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New Literary History 35.3 (2004) 355-372

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The Acoustical Prehistory of Poetry

Brunella Antomarini *

John Cabot University, Rome

Translated from the Italian by Susan Stewart

I. A Minimal Premise

The musicality of poetry is based upon an elementary sonority underlying the voice
of the poet, a sonority sent on to the listener and always inevitably outside of the
ordinary: the poet wants to transport us by means of a mode of hearing that goes
beyond the habitual contexts of our language. To do so he or she uses a verse that is
rhythmic. It is likely that our aesthetic preferences of all kinds are regulated by
biological principles and we can apply these universal biological laws to the
musicality of poetry. A primary example is the natural tendency we have to prefer
vocalaccentuation, or the grouping of sounds into rhythmic clusters. Such grouping
has long been studied by Gestalt psychologists and further work has been done by
Victor Zuckerkandl with regard to music. This preference seems to be connected to
the primacy of emotion—our attention is caught by expression and mood before it
is caught by an object. Yet, in emphasizing this base of biological principles, it is
necessary to consider anthropology under genealogical terms and to explain from
the outset what biology has in fact no interest in explaining. The goal is to find a
way to read poetry according to its acoustic beauty and actual poetic practices—
that is, to immerse ourselves in the world of poetry's emergence and to grasp the
forms of cognition poetry produces without superimposing symbols, metaphors,
and interpretations at the outset.

II. The Polyphony of Archaic Language

According to the preponderance of research in linguistics, the origin of language

does not lie in monosyllables. As Ernest Renan concluded as [End Page 355] early
as his 1859 De l'origine du langage,1 and counter to the tradition held by Jakob
Grimm, language does not have its origin in monosyllables that then grow more
complexly into polysyllables. Rather, the origin of language lies in the harmony of
imitated natural sounds such as those of birds or waves, out of which develops a
whole made up of melody and rhythm: communication begins by means of vocal
flexings that are "the sensible ideas joined together in the end by common roots"—
that is, particular sounds with common roots that then grow into arbitrary
associations. For example, in a group of sounds like "inst," from the Greek en-
sístemi, to stay in, we can form insist, instant, instinct—not merely from a
distinction of roots and suffixes, but out of a melodic flexing of the root, as if we
could sing the root in various ways in response to varying and ongoing situations.

We begin to speak, and are able to say and tell, as we put into motion sung
formulas that modulate external events, reciting and soliciting emotions. These
formulas are actions in themselves. The difference between these two kinds of
language—the primitive language of flexings and the structured language that
gradually develops—is like the difference between emitting musical sounds as we
dilate the diaphragm, on the one hand,and saying, "I am filled with joy," on the
other. As Giambattista Vico wrote in his famous example of primitive figures
moved to speech and metaphor by their terrifying encounter with lightning in the
primeval forest, language is originally born out of the lack of words and our
compulsion to speak in moments when we fail at comprehension.2 Prose discourse
will be a contraction of various poetic formulas or compositions: "my blood is
boiling," for example, will become wrath. This is how archaic formulas, poetic by
definition and at once both gestural and vocal responses, develop into the
economical and regulating structure of language. The no-longer-sense-bound
application of arbitrary signs is what indeed produces this economy.

Language, therefore, does not develop from simplicity to complexity. As Gerard

Génette has shown,3 historical languages are more complicated than those that
evolved from them. Hence new languages are simpler than older ones: there is a
kind of linguistic entropy that leads toward a structure that is simpler and more
efficient.4 An exuberance, both musical and structural, is characteristic of primitive
language. Génette suggests that languages develop by means of successive
syntheses and melodic flexings. Renan as well had suggested that the distinction
between roots and ends, or suffixes, is a purely analytic one; a root that gathers to
itself other particles of words has never existed.5

In preliterate times, characterized by the exclusive use of oral transmission, the

sense of sight is guided by that of hearing, and this makes an enormous difference
not merely in the mode of apprehension but [End Page 356] also in terms of what
is apprehended and, in the largest sense, in terms of the world that is created.
Before literacy, speaking unfolds without a concept of distinct words. We can see
this in the first written documents with their words run together, attached
continuously to each other. Here the speaker cannot sense divisions between words,
but rather distinguishes clusters of sounds, draining or running away with the same
sense of depletion as that characterizing the emission of sounds. The group of
rhythmic sounds that transmits an emotion follows the breath and is as well a
physiological event that ratifies the presence of the feeling. Beyond such a
sounding, no traces remain of that original emotion or of what it meant. The sound
thereby distributes individual moments of feeling and sense impression rather than
organizing or abstracting types of sensation as we know them eventually in the
structures of grammar.

Language, born within the spheres of the oral and the acoustic, is formed at a
stroke; a continuous flow becomes diverse vocal flexions, a collective invention
that, like all the great inventions of antiquity, coincides with the anonymous
creation of works. Such works are characterized by Vico as "imaginative
universals"—formulas indicating an aide-mémoire of events (such as the thunder of
Jove) that have solicited, and then been transmitted by, natural sounds by means of
voices or musical instruments. To name something is to endow it with both
singularity and significance; in other words, we give names to singular things as
they unfold to perception. We imagine the world as we make it, in the surprise of
its appearance and disappearance. Then, out of the multiplication of variants, we
begin to put into order the structure of language.

III. What Appears and Disappears in Rhythm

Oral language is a corporeal gesture that reproduces the actions of perception.

Thanks to the natural rhythm of imitation, the listener in turn hears and imitates and
remembers the gesture and continues the chain. Therefore those things that are
expressed come to coincide with the expression: the body too remakes itself as it
perceives reflexively—hence the action is a presence, not, as is the case with
linguistic signs, standing for something else. For example, the psychiatrist and
neurologist D. J. Morlaas6 has discussed how the temporality and rhythm of a
moment of cognition become its primary modality. He writes that a bird must have
been known in preliterate times as "the flier" (4). A gesture of the immediate
rhythm of flying would be recorded and remembered in its natural musicality. We
can imagine how, before the use of symbols, the gesture of flight would have
indicated deictically that flier in particular, and then gradually the fliers, before in
the end an "algebrization" [End Page 357] or the word bird could emerge. This is
not a matter of carrying over knowledge by means of incorporating mental facts or
schemas but rather a matter of putting to use what might be called a "bodily
mind."7 It would be a mistake to think, as Eric Havelock and other students of oral
transmission frequently have, that these rhythmic qualities of apprehension would
be used as prototypes for moral rules or categories to be foisted on the members of
the community. Rather, we might consider each repeated rite or performance as a
scene that provokes again the initial solicitation of emotion and hearing, carrying it
over and also internalizing it. An event is perceived by the body, taken up by all the
senses, and then disappears just as the performance carries it into the present and
concludes it. The actions of song and dance or other musical performances are in
this way the basis of vision and spectacle—it is those actions emerging through
sounds, less permanent and inevitable than vision, that create an organic memory of
the initial event. In the Poetics Aristotle, in fact, says that what is visualized is not
as important as what is heard in narration. We can imagine Oedipus, who sends his
voice across the dramatic events of his story without the help of any mise-en-scène
that might have illustrated false repetitions of the events he has suffered. Oedipus
truly suffers while telling his story. His voice carries his lived emotions. The actor
exists in blood and flesh, and his voice takes part in the reality of the drama. The
object of vision can be easily avoided just by turning around, or by turning the eyes
away, but the acoustical can be directly transmitted from the source to its
destination without mediation.8 In literate eras, written documents, set aside in
sheltering places and abstracted from sense perception, pose an intellectual
existence and forms of memory that render themselves independent of the body,
creating an objective and symbolic reserve.
In contrast, the acoustical word, identical to that which it says, was defined by
Plato in the Symposium as something that passes from nonbeing to being.9 What
does this mean? That it is a question of creation ex nihilo? Or of artifacts designed
to please the ear? Or does he intend to indicate a type of cognition that does not
leave traces and therefore needs to engage in reformulations, in continuous
passages from nonbeing to being? A little earlier in the dialogue he has associated
Eros with music, an art he will not refute as he has the others since music is
characterized by the harmony of all well-made things.10 To imitate the sound of
things, therefore, is much more worthwhile than imitating imitations, as the other
arts do. By means of music, the harmony of the cosmos is transmitted; it helps
articulate the good and the just comportment of the gods.

There is, then, an enormous distance between mimetic art and musical poiesis: the
first regards the poets who sing the sounds of things [End Page 358] without
taking any responsibility ontologically; the second is that of divine
intermediaries—priests like Socrates, who do not write, but rather transmit, hymns
and sang rituals and dances about the just and the good by means of which the
world is made. It is they who are the true poets, worthy of being the poets of the
ideal Republic.

IV. Rhythmical Formulas and the Prolongation of Perception

As exemplified by the majority of archaic documents, including the Vedic hymns,

the Gospels, and the songs of shamans, ancient rites have as their basis sung
formulas. The formula, as demonstrated first of all by Parry and Lord,11 is not a
word, nor a pure sound: it is the modality of the voice that takes an indirect
trajectory,12 a microphrase that continues even though we do not distinguish
discontinuous verbal segments. This phrase is identified only with the metrical
conditions to which it responds. A formula is not the same if it is produced in a
different metric: it produces a discourse without words.13 With the "propositional
formulas"—as defined by Morlaas—we stay within the vicinity of the real and,
with that, "man can already grasp the real in the entire body before carrying it in his
voice."14 The voice that follows the rules of this organic form of memorization is
not the instrument of the emission and communication of signs. For signs are
instruments of a symbolic patrimony outside of our bodies and are therefore purely
mental or cultural. Rather, the voice is like a musical instrument that accords itself
with the flow of rhythm and connects with this stimulus that is solicited. As Lévi-
Strauss wrote, a sound is already an "accord" and vice versa.15 The note that is
emitted makes itself one with the note emitted by the external or actual sonority, or
with that of the master "first imitator" or of other participants, and then what
follows is the collective event—a uniform sense of the communally "well-made"
that is ethical-religious only in virtue of its aesthetic perfection.

Initially solicited by a rhythm, the sonorous reception continues as if it is a question

of carrying to the end an action that was not decided or willed but rather compelled.
It is as if, in the passage from one individual to another, a collective
macroorganism were created. Within the temporal unfolding of the performance
resides the pleasure of reenacting.Sensations come to coincide with something
outside themselves. Singing or dancing together, the participants prolong their
perceptions via each other. Within Islamic prayer, in its choral and collective form,
there is no space between one body and another; bodies necessarily touch one
another. The utterance of ritual song corresponds to the physical [End Page 359]
contact between bodies. Believers say that the name of Allah is inscribed in this
unique organism made of individual bodies, a language of bodies created from the
transmission of senses and emotions.

When we follow a rhythm, we follow its collective form and disregard whatever
other rhythms might be present. Small children, while learning a poem by memory,
compulsively move to its rhythm; their bodies remember and remake it and in
doing so they give over their perceptual isolation, an isolation that feels unnatural
to them.This giving over to a rhythm is described as well by Paul Valéry, as being
"gripped by a rhythm," and there are numerous historical accounts of poets who
compose by chanting and walking under this influence of surrendering to a
rhythm.16

V. The God of Song

There is no distinction between what happens within the organism as emotion and
what happens outside it as event. The poets who did not please Plato began to be
appreciated in a later epoch, one wherethe distinction between the external and the
internal had already occurred, andbody and environment hadevolved into subject
and object. Cultural evolution, meanwhile, with the discovery of writing, permitted
the spatialization of sung formulas: the poet and the singer can master the song,
revise it, and reformulate it as they please on the surface on which it is written. This
permits them to provide the finished sense of a composition, to reread it, to provide
individual interpretations, to stand back from it, and, instead of remaking it, to
simply return to that which it already is. Yet bodily cognition is still in effect and
interferes with such symbols, written signs, and visual effects. The result is the
obscurity of ritual texts and poems.

The difference between song and language gives us an idea of how poetic formulas
arise: when we speak we continually change our pitch, and within the syllable is a
sense of something concealed or unspoken. When instead we sing, the change of
pitch is discontinuous and covers a major extension with more defined scansions.
Archaic ritual poetry, expressed between song and word, had to have a scansion
similarly limited to the song, closed with variants in its interior.17 Therefore, by
means of poetic recitation, we harmonize rhythm with a continual, melodic
modulation of the voice, and the result is the "feeling" of a composition. The words
that gradually begin to give names to things, names, in fact, for every single thing,
fully result in a great improvisation and superabundance. The names arise from
rhythmic song, a song sung in temporal sequence, and they eventually become
those unique classifications [End Page 360] that are functions of the right
hemisphere and then impose themselves on the linguistic functions of the left
hemisphere.

VI. The Poetic Obscurity of the Madagascan Hain-Teny

The "hain-teny" are brief poetic compositions popular in Madagascar, famously

obscure in their content and function. Jean Paulhan found in this very obscurity the
basic characteristics of poetry itself, grasping that these obscure verses, originating
in an everyday practice of verbal dueling,are dedicated to forming metaphors.18 Yet
he tended to listen to, and record, these oral performances as if they were written
and visual forms. Here is an example of this form composed by means of
alternating voices:

L'oiseau regrette les saisons en allées

Je regrette mon amie disparue
Le petit caïman que sa mere mange
Retourne au ventre qu'il connaît bien.
Ne glissez pas, ne regrettez pas
Je sais distinguer qui m'aime.
Les gouttes d'eau sur la feuille de songe
Roulent à terre toutes ensemble.

[The bird longs for the seasons that have passed

I long for the friend who disappeared
The small caiman eaten by its mother
returns to the womb it knows so well.
Don't slip away, don't regret
I can tell who loves me.
The beads of water on the leaves of the dream
roll all together to the earth.]19

Though we cannot examine the original sounds conveyed in Paulhan's

transcriptions, we can nevertheless see how the hain-teny develops. Mimetic
physical motion is suggested by the actions as they are rhythmically described. The
first verse and the others contain a rhythmic progression, attesting to the original
sonority heard by Paulhan. This progression is internal to each verse, like the
pattern of beats and pauses we make as we tap out a rhythm on a tabletop, and each
progression has semantic consequences. The sense is carried by a succession of
visual and sonorous analogies: in "L'oiseau regrette les saisons en allées" (the bird
longs for the seasons that have passed), the semantic passage from the first half of
the verse to the second is given in the threads of sound, [End Page 361] rhythm,
and gestures of "regrette." Therefore, something that regrets resembles something
consumed that has returned to its origin: "Le petit caïman que sa meremange /
Retourne au ventre" (The small caiman eaten by its mother / returns to the womb).
We can picture a dance or perhaps a movement of the reciter's body as the verse
distances and gathers itself successively. With "Ne glissez pas, ne regrettez pas"
(Don't slide away, don't regret), the gestures of fleeing and gathering or picking up
are enacted. This is then how the drops slip down the leaves: "Les gouttes d'eau sur
la feuille de songe / Roulent à terre toutes ensemble" (The beads of water on the
leaves of the dream / roll all together to the earth). Here the voice inflects the
sequence and an emerging internal rhythm, compelling a memory of an experience
the body already knows. At this point, what is the use of looking for a metaphor?
Not only is it impossible to search further, for little is known of the context, but
such a search is also unnecessary because any sense designed to be more clear than
this is simply redundant.The reciters/imitators, together with the hearers/imitators,
have pulled themselves overto the last formula, simply letting go of, no longer
holding in mind, the first. The mnemonic oral extension is limited and, within the
rhythm of the imagination, provides temporal sequences in chains, not spaces
dominated by visual surveillance. Here is another example:

La pluie tonne en Ankaratra,

L'orchidée fleurit à Anjafy.
Il est dur d'oublier tout d'un coup,
Il est aisé d'oublier peu à peu.
Elle pleure, la-Fille-de-l'oiseau-bleu
Il rit, Celui-qui-ne-craint-pas-le-retour-des-choses.
Retour de mort, ne retournez pas
Mais retour d'amour, retournez.

[The rain thunders in Ankaratra

The orchid flowers in Anjafy.
It is hard to forget everything at once,
It is easy to forget little by little.
She weeps, The-daughter-of-the-bluebird
He laughs, He-who-doesn't-fear-things-returning.
Returning death, don't return
But returning love, return.]20

The rhythmical opposition of the first verses—"pluie . . . Ankaratra" (rain . . .

Ankaratra) Orchidée . . . Anjafy (orchid . . . Anjafy)—come reinforced by the
formula "d'oublier tout d'un coup . . . d'oublier peu à peu"(to forget all at once . . .
to forget little by little). During the [End Page 362] recitation, the speaker seems to
associate the violence of the thunder with a sudden forgetting that then is recast as
another kind of forgetting—one that slowly blooms. But perhaps to say this
isalready to superimpose too much meaning. The hain-tenyproceeds with "pleure . .
. rit," "retour-des-choses . . . Retour de mort," "retour d'amour . . . retournez" (weep
. . . laugh, return-of-things / return of death, return of love / [you must] return). One
image only provokes another, and that in turn provokes the successive one. The
images arecarried, with an intimation of their sense, into resonance, like the links of
a chain.

Several formulas, such as "il est dur d'oublier . . . il est aisé d'oublier," return or are
repeated in diverse compositions because they are like a pivot or a divine priming.
The aide-mémoire exerts a rhythm toward each other variant, a kind of root to
which it attaches diverse suffixes within the formulaic grammar. According to
Paulhan,21 proceeding from a description, one passes to a dimension that is only
metaphorical as the last verses of the hain-teny lose their way within a fantastic
obscurity. But it seems that this loss of direction is the same phenomenon we often
find in the use of refrains. In such cases, the song moves toward infinity and
exhausts itself, just as a conversation or a nursery rhyme exhausts itself in the
saying of it. There is nothing obscure or hidden within the appearance. If we
imagine there is nothing outside of the voice, as the rhythm carries a sense along
diachronically, we know that one image follows another by pure analogy or
assonance and that whatever obscurity arises is the result of exhausting the acoustic
and analogical resources of the sound.

VII. The Balance of the Body and the Hemistich

The Jesuit anthropologist Marcel Jousse conducted research during the 1920s and
'30s within Native American groups in order to find analogues for the formation of
an oral tradition of the Gospels in the Palestinian context.22 His work finds
confirmation in that line of experimental research from Marc Jeannerod to
Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese to George Lakoff, according to which
mental and symbolic activity has its origin in motor imagery. It has by now been
shown that metaphor is but the condensation of motor cognition into the symbolic
sphere,23 which might explain the simplicity of poetic imagery. This imagery is
apprehended by the body and hence limited to its movements, to its actions and the
observations of actions of others, and as well determined by its limits.

The apprehension of formulas appears, with the rhythmical bilateral movement of

the body, as that which moves itself before and behind, in [End Page 363] height
and in depth, to the right and to the left, as Jousse showed when he analyzed what
he called the "parallel rhythmic recitations" of the Hebrew scriptures. Consider, for
example, the following formula:

Guérisseur,
guéris ta douleur

[Healer,
heal your own suffering]24

Such a formula responds to the physical and psychological laws of the bilaterality
of the body. The medicine is associated with the left, then the shift to the right
posits the opposition between medicine and suffering. The rhythmic balance of the
body becomes a condition of memorization, necessary for the repetition of the parts
of the formula and other kinds of recitations, as shown in these two variants of
"Four Kinds of Memorizers":

Prompt à apprendre Prompt à apprendre

et prompt à perdre: et lent à perdre:
son Défaut efface la Qualité. célui-là a la bonne Part.

Lent à apprendre Lent à apprendre

et lent à perdre: et prompt à perdre:
sa Qualité efface son Defaut. célui là a la mauvaise Part.

Ready to learn Ready to learn

and ready to lose: and slow to lose:
its defect effaces its quality. this one has the good lot.

Slow to learn Slow to learn

and slow to lose: and ready to lose:
its quality effaces its defect. this one has the bad lot.25
This group of parallel recitations, called by Jousse "mimodramas," are all songs of
the same melody, yet as well somewhat different. They depart from a recitative
scheme that is not simply a structure but rather a first formula from which variants
and repetitions follow one another. The formula, once "danced" in the mouth, tends
to come back every time something similar is perceived. The effect is as when we
hear a word that recalls a song and we begin singing it. Such formulas were
instinctively repeated, and by means of this repetition young people would take in
rules and behaviors important to the group. [End Page 364]

The formula comes to be taken literally as something to be eaten,26 according to a

mechanism like that of maternal nutrition in which the affective nourishment is
simultaneous to that which is literally consumed. Jousse shows that affective states
are themselves the matrix or motor of mental motions and are sufficient to explain
a mode of apprehension.27 A movement without periodicity is impossible, says
Jousse.28 He cites Wilhelm Wundt, who observed as well that the reception of an
object occurs within a certain bodily rhythm.29

VIII. The Temporal Mode of Existence of the World

The mind flies up and out, sent by whom?

The first breath emerges, chained by whom?
By whom, they say, is this word sent?
Which god chains the eye, the ear?
—Kena Upanishad, 1

The world apprehended in dance and song is fluid and rhythmic and never fixed, a
living structure. What comes to be recognized in a song as part of the environment
is joined to the previous song and is lost in this going forth, only to be retrieved
later in another song. This is the sense of parataxis that predominates in archaic
texts, and, indeed, in much of the history of poetry more generally: effects such as
analogies without completion and movements to and fro resembling dance
rhythms. The song gathers and releases a cosmological order, yet it leaves such an
order open and unfixed. This is why so often ritual itself has an agonistic or teasing
tone. Ritual, in fact, often involves processes of improvisation such as we find in
the formulaic, but open-ended, calls and responses of the hain-teny. Such
exchanges, series of questions and answers or the call and response of prayer,
characterize ritual progressions in many cultures. As rituals unfold, each successive
pieceof information does not negate what has previously appeared but rather
accrues to it, producing an instability in the text and the world, an atmosphere of
dramatic reenactment within which every listener is called to participation and,
eventually, resolution.

IX. The Successive Internalizations of the Formula

As the balance reproduces that temporal rhythm within the space of the body, so
does the world become visualized in an imaginary space that repeats or represents
the bodily movement and takes stable form within the interiority that comes itself
to take shape in biological evolution. [End Page 365] Within Christianity, the
temple becomes the body of Christ that is "eaten" at each liturgy, and in modern
times it imposes itself in the interiority of prayer; within Islam, the prayer,
suggested by the imam, is performed silently by each follower.

As breathing is a physical fact, bringing what is external to the body's interior, so

the psyche comes tobe an internalized entity. According to the research of the
classical philologist Edward Cranz, around the first millennium BCE a fundamental
transformation of mind occurred, one that flowed from a notion of coincidence
between external and internal worlds; an ontological continuity in which the world
that possesses the mind gave way to a notion of an elemental distinction between a
mind closed in itself and a world/object. That which Cranz calls "the extensive
self"30 is that very whole we earlier described as the prolonged intersubjective
perception that sounds out a way of thinking the world. Already in Aristotle and
Plotinus, says Cranz, we have vestiges of this ontology without significance, in
which the mind literally contains being.31 In Plato as well we find the identification
of the external and the internal: the spirit of the world is the musical harmony
between body and cosmos.32 Oddly there has since been a long period of transition,
across the first millennia of the new era,about which studies such as those of Cranz,
Jousse, or those who study oral tradition, converge in their description of a
transformation in the means of consciousness of the world. The transition is of
interest in order to provide an account of the complexity of modern poetry, within
which the visible investment is undeniable even as it recognizes the temporal basis
of our perception and means of thought, a basis serving to render the symbolic
superfluous, neither necessary nor unique.

In her "Spazi metrici" of 1962, the sole essay she ever wrote, Amelia Rosselli
seems to recuperate the path between rhythmical/musical verse and visual/spatial
verse. Providing a kind of history of poetics in the space of just a few pages, she
presents the emerging relevance of the visual as she also shows that it never
detached itself from the acoustical paradigm. According to her experience of
sonority, "the minimal element necessary to organize writing emerged clearly as
the 'letter,' sounded or not, with a certain timbre or not. . . . This letter created
phonetic nodes (chl, str, sta, biv) that were not necessarily syllables, and were in
fact only found in the forms of functions, graphemes, and noises. In the search for
the fundamental forms of poetry, a classification in the end neither graphical nor
formal, it was necessary to speak instead of the syllable, understood as. . . . a
rhythmical particle."33 In a successive phase, time becomes projected onto verse
that then appears on the page—all according to "new sonorous fusions and ideals,
according to the change of practical time, within graphical spaces." She continues,
"the unity underlying verse was not only the letter, breaking [End Page 366] up
and insignificant, nor the syllable, rhythmic and cutting, but always pure and
without ideality, but above all the entire word. . . . Within which the first line of the
poem secured once and for all the extension of the picture that was both spatial and
temporal, the following verses were then able to adjust themselves in equal
measure. . . . I wrote by passing from verse to verse without attending to any
priority of significance regarding the last word at the end of the line as it happened
by chance to appear" (340).

Words, more ideal and abstract than sounds, now sustain the sonority of the
syllable. But significance stays superfluous because now the visual/graphic picture
is charged with the same role asthat first taken up by those formulaic sequences
that were exclusively acoustical: "I thought in fact that the dynamic of thought and
sonority generally exhausted itself in the end of the phrase or period or thought,
and that the vocal emission and the writing followed nevertheless without
interruptions—in this was its birth and rebirth" (341).

As in ritual song, the linguistic sense is given in the temporal-spatial form and
remains dependent on it. This intolerance for meaning, typical of poets and artists,
is never explained on the plane of anthropological evidence: it is evident that the
subordination of the symbolic function is not due to a historical-cultural tradition,
and not to successive images and sonorities, but rather to the poetical intentionality
that is reached beyond meanings or symbols. The motor function is sufficient to
provide form to images and sounds without the intervention of meaning.

In Rosselli's intense analysis, the historical destination of contemporary poetry is

also revealed in terms that are above all still physical: "Reality is a heavy thing that
the hand tires of, and no form is able to restrain it" (342).

X. The Transition to Poetic Verse

We do not want to distract ourselves with a walk in the forest of symbols because
we possess a forest far denser, in our divine physiology, the infinite complexity of
our obscure organisms.
—Osip Mandel'stam34

The hemistich is the fossil of that short breath specific to poetry. Even today, to
read modern verse without superimposing symbolic meanings is to conduct an
experiment that is built upon the direct ritual and bodily inheritance of poetry, to
read freed of the responsibility of [End Page 367] meaning. And even when the
poet imposes writing on poetic rhythm, and even when the symbolic suffuses the
receiver of the poem, the symbolic remains limited and is continually provided by
the material level of motor and sensory sense. In a poem there will always be a
limited cluster of actions, such as "to and fro" or "beginning, interdiction or clue,
and end." Novels, chronologies, philosophical arguments rely upon linearity, but in
a lyric poem an action can be grasped in one breath, taken up at a moment in time.
The ear and eye progressively gather the images that accrue to form a "picture."
But this picture stays closed, delineated and confined by the formula of the sound:
the spatiality obtained by means of writing does not surrender to a discursive
exigency in poetry. Semantic obscurity, however, is a first level possible whenever
there is a temporal sequence without a spatial center (the chain of images); at
another level, it will become superimposed on spatiality. As a temporal literary
form, poetry recuperates a moment when the image has already passed and joins
with what follows, but it is necessary to gather all the images in a global,
exhaustive comparison. Yet modern poetry often involves a little metrical error, a
little flight from grammar or linguistic syntax, a semantic destabilization that takes
place as an action: the poetry, in this case, is recognized as such by virtue of a
technical imperfection that becomes a poetical component; it is participating in
something that was not there before, a laying bare of a contingency that casually
insinuates itself in verse. Between the diachronic melody and the syncretic
harmony, it betrays expectations and provokes surprises, and we want to know how
this is done.

It is the profound and sacred silence of poetry and art, and not the protection of a
restored significance, that suffuses the richness of reading, just as it does that of
hearing, and we come to understand the ways we are moved. As Dino Campana
wrote in "Pei vichi fondi tra il palpito rosse":

Pei vichi fondi tra il palpito rosso

Dei fanali, sull'ombra illanguidita:
Al vento di preludio di un gran mare
Ricchissimo accampato in fondo all'ombra
Che mi cullava di venture incerte

[Along the deep alleys between the red throb

Of the street lamps, above the weakening shadow:
Toward the wind the prelude to a great and stormy sea
I camped in the depths of the shadow
Rocking me toward uncertain adventure]35

We are already situated in a physical atmosphere, but one that is introduced

indirectly— "Dei fanali, sull'ombra, al vento, in fondo [End Page 368] all'ombra"
(street lamps, shadow, wind, in the depths of the shadow)—because we are
uncertain whether this landscape is external or internalized. What those words
indicate by their sonorous rhythm. "Che mi cullava di venture incerte" (rocking me
toward uncertain adventure), the bilateral "cullava . . . venture incerte" (rocking . . .
uncertain adventure), carries us in this verse towardan interior dimension, and then
the uncertainty of that which occurs turns suddenly external and physical:

Io me n'andavo nella sera ambigua

Nell'alito salso umano
Tra nimbi screziati fuggenti
In alto da ogive orientali

[I went into the ambiguous night

In the salty human breath
Among speckled clouds fleeing
Upward from oriental ogees]

From the start the ambiguity is riveted to a semantic and spatial uncertainty—
"Nell'alito . . . tra nimbi . . . in alto"—and can renew an internal dimension to the
verse:

Col caro mare nel petto

Col caro mare nell'anima

[The dear sea in my breast

The dear sea in my soul]

Something physical immediately occurs, thanks to a rhythmic interruption:

Or tremo. L'apparizione fu ineffabile
Una grazia lombarda in alto sale

[Now I tremble. The apparition was ineffable

A Lombard grace rising up]

And afterwards this verse itself passes again to the level of apparent symbol:

O vita sarcastica atroce

O miseria nefanda intravista

[O sarcastic atrocious life

O foul misery barely glimpsed]

But the abstraction of "life" is immediately drawn away again by the singularity of
the event: [End Page 369]

All'angolo di un vico lubrico nella sera ambigua

Al palpitare inquieto dei fanali

[At the corner of a slippery lane in the ambiguous night

At the restless throb of the street lamps]36

These lines repeat themselves by means of the formulas of streetlamps, wind, and
sea: the poet gives us the presence out of which things are imitated and tells us in
turn how to make and imitate them, all the while leaving us behind in this passage
at the moment it is passing. Such are the rules internal to poetic practice. The
beauty of sound and rhythm in this poetry is relatively independent of historical
and literary evaluations. Let us turn, in concluding, to several verses of Amelia
Rosselli:

Per una impossibile gagliarda esperienza

Rompevano isolamenti faticosamente, ma
i carri che ci portavano come frutta al
mercato erano lugubri automobili bianche
se nevicava, infernali nella pioggia. Corrompendo . . .

[Because of an impossible brave experience

they laboriously broke their isolation, but
the carts carrying us like fruits to
market were gloomy white cars
if it snowed, infernal in the rain. By corrupting . . .]37

By now everything that the letter requests of, and surrenders to, the sequence of
actions (formulas) can only be scanned from an evidently bilateral rhythm. Hence
the graphical allows a verse that is more complex, but limited by its quantitative
capacities for memorization. Here "esperienza . . . che rompe l'isolamento"
(experience . . . that breaks isolation) gives a sense of the fatigue of the action. The
final "ma" of the second verse closes the sequence: the body interrupts itself,
forgets, and goes ahead. With "isolamento rotto . . . carri che portano molti
individui-frutta . . . al" (broken isolation . . . carts carrying individuals-fruits . . . at
the),we gather a complex image of "gathering" and diminishment because "al"
comes to a close even as it introduces the next sequence, in which "carri . . .
mercato" (carts . . . market) comes as a negation. There are "automobili bianche"
(white cars) and we are carried by "lugubri" (gloomy); the successive sequence
opens a world that seems to have already begun before the verse and is also
simultaneous to it: "se nevicava" (if it snowed), a hypothetical that delimits "il
bianco" (white), closes the image and the sequence, foranother will only open it—
"infernali" instead of "nella pioggia" (infernal in the [End Page 370] rain).
"Corrompendo" again closes the image of the infernal car in the rain.

The greatness of a poet like Amelia Rosselli lies within her capacity to make her
letters heard. Each sound follows rhythmically from another sound and we, too, are
moved with each verse. This overturning of one poetic action by another remakes
us by means of a heavy emotional investment. Yet we do not necessarily bring to
mind preceding verses, for Rosselli never requires that we gather the work into a
whole—the kind of whole that would be a restoration of symbolism and
"significance." Poets are the only ones among us who cannot do without rhythmic
memory: for the rest of us it has often disappeared or we have forgotten how to
hear it. Poets carry forward this memory as a deliberate archaism—this mistake on
purpose is in the end the secret of their talent.

Brunella Antomarini is Professor of Philosophy at John Cabot University in Rome,

where she teaches aesthetics, contemporary philosophy, and the philosophy of
social science. She is the author of Trascendenza e finitezza. L'estetica di Hans urs
von Balthasar (2004); co-director of the philosophical book-series Montag,
published in Rome; and editor of the philosophical journal il cannocchiale. She has
published many articles that are part of her ongoing research regarding
contemplative perception in art and its cognitive value, and she is currently
working on a book about forms and knowledge.

Endnotes
*
I would like to thank Susan Stewart, who has enriched the sense of this essay with
the music of her English and who constantly enriches me with her friendship.

1. Ernst Renan, De l'origine du langage (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1859).

2. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max
Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 76-77.

3. Gerard Génette, "Langues du desert," in Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie

(Paris: Seuil, 1976), 245.

4. Brunella Antomarini, "Poesia mimetica: Un'ipotesi," in "Il valore cognitivo

dell'arte," Il Cannocchiale 2 (2000): 31.

5. Renan, De l'origine du langage, 11.

6. D. J. Morlaas, "Du mimage au langage," 1936, unedited manuscript, Fondation

Marcel Jousse, 23 rue des Martyrs, Paris.

7. T. W. Jennings, "On Ritual Knowledge," The Journal of Religion 62 (1982):

115.

8. Brunella Antomarini, "Oral Formulas in Ritual Pre-Literature Communication:

The Cognitive Organic Response," Interdisciplinary International Journal of
Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis (Spring 1999): 66.

9. Plato Symposium 205b-c.

10. Plato Symposium 181a.

11. Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1960).

12. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 111.

13. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 115.

14. Morlaas, "Du mimage au langage," 5.

15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Guardare, ascoltare, leggere (Milan: Saggiatore, 1994),

80.

16. Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry (New York: Vintage, 1961), 70-72; discussed
with further examples in Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 211-13.

17. Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind, trans. L. Sosio (Milan: Adelphi, 1976), 432.

18. Jean Paulhan, "Les hain-tenys" (1939) in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Cercle di
Livre Précieux, 1966), 2: 67-96. [End Page 371]

19. Paulhan, "Les hain-tenys," 74.

20. Paulhan, "Les hain-tenys," 73.

21. Paulhan, "Les hain-tenys," 73, 75.

22. Marcel Jousse, Les récitatifs rythmiques parallèles (Paris: Editions Spes, 1929).

23. G. Gallese and A. Goldmann, "Mirror-neurons: In Reflection," Trends in

Cognitive Sciences 2, no. 12 (1998).

24. Bereshit Rabbah, IV, 23, 49b, quoted in Jousse, Les récitatifs, xvii.
25. Avot, V, 12, in Jousse, Les récitatifs, 176-77.

26. Jousse, La manducation de la parole (Paris, Gallimard, 1974), 64.

27. Jousse, "Le style oral rythmique et mnémotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs,"
Etudes de psychologie linguistique 2, no. 4 (1925): 4.

28. Jousse, "Le style oral," 20

29. See Wilhelm Wundt, Principles of Physiological Psychology, trans. Edwrd

Bradford Titchener (London: Macmillan, 1904).

30. Edward Cranz, "The Reorientation of Western Thought, c. 110 AD.: The Break
with the Ancient Tradition and Its Consequences for Renaissance and
Reformation," March 24, 1982, p. 2. My thanks to Robert Proctor for making this
unpublished manuscript available to me.

31. Cranz, "The Reorientation," 3-4

32. Plato Philebus 29e.

33. Amelia Rosselli, Le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1997), 338.

34. Osip Mandel'stam, "Il mattino dell'acmeismo," in La quarta prosa (Rome:

Editori Riuniti, 1982), 65.

35. Dino Campana, Canti orfici e altri scritti (Milan: Mondadori, 1941), 115.

36. Campana, Canti orfici, 115.

37. Rosselli, "Serie ospedaliera," Le poesie, 345.