about ethics
or politics. Tere is no reason why it should
entail relativism about poetics either.
Poetics need not subserve hermeneutics.
Anyone who is trying to fnd out and to say
what a given poets verse style is actually like
will at some point or other face the urgent
inquiry, But how does this help us to offer
a reading of the poem? That question feels
natural. Yet it assumes as an evident good
a quite peculiar and not invariably valuable
practice, the writing of readings of poems.
What poetics may be able to say about verse
style is considered to be useful insofar as it
contributes, in a subsidiary and relevant fash-
ion, to this goal. Te assumption that poetics
subserves hermeneutics presses connoisseur-
ship of verse style so rapidly and so forcibly
into interpretative service that it leads to fal-
sifed and unconvincing claims about verse
style and its supposed efects, thus prompt-
ing many excellent scholars to set the whole
domain to one side. It is hard to imagine a
scholar of Rubens who would have nothing
932 For a Poetics of Verse
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to say about Rubenss handling of paint, but
there is no need to imagine a Miltonist who
has nothing to say about Miltons handling of
blank verse (though for approaches that, on
the contrary, treat Miltons thinking as nec-
essarily bound up with his work as a maker
of verse, see, e.g., Creaser, Trough Mazes
and Service; Sugimura; and Teskey). But
the setting aside of verse style has its costs,
not only for students of poetry but also for in-
tellectual historians of poets opinions: think-
ing in verse is a practice and an institution
diferent from thinking in prose, and the con-
nection between the two is not simple or au-
tomatic even when they happen to come out
of the same head. Anyone who ignores this
gets intellectual history wrong.
Widespread indiference to rhythm and
meter in poetry is, for sure, partly a symp-
tom of what the close study of these topics
has come to look like. Far from having been
solved, most of the main descriptive questions
concerning what rhythm and meter actually
are and how they work remain controverted
(such valuable works as Groves; Wright; and
Tar lin skaia present mutually incompatible
theories). Te unsolved nature of basic ques-
tions in metrics discourages critics from
treating such questions as central to the study
of poetry. It is not surprising that many crit-
ics of poetry would rather hypothesize upon a
precious inkblot in a manuscriptas though
this were the auratic stuf itselfthan scan
a line of verse when the questions of what
rhythm and meter themselves are, and how
they work, remain so uncertain (cf. Michaels;
Jarvis, What).
Worse, this uncertainty can in principle
never be brought to an end. To scan a line of
verse is not to describe the properties of an
object. It is, instead, to make a diagram of
a performance, of an interpretation, and of
an experience. If a scansion of a line of verse
does not in some way record some salient
elements of some particular performance,
vocalized or silent, of that line, it is content-
less, an aprioristic fantasy. But no diagram of
a performance, of an interpretation, or of an
experience can be adequate to them.
Accordingly, the remedy for indiference
to verse technique may not be to throw all
our eforts into devising an unchallengeably
scientifc description of metrical rules. Te
problem may, instead, lie in the very under-
developed nature of the aesthetics of verse
when compared, for example, with the aes-
thetics of music or of painting. Because of the
default priority of hermeneutics over poetics
in the study of poetry, the aesthetics of verse
continues overwhelmingly to rely on the
logic of a mimetic relationship to paraphras-
able content. Te questions of the possibility
and centrality of verbal mimesis are too large
to be settled here (for further discussion see
Jarvis, Melodics), but when verbal mimesis
is allowed by mere want of alternative to be
treated as the acme of poetical achievement,
the result is rather as though the occasional
birdcalls that fnd their way into symphonies
and concertos were to be considered as the
summit of musical art. To be interested in the
history of verse style, and to believe that this
history is nonidentical with that of (say) prose
fction or political or economic history, need
by no means be to set up a series of claims
about the specialness of poetic language.
Verse, as Wordsworth exhilaratingly discov-
ered for himself, has no inevitable connection
with poetic language at all. Language is one
of the materials deployed by the practices of
verse making and of thinking in verse.
All this leads to the following series of
refections. First, verse is not a subset of lan-
guage. It is an institution, a series of practices
as real as the belief in them and the capacity
for them. Verse adepts cut up, mutilate, select
from languageusing intonation contours,
rhythms, print, gesture, and so on. (Te argu-
ment does not apply in the same way to prose,
in which rhythmic recurrence or, minimally,
segmentation are not constructive factors
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Simon Jarvis 933
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[Ty nia nov 32].) When language has had all
this done to it, it is no longer only language.1
Tis leads on to my second point: poet-
ics is not a subset of linguistics. If language is
one of the materials of verse, then the histori-
cal study of verse style is no more a subset of
linguistics than the history of the handling of
color and line in painting is a subset of the
study of the chemical composition of paint.
Tird, all poetics is critical poetics. Tat
is to say, there is no purely descriptive poetics
of verse. Te history of verse thinking can no
more proceed in mere avoidance of evalua-
tion than can the history of philosophy.
Fourth, there is a need to renew and ex-
tend the poetics of repertoire. By repertoire
I mean the quasi system of local expressive
forces that individual prosodic gestures may
take on or develop in particular authorships,
coteries, periods, and genres. Te devices of
verse have no fixed effects, but readers are
seduced into conjecturing efects with them
(Barthes 220), as they notice poets sinking
the most powerful thoughts and feelings
into even the most abject little phonetic and
printed bits and pieces. In the work of no im-
portant poet can this peculiar, this perverse
thinking that verse undertakes be understood
as at all times pressed into the service of para-
phrasable meaning: of some story, plan, idea,
moral, or effect that the poet may be pre-
sumed to have had in mind. Versifcation is
in each case a second repertoire of thinking,
interfering with, interrupting, complicating,
and competing with the poets explicit think-
ing more readily than it can merely cooperate
with, support, or illustrate it.
So that, at last, when Rei Terada says,
Lets let lyric dissolve into literature and
literature into culture, using a minimalist
defnition of culture from which no produc-
tion or everyday experience can be excluded
(200), I say, Lets not. Lets not let everything
dissolve into everything else in this way, into
this indeterminable blancmange of (mythical)
everydayness, but lets instead give up our un-
happy and only apparently democratic fight
from evaluation; lets subject our large ideas
about poetry or lyric (or textuality or cul-
ture or everyday experiencesince all these
terms can also be made to go inside quotation
marks, just like lyric and like poetry) to
the most minute test of verse-historical con-
noisseurship; lets reanimate the connection
between advanced verse practice and refec-
tion on its history (cf. Wilkinson); and lets at
the same time understand the entire history
of verse meters, rhythms, instrumentations,
intonations, italicizations, punctuations, gaps,
breaks, and absences as that extraordinarily
intricate record of thinking through making
whose contours we have hardly begun to be
able to interpret. Farewell.
NOTE
1. Allen Grossman said this to me the frst time I met
him, at Johns Hopkins University in February 2005.
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