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Ideologies of English: Stress Clash, “Anglo-Saxon”, and Twentieth-Century Conceptions of Rhythm

Idéologies de l’anglais: “Anglo-saxon”, contre-accent, et conceptions du rythme au vingtième siècle
Andrew Eastman
p. 129-142

Abstracts

“Ideologies of English” looks at how our implicit myths about language interact with our conceptions of rhythm. It takes as a case in point the critical writings of Seamus Heaney and his figuration of the “Anglo-Saxon”, a notion by means of which Heaney defines a gendered nature or essence of English based on the rhythmic criteria of stress clash and consonant cluster. Heaney’s conception is contrasted with a diametrically opposed view: in Derek Attridge’s account, English rhythm is characterized by a “natural” tendency to alternate stresses and non-stresses, in such a way as to avoid stress clash. In contrast with these nature-based definitions, this article argues for a conception of rhythm as subjectivity in language, thus as a discursive activity transforming linguistic patterns. A brief examination of Heaney’s Beowulf: A Verse Translation attempts to show how this modern English version of “Anglo-Saxon” enacts rhythm as discursive practice, to the extent that in it, alliterative prominence rewrites the rules of English phonology.

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1Twentieth-century poets made the invention of rhythmic practices a form of individuation, at once the theory and enactment of the radical historicity of language. These developments have appeared more characteristic of American poetry, as manifested in the writing of Williams, Moore, Cummings, Oppen, or, more recently, Susan Howe. On the other hand, rhythmic practices in twentieth-century British poetry may appear less “technically innovative”, as the phrase goes—or aimed less at transforming the meaning of meaning than at making use of communally recognized devices of expression, founded on conceptions about the nature of the English language itself. Thus, when Seamus Heaney remarks, in The Government of the Tongue, on the intimate connection between phonetics and feeling, he appears to be expressing a consensus characteristic of a certain strand of discourse on twentieth-century British poetry, the idea that poems are to be made of concrete, monosyllabic words of Germanic origin: such words, goes the implicit argument, lie closer to our unconscious, inchoate, yet deeply-felt relations to the world of things. What is at stake, it seems, in some British twentieth-century practices and conceptions of rhythm—and notably in the work of Seamus Heaney—is the relation between language and nature.

2More than other concepts pertaining to language, perhaps, rhythm suggests the possibility of a continuum with nature. As Michael Golston notes in a recent article on William Carlos Williams, early twentieth century theories of rhythm emphasized the link between rhythm and body metabolisms, treating rhythm as a national or racial characteristic; rhythm, as Golston would have it, becomes a suspect concept, with a decided essentialist tinge. Discussions of rhythm in twentieth-century poetry raise the central question of the extent to which rhythms in language are conceived on the model of natural or biological rhythms. This problem is Émile Benveniste’s point of departure in his article, “La notion de “rythme” dans son expression linguistique”: Benveniste argues there that our universal concept of rhythm, embracing and relating natural phenomena, social activities, music, and language, was rendered possible by Plato’s equation of rhythm with measure, but that Greek rhythmos was earlier understood to designate “form in the instant in which it is assumed by what is moving, mobile, fluid” (Benveniste 333; my translation). As Henri Meschonnic shows in his Critique du rythme, Benveniste’s article makes possible a conception of rhythm as enunciation, as a subject’s self-organization in discourse.

3It seems significant from this point of view that the first use of the word “rhythm” in Heaney’s early collection of critical essays, Preoccupations, refers to the timeless, traditional rhythms of rural existence, contrasted with the circumstances of the Second World War, the military rhythms of American troops drilling in Northern Ireland; “the rhythms of the yard” are here the working of a communal pump (Heaney 1980b, 17). The term appears in the opening of Heaney’s short memoir “Mossbawn”; and it is clear from other contexts in Preoccupations and from Heaney’s early poems that the pump functions as an image of poetry itself, understood as the retrieval of a cultural unconscious; the pump reappears in the poem “Rite of Spring”, again suggesting a connection between the rhythms of human activities and those of the seasons. In “Mossbawn”, Heaney portrays the sound of the pump through the repetition of the words “omphalos, omphalos, omphalos”, using the Greek word for the center of the world: the central image of rhythm and more specifically of poetic rhythm proposed here is that of repetition and repetitive movement, associated, however playfully, with the ground of all things.

4The image of the pump conflates the natural, the archaic, the unconscious, the sexual and the traditional; as such it correlates, in Heaney’s critical writings, with a poetics of the English language itself. Following this lead, I would like to look, in this paper, at how ideas of nature seep into our considerations of language; more particularly, at how we ascribe ideological “natures” to languages, which draw on, and determine, our concepts of rhythm. “Ideologies of English” thus poses the problem of how our more or less spontaneous philosophies about the nature of English enter into the reading and writing of poetry. In this connection, I would like to look at some aspects of the work of Seamus Heaney, because its emphasis on the sensuous qualities of words, on the materiality of language, seems to represent in emblematic fashion widespread assumptions about the poetics of English; and because Heaney’s critical writings have emphasized the importance of “naturalness” in the way poems should speak.

5The choice of Heaney looks at first sight problematic, since one of the basic gestures of his writing involves “de-naturing” English, by introducing Irish words or local Ulster expressions into his poems. Yet, perhaps because he is also writing as an Irish poet, Heaney appears heavily invested in attributing a nature to English; such a nature is perhaps less a statement about English than about the writer’s point of view, about the predicament of Irishness. Paradoxically, however, Heaney discovers the essence of English in his own, locally-spoken variety of it. Becoming a poet, Heaney argues, involves recovering what he calls “the essential quick” of one’s own speaking voice (Heaney 1980b, 44); this essential voice is inextricably caught up with the dialect one learns as a child. Yet dialect is also, as Heaney asserts in a discussion of Ted Hughes, where “the bedrock of the language” is to be found (Heaney 1980b, 159). In this sense, finding one’s “poetic voice” means delving into the nature of English.

6The bedrock of English revealed in dialect is defined by Heaney in terms of what he calls “Anglo-Saxon”, a word which conflates the Old English idiom and the poetry written in it. In his introduction to his translation of Beowulf, Heaney alludes to the similarity of his own Ulster speech with the “Anglo-Saxon metrics” which, he claims, cropped up in his early writing (Heaney 2002, xxxiii). Speaking about some of the poems associated with place-names in his volume Wintering Out, Heaney noted his sense of relief at discovering that “one could be faithful to the nature of the English language [. . .] and at the same time to one’s non-English origin”, adding that his new poems were “erotic mouth music by and out of the Anglo-Saxon tongue” (quoted O’Donoghue 61). That “by” is important, for it suggests, typically for Heaney, that it is the nature of the language which writes the poem, rather than the poem inventing the language.

  • 1 Presumably an allusion to a remark made by Hopkins about a line from his poem “The Loss of the Eury (...)

7The nature of English is defined in rhythmic terms, as is shown through the account Heaney gives of his own poetic origins in his introduction to Beowulf: A Verse Translation; describing his early attempts at writing poetry, which he calls “as much pastiche Anglo-Saxon as pastiche Hopkins”, he gives the example: “Starling thatch-watches and sudden swallow/Straight breaks to mud-nest, home-rest after” (Heaney 2002, xxxiii). Heaney’s characterization of the Anglo-Saxon core of English thus associates stop consonants and consonantal clusters, monosyllabic words, compounds and stress clash. That exacerbation of “stress” is essential to English rhythm is suggested by another of Heaney’s comments on Ted Hughes, where he argues that the latter has inherited from Shakespeare, Webster, Hopkins, and Lawrence “something of that primary life of stress which is the quick of the English poetic matter” (Heaney 1980b, 154). Here the expression “primary life”,1 pointing to the archaic and unconscious, identifies rhythm with a natural force: it correlates then with Heaney’s descriptions of poetic composition, in The Government of the Tongue, as “chain reaction” or “event in nature” (Heaney 1988, 94), chemical or biological process.

8This construction of the nature of English and of rhythm in English, is invested, interestingly and inevitably, with traditional myths. Commenting on Hughes’s poem “Thistles”, which associates the thistle plant both with Viking invaders and “the gutturals of dialect” (Hughes 55), Heaney notes, “[h]is consonants are the Norsemen, the Normans, the Roundheads in the world of his vocables, hacking and hedging and hammering down the abundance and luxury and possible lasciviousness of the vowels” (Heaney 1980b, 154). As “lasciviousness” shows, Heaney is here invoking a geolinguistic myth which identifies the “character” of languages with the climates and supposed lifestyles of their speakers; a central statement of which appears, for example, in chapters 9 and 10 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine des langues, where Rousseau contrasts the soft life of the inhabitants of warm countries and their voluptuous passions with the irascible natures of northern peoples, whose voices or vocables “s’accompagnent toujours d’articulations fortes qui les rendent dures et bruyantes” (Rousseau 111).

  • 2 Heaney’s characterization of Hopkins’s poetry as a “masculine forging” in “The Fire i’ the Flint” ( (...)

9Heaney’s comment on “Thistles” obviously intersects with his own reflections on Vikings, violence and the imagination of place, a central preoccupation of his collection North. His gendered geo-poetics likewise characterizes the way he describes the relation between his own poetic voice and the dialect he grew up in. First in the early essay “Feeling into Words” and later in the introduction to his translation of Beowulf, Heaney explains the Anglo-Saxon bent of his early work by quoting W.R. Rodgers’ assertion in the unpublished Character of Ireland that the people of Ulster “like the spiky consonants of speech/and think the soft ones cissy”; Rodgers contrasted this predilection with “the round gift of the gab in southern mouths”—an expression which Heaney glosses by opposing the “tangent of the consonant” with “the circle of the vowel” (Heaney 1980b, 45). However playfully handled, a gendered linguistic mythology of English is the stock-in-trade of Heaney’s early criticism—as shown, for example, by the definition of “feminine” and “masculine” modes of writing in the essays “The Makings of a Music” and “The Fire i’ the Flint”2; it recurs in the presentation of Beowulf: A Verse Translation, where Heaney explains how he sought to preserve the poem’s “foursquareness” and business-like quality, adopting to this end the tone of some “big-voiced” male relatives from his youth (Heaney 2002, xxxvi).

10This mythology is formulated as archaeology in the second part of Heaney’s “Bone Dreams”, a poem which coalesces around its reference to the Anglo-Saxon bân hûs (bone house), a “kenning” or metaphoric compound designating the human body. The poem stages a return to the archaic, imaged here as “skeleton”; it invokes the traditional association of bone and consonant, both identified with the masculine:

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue’s
old dungeons.
I push back
through dictions
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,
the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied latins
of churchmen
to the scop’s
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line. (Heaney 1980a, 182-83)

11“Bone Dreams” suggests a fundamental opposition between southern European poetic practices, identified with artifice (“dictions”) and rhetorical excess (“Elizabethan canopies”) and the consonantal clarity of the “scop”, or Anglo-Saxon poet. This opposition between southern and northern languages is then moralized in traditional terms, through the contrast between eroticism and war. The geopoetical opposition is in turn exemplified by the rhythm of the passage: well-ordered, parallel constructions organize the enumeration of rhetorical practices which have been imported into English poetry, while the enjambed monosyllables “scop’s/twang” and “iron/flash” clash, as a way of suggesting the consonantal harshness of the Anglo-Saxon poetical manner. In other words, rhythm, here, is expressive and illustrative, based on a presumed correspondence between a rhythmic pattern, consecutive stresses, and a moral attitude. The poem takes a set of clichés and cleverly acts them out.

12Given the binary categories which organize Seamus Heaney’s writing about language, it is not surprising to find alternate, and diametrically opposed descriptions of the nature of rhythm in English. Recent metrical theory identifies the “natural rhythms of the language” (Attridge 22) with the alternation of stresses and non-stresses. A central piece of evidence for this account of English is the so-called “rhythm rule”, which explains how speakers shift stresses to avoid their immediate succession. The expression “rhythm rule” presupposes an aesthetic, ultimately Platonic, notion of rhythm, rhythm as orderly, harmonious movement; and likewise that rhythm is a psychological capacity or predisposition which operates independently from language, a “nature”, then, which transcends and overrides language, subject, and discourse. Yet the underlying explanation of the rhythm rule is physiological, as Derek Attridge tells us in The Rhythms of English Poetry: the alternation and regular placement of stresses in English is “a natural product of the muscular processes which underlie all speech” (Attridge 71). Similarly, current linguistic theories discuss prominence in relative terms, thus as the alternation of relatively strong and weak units. But as Dwight Bolinger noted in Two Kinds of Vowel, Two Kinds of Rhythm, “A theory in which prominence is truly relative should be one in which adjacent equality as well as adjacent difference is to be found. For gradient phenomena, binarity is a procrustean bed” (Bolinger 1980, 43).

13Our traditional ideologies of English, the binary, gendered opposition between the Anglo-Saxon and Latinate or Romance, infect, it would seem, the basic terms by which we talk about rhythm in English, “stress” and “accent”, two notions which must first be defined and distinguished in relation to each other as a preliminary to any theoretical account. Both words are of Romance origin; yet “accent”, derived from adcantus, is linked to the idea of song, while “stress” invokes the energy required to pronounce the harsh consonants of northern tongues; “storm and stress” is the translation of “Sturm und Drang”. In terms of what Saussure called a native speaker’s “sentiment de la langue”, “Stress” figures as Germanic by reason of its monosyllabism; the word appears to have moved away from its Anglo-French origins by the fact that initial/str/clusters have largely disappeared from French except in self-evident loan words. The collateral notions we associate with “stress” appear to coalesce in the expression “stress clash”. Paradoxically, however, as noted by Alan Cruttenden in his work Intonation, stress in the wider sense of linguistic prominence is primarily produced not by loudness or intensity, but by pitch accent. The fact that we go on speaking of stress rather than accent, I would argue, is a product of our implicit ideologies of English.

14There is a second aspect to the primacy of stress in our descriptions of rhythm, which is noted by Alan Holder: stress is typically word stress, the stress pattern marked in the dictionary, which, for the purpose of metrical analysis, offers more promising material for the construction of metrical regularity; accent is a production of discourse, not so easily reduced to the traditional Platonic conception of rhythm as measure, alternation, or periodicity. In this context it seems useful to contrast Heaney’s emphasis on stress, with Dwight Bolinger’s approach to rhythm in English, which appears almost to do away with stress altogether. Stress, in Bolinger’s account, is purely virtual, defining potentialities for accent; rhythm is then primarily an aspect of enunciation, as a 1972 article, “Accent is Predictable (If You’re a Mind-Reader)” forcefully suggested. Bolinger’s approach thus corresponds in important ways with that of Henri Meschonnic, who distinguishes between three categories of rhythm, linguistic, rhetorical, and poetic, the last corresponding to the specific organisation of a way of writing (Meschonnic 223). A poetics of rhythm, it would seem, must ask how lexical, syntactic, and phonological patterns are transformed in discourse, through the semantic activity of a subject, writer or reader. Rhythm in English only really begins when English lexical stress is re-interpreted, or de-natured, one would like to say, through accent.

15One way of thinking about rhythm in poems as a mode of discursivity is provided by the concept of alliterative prominence, which appears in accounts of Old English versification. Traditional rhythmic description in English tends to divorce questions of stress and accent, meter and speech rhythm, from phonemic patterning, the repetition of vowels and consonants. If one accepts, however, that linking signifiers by phonemic echo is an essential aspect of the way semantic values are specified by texts, speechsound patterning might well be recognized as a fundamental aspect of prominence. A cogent application of the concept of alliterative prominence is provided by Fitzroy Pyle, in an article from 1966 entitled “Pyrrhic and spondee”: commenting on a line from Shakespeare’s sonnet 30 “And with old woes new waile my deare times waste”, Pyle argues for a reading of the line that recognizes three spondees; in particular, he argues that in the sequence “old woes new waile”, “old” and “new” must receive emphatic stress because of the contrast they entail; yet lesser prominence could not be attributed to “woes” and “waile”, given their alliterative marking through the repetition of initial/w/and the semantic association the alliteration brings with it. Pyle concludes: “The only right and proper thing to do is to stress all four syllables equally” (Pyle 54); his proposed scansion at least raises the possibility that a single stress hierarchy cannot unequivocally account for discursive prominence, because modes of prominence here are not mutually comparable or compatible: in contrast to what is implied by Jespersen’s relative-stress principle (see Jespersen 1962) they cannot be gauged relative to each other.

16Given that Heaney’s definitions of English and rhythm depend conjointly on a conception of the “Anglo-Saxon”, it would seem worthwhile to look briefly at how Heaney’s practice of rhythm functions in Beowulf: A Verse Translation. Heaney’s account of the protocols he has adopted in rendering the verseforms of Beowulf is central to the way his lines work. His translation, he notes, follows “the fundamental pattern of four stresses to the line” and reproduces the alliterative structure of Old English verse (Heaney 2002, xxxvii). Yet while the alliterative pattern of Beowulf links one or both of the first two stressed syllables with the third, Heaney, like other translators, allows himself to alliterate on either the third or fourth stressed syllable. The examples Heaney provides of his own practice all unequivocally mark four stressed syllables in the line, and these correspond to the consonantal echoes which bind the line together. Heaney notes, however, that in certain cases he has allowed himself to dispense with alliteration altogether; bowing, he claims, to what he calls “the natural ‘sound of sense’”, refusing “to force an artificial shape” onto his lines (Heaney 2002, xxxvii). Yet his alliterative practice results in a discursive re-interpretation of phonological rules which on occasion appears all but “natural”.

17Fundamental to Heaney’s practice in the translation is the fact that alliteration determines what is to be accented, and selects for successive stresses and rhythmically charged readings. Particularly important in this respect is the treatment of compounds, a central aspect of Old English poetics: whereas English subordinates the second element of a compound to the first, Heaney’s alliterative practice renders compounds as spondees, sequences of two fully stressed syllables. Thus in a description of the fallen dragon

so that the sky-róamer láy there rigid (l. 2830)

18alliteration calls for accents on “roamer”, “lay”, and “rigid”, so as to bind the two halves of the line together; realizing the four-beat pattern means strongly accenting both elements of “sky-roamer”. Were one to read, more “naturally”, with the stresses regularly spaced: “só that the sky-roamer láy there rígid” the alliterative pattern would disappear. That the more wrenched, alliterative reading is the best one might be suggested by the line’s obvious expressive function: reading “sky-róamer” forces a pause before “lay”, and leads the voice to stop in mid-line, like the dragon falling from the sky. In accord with his theory and practice of language, Heaney has arranged for an imitative effect; at the same time, however, his translation, de-naturing the normal stress-patterning for compounds, estranges English as it imagines “Anglo-Saxon”.

19Not seldom, however, the densely intricate alliterative schemes of Heaney’s lines not only select for stresses, but open up multiple rhythmic possibilities. In the geneological account of the Shieldings which opens the poem, we find the line

Afterward a bóy-chíld was bórn to Shíeld (l. 12)

20Here two alliterations linking half-lines are specified, “boy” with “born” and “child” with “Shield”; one reading might place the first stress on “Afterward”, thus achieving a regular spacing of accents and a more “naturally” stressed compound (“bóy-child”). However the link “child”-“Shield” appears so pregnant that it would also seem cogent to read an accent on both words, especially given the translation’s marked tendency towards successive accents. The realization of the alliterative pattern, then, depends on the reader’s interpretative choices.

21As this example perhaps also shows, alliterative prominence may lead a reader to overstress the line, to introduce more accents than the versification calls for. Thus in the climactic description of the burning of Beowulf’s body at his, Heaney marks the second and last occurrence in the poem of the compound “bone-house”:

and flámes wrought hávoc in the hát bóne-hóuse (l. 3147)

22Here four stresses may be regularly placed on “flames”, “havoc”, “hot”, and “bone” while the alliterative pattern is assured by the echo between “havoc” and “hot”. Yet the poem’s phonemic patterning also gestures towards an accent on “house”; what one might call “alliterative set”—that is, the pressure to find and multiply alliterative accents, even where the basic architecture of the four-stress line is assured—would also, to my ear, push for reading the compound “bone-house” as a spondee. Such a reading is further supported by the fact that this compound is unlexicalized in English. By placing an accent on both elements the line sets them in relation, enacting composition in a context which alludes to the composition and decomposition of the body; what is made audible here is the constructive function of rhythm, its invention of a bodily self.

23My brief attempt to make sense of the rhythms of Beowulf: A Verse Translation is hampered by my ignorance of the speech patterns of Ulster English. One might plausibly claim that Heaney’s lines should be read according to the “natural” speech rhythms of English, without the odd, wrenching effects I have proposed. Yet normalizing and naturalizing Heaney’s lines would ignore the continuity and interaction between rhythm and sound patterning which they implicitly affirm. Polyrhythmic and ambiguous, Heaney’s lines call on a reader to perform rhythms that disrupt the lexical, syntactic, phonological, and metrical patterns of English. His translation thus enacts the idea that rhythm, in the final analysis, is an enunciative act, the production of discourse, not of a language, and, as such, a mode of subjectivation, radically historical.

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Bibliography

Attridge, Derek, The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982), London: Longman, 1995.

Benveniste, Émile, ‘La notion de “rythme” dans son expression linguistique’, Problèmes de linguistique générale, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

Bolinger, Dwight, “Accent is Predictable (If You’re a Mind-Reader)”, Language 48 (1972): 633–644.

Bolinger, Dwight, Two Kinds of Vowels, Two Kinds of Rhythm, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1981.

Cruttenden, Alan, Intonation (1989), Cambridge: CUP, 1997.

Golston, Michael, “Weathered measures and measured weathers: W.C. Williams and the allegorical ends of rhythm”, Textual Practice 18.2 (2004): 251–264.

Heaney, Seamus, Beowulf: A Verse Translation (2000), New York: Norton, 2002.

Heaney, Seamus, The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings, London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

Heaney, Seamus, Poems 1965–1975, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980.

Heaney, Seamus, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978, London: Faber and Faber, 1980.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, London: Oxford UP, 1955.

Hughes, Ted, New Selected Poems 1957–1994, London: Faber, 1995.

Holder, Alan, Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line, Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1995.

Jespersen, Otto, Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905), Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1938.

Jespersen, Otto, “Notes on Meter”, Selected Writings of Otto Jespersen, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962, 647–672.

Meschonnic, Henri, Critique du rythme, Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982.

O’Donoghue, Bernard, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.

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Notes

1 Presumably an allusion to a remark made by Hopkins about a line from his poem “The Loss of the Eurydice”: “Stress is the life of it” (Hopkins 52).

2 Heaney’s characterization of Hopkins’s poetry as a “masculine forging” in “The Fire i’ the Flint” (Heaney 1980b, 97) borrows a critical concept from Hopkins himself, who writes of Dryden as “the most masculine of our poets; his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked thew and sinew of the English language” (Hopkins 267–268). That Heaney’s gendered account of English is something more subtle and pervasive than myth is shown by the fact that we encounter it in the writings of one of the most acute students of English, the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who in his Growth and Structure of the English Language, first published in 1905 and republished in 1938, describes the peculiar character of English as “positively and expressly masculine” (Jespersen 1938, 2). The masculine nature of English resides, Jespersen explains, in its consonantal clusters and its series of stressed monosyllables. Jespersen’s account notes, however, that monosyllabism is not a primordial, “Anglo-Saxon” trait, but a recent development, brought on by the disappearance of case and tense endings which gave rise to modern English.

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References

Bibliographical reference

Andrew Eastman, Ideologies of English: Stress Clash, “Anglo-Saxon”, and Twentieth-Century Conceptions of RhythmÉtudes britanniques contemporaines, 39 | 2010, 129-142.

Electronic reference

Andrew Eastman, Ideologies of English: Stress Clash, “Anglo-Saxon”, and Twentieth-Century Conceptions of RhythmÉtudes britanniques contemporaines [Online], 39 | 2010, Online since 11 February 2016, connection on 29 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/2813; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.2813

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About the author

Andrew Eastman

University of Strasbourg.
Andrew Eastman is maître de conférences at the University of Strasbourg. His research focuses on the relations between rhythm and meaning in English-language poetry; he has published articles on the work of Ezra Pound, George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky, Elizabeth Bishop, and Susan Howe.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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