A Prosody of Free Verse

A Prosody of Free Verse sets out, for the first time, a comprehensive system for accounting for the irregular rhythms that characterize unrhymed and unmetrical poetry. In this groundbreaking study, Richard Andrews provides a detailed analysis of free verse in order to theorize how the rhythmic patterns that underlie it are constituted and structured. Whereas previous attempts have focused on variations on regular metre, this volume breaks away form that tradition and draws upon the two wellsprings of free verse: music and dance. The book also suggests that whereas the 'foot' is the basic unit of rhythm in metrical verse, the 'line' is the better unit for analysis in free verse.

There is to date no comprehensive account of the rhythms of free verse. The main purpose of A Prosody of Free Verse: explorations in rhythm is to fill that gap and begin to provide a systematic approach to describing and analyzing free verse rhythms. Most studies have declared the attempt to write such a prosody as impossible: they prefer to see free verse as an aberrant version of regular metrical verse. They also believe that behind free verse is the 'ghost of metre'.

Running against that current, A Prosody of Free Verse bases its new system on additive rhythms that do not fit conventional time signatures. Inspiration is taken from jazz, contemporary music and dance, not only in their systems of notation but in performance. The book argues that twentieth and twenty-first century rhythms in poetry as based on the line rather than the metrical foot as the unit of rhythm , and that larger rhythmic structures fall into verse paragraphs rather than stanzas.

Autorentext

Richard Andrews is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He has recently served as Professor in English and Dean of the Faculty of Children and Learning at UCL's Institute of Education in London, and as Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He is author of several books for Routledge, including Rebirth of Rhetoric, Argumentation in Higher Education, Re-framing Literacy and A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric.

Inhalt

1. Introduction

2. Voice: human embodied cognition

3. Breaking the pentameter

4. What is distinctive about free verse?

5. The basis of prosody in music

6. The basis of prosody in dance

7. A new prosody 1: elements of the system

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8. A new prosody 2: how the system works

9. A new prosody 3: the system in action

10. Free verse across the world

11. Free verse in translation

12. Writing free verse

13. Reading free verse

14. What lies beyond free verse?

15. Postscript: June Fires