Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse

Though many recent poets insist on their poetry s musical qualities, few offer linguistically satisfying explanations of that music. This book helps to fill that gap. It is a linguistically based study of rythmic structures, and of the nature of rhythm, in the free verse of T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, and James Wright. It was written for accessibility to readers who, although not necessarily specialists in linguistic poetics, have some knowledge of language and poetry. The book begins with an examination of rhythm in language as a whole, and of rhythm as a basic mental structure. This discussion touches on concepts from metrical phonology, acoustic phonetics, Russian Formalist and New Critical ideas of rhythm and meter, and music theory. It then analyzes what the author (borrowing a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins) calls rhythmic figures of sound, syntax, line structure, and intonation in the poetry of Eliot, Lowell, and Wright.