poleRon's complex counter-polemic (in post of today, 6.11) to the New Formalist polemics of Steele & Schreiber, attacks the latter's oversimplifications of literary history and 20th-century practice. However, the elaborate model of prosody Ron builds & defends here (via Zukofsky et al.), combining language/music/speech/writing, etc. in different permutations, serves to obscure one basic point made by Schreiber:

"Phrasing in music works in relation to the beat, not as a substitute for it."

This is a legitimate criticism - offered perhaps most strongly (& originally) by Robert Frost - to the Poundian nostrum of "composition by musical phrase". The correlation of meter & phrase, or speech pattern, is not simply part of the toolbox of optional traditionalist techniques. It is a basic aspect of poetry, and as such, serves as a kind of grounding for creative experiments of all kinds. To deny or minimize this both rules out vast fields of poetic enterprise, past and future, and distorts the evidence of 20th-cent. literary history.

The synthesis of rhythm and phrasing is one element of the overall harmonics to which composition aspires. It can be found in some of the most memorable passages of Pound & Eliot (Annie Finch's "ghost of meter", for example in the contrast of pentameter lines with trochaic beat of parts of the Cantos, or the hidden metrical forms planted in Four Quartets). The same synthesis was worked out more thoroughly and paradigmatically, if not always successfully, by Hart Crane. Crane again and again trumps these distinctions between free & metrical verse, between modernist innovation and traditional forms. Wallace Stevens, too, in his own less emphatic way, melded pentameter & free verse.

Setting up the New Formalist agitators as straw men with which to thump Quietude & plump Post-Avant is itself a polemic which tends to box, pigeonhole & truncate contemporary understanding of technical possibility.

[p.s. ...& then, moreover, what would Yeats say?]