Attridge Beyond Metrics

Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Beyond Metrics: Richard Cureton's Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse

Author(s): Derek Attridge
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 17, No. 1, Metrics Today II (Spring, 1996), pp. 9-27
Published by: Duke University Press
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Beyond Metrics: Richard Cureton's
Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse
Derek Attridge
English, Rutgers
Abstract Richard Cureton has published some short studies of rhythmic pat-
terns in poetry, but it is with the publication of Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse
that the real significance of his challenge to traditional metrical study can be
seen. Cureton argues that accounts of meter touch on only a very limited part of
the rhythmic structures and effects of poetry and advances a full and complex
theory of rhythmic phrasing above the level of the syllable and the metrical
unit. While a number of prosodists have insisted on the importance of rhyth-
mic effects at these levels, Cureton is the first to attempt a systematic theory
with a detailed formalization, including a set of rules and a number of scanned
examples. He draws heavily on music theory to discuss the grouping and the
patterns of expectation that occur at the higher levels of linguistic structure
(clitic phrases, tone units, etc.). One of the most interesting features of his ap-
proach is that it makes possible the detailed analysis of free-verse rhythms in a
way that is continuous with the analysis of metered rhythms. This essay offers an
assessment of Cureton's work, detailing its achievements in opening up a new
and important field for prosodic study and discussing some of the weaknesses in
its proposed system of rules and formalizations. The essay considers the future
of metrical study in the light of a possible new emphasis on phrasing and makes
some suggestions about the integration (in poetry and in analysis) of the two
domains of rhythmic form.
Into the Beyond

Genuinely pathbreaking work in prosody is rare; discussion of the topic
has for the most part circled around a limited number of problems and
positions, with occasional gestures toward unmapped regions awaiting
Poetics Today 17:1 (Spring 1996). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics
and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50.
10 Poetics Today 17:1
the endeavors of bolder spirits. One of the regions that has been most
frequently pointed to is the higher-level territory above the arrange-
ment of syllables into feet, measures, or patterns of beats, that is to
say, the domain governed by the rhythmic organization of syntax and
sense, moving in conjunction with or counterpoint to the more local
effects of strongly or weakly stressed syllables arranged in fixed or free
configurations. Few commentators on the rhythmic qualities of poetry
have doubted that our experience of verse is strongly marked by move-
ments and relations at this higher level, but we have lacked a framework
and terminology by which to articulate, elaborate, and compare our
perceptions.
The most signal achievement of Richard Cureton's Rhythmic Phrasing
in English Verse (1992; RPEV) is that it opens up this terra incognita for
informed analysis and debate.1 Cureton provides us with a richly de-
tailed theory of shaping and movement at these higher levels, worked
out through specific perceptual rules and a precise system of terms and
formal representations that allow full analyses and careful comparisons.
This high degree of explicitness makes it possible for others to iden-
tify points of agreement and disagreement clearly and for the first time
makes higher-level rhythms fully accessible for discussion. From now on,
studies of meter and rhythm that merely gesture toward the misty land
beyond the stress pattern will be guilty of ignoring a solidly constructed
highway to its center.
Summary
Cureton's study depends on some bold clarifying moves that separate out
domains often confused and that bring together others usually consid-
ered separate, so that to appreciate the importance of his work readers
may need to adjust old habits of verbal usage, at least for the purposes
of following the argument. Most important, rhythm is regarded as a
multidimensional and universally shared phenomenon not tied to any
specific medium; as humans we possess a perceptual capacity that pro-
duces the experience we call "rhythm" in response to certain kinds of
temporal event. This definition enables Cureton to base his analysis of
rhythm in language on studies of rhythm in music, in particular on the
tradition of analysis that extends from Heinrich Schenker's protostruc-
turalism in the thirties, through Leonard Meyer's Gestalt approach in
the fifties, to the recent generative theory formulated by Lerdahl and
Jackendoff (1983). Although Lerdahl andJackendoff's work is based on
Chomsky's linguistic theory, it now comes back to the linguistic medium
in a very different guise, as a sophisticated and highly developed account
of rhythm.
1. Although Cureton (1985, 1986a, 1986b) has adumbrated his theory in a number
of short publications, this is the first presentation of them in extenso.
Attridge . Beyond Metrics 11
For Cureton, rhythm embraces what have traditionally been regarded

as very different kinds of perceptual phenomena. The first eleven lines
of Hopkins's "Windhover," for example are shown in his scansion2 as
rhythmically equivalent to the last three, in a relation of weak to strong,
and this relation is represented by means of the same terminology as
that used to describe the relation of weakly and strongly stressed syl-
lables (RPEV, 327-28). Having specified rhythm as a global term covering
all relations of strength and weakness, Cureton is able to divide it into
three distinct components, which he terms meter, grouping, and prolon-
gation. Simplifying a complex discussion, meter involves the perception
of beats in regular patterns; grouping involves the apprehension of lin-
guistic units organized around a single peak of prominence; and pro-
longation involves the experience of anticipation and arrival. To hear
language (or music, or any other temporal phenomenon) as rhythmic is
to hear at least one of these components. This has the important corol-
lary that the common opposition between "regular" and "free" verse
makes sense with regard to only one of the three rhythmic components,
meter, and ignores the fact that exactly the same structures of grouping
and prolongation occur in both types of verse. One of Cureton's leading
accomplishments is to have found a way of introducing free verse wholly
into the realm of rhythmic analysis, without in any way alluding to it as
a poor relation, prosodically speaking.
Cureton's study focuses mainly on grouping, but it dwells sufficiently
on the other two components to finally present a coherent theory of
rhythm as the interrelation of these three kinds of events, and also offers
a strong challenge to previous accounts of meter, the only one of the
three that has been given extensive attention. Although these compo-
nents are separate, they all possess what Cureton sees as the crucial
organizational feature of any kind of rhythm: strict hierarchical struc-
ture. A rhythm consists of a series of local events, perceived as more or
less prominent elements within longer events, which are themselves per-
ceived as more or less prominent elements within even longer events,
and so on throughout the entire piece.3 (The notion of "prominence" is
clearer for meter and grouping than it is for prolongation, which is not
discussed in detail and which falls beyond the scope of this review.)
2. Cureton prefers the phrase rhythmic analysis to scansion, perhaps because of the
latter's association with the metrical level of verse, but I still find scansion a convenient
term and am happy to have its field of use extended.
3. As in all scansion, Cureton's formal representations (and some of his terminology)
convert this temporal experience into a visual one, but with a certain mental agility
it is possible to translate it back onto the temporal axis. Of the three components,
grouping is the one most liable to be conceived in spatial rather than temporal terms,
and for a full understanding of Cureton's theory it is important to appreciate that
grouping always works in conjunction with prolongation, which imparts directionality
to groups.
The strictness of the rhythmic hierarchy is a feature of the theory on

which Cureton lays great emphasis: units that occur at the same level
are ipso facto structurally equivalent and are always contiguous, with-
out gaps or overlapping; units at all levels are subject to exactly the
same structural restraints (thus the rule that limits the number of con-
stituents within a group to seven applies to any level of the grouping
hierarchy). There are further constraints on the hierarchies within each
of the three components of rhythm. The claim implied by this rigorous
formalization is that if a stretch of language is perceived as rhythmic by
a competent listener or reader, it conforms to these norms; by the same
token, a stretch of language that does not conform to them will be per-
ceived as nonrhythmic. Against those who would argue that all speech
has a rhythmic dimension, Cureton asserts that "language, for the most
part, is not especially rhythmic" (RPEV, 424)-though, as we shall see,
this does not prevent him from finding metrical patterning in texts that
would conventionally be regarded as nonmetrical.
Meter
Although meter is not the major focus of Cureton's book, and we can
expect much more detailed studies from him in the future, the sketch
he has given constitutes a strikingly original intervention in the long
history of metrical theory. Meter, for Cureton, is the component of
rhythm that organizes stronger and weaker beats into hierarchical struc-
tures (in other words, it corresponds to what many have taken to be the
major domain of verse rhythm); its characteristic features are in no way
tied to language, however, and can be described independently of any
medium. These structures are tightly constrained, being limited to duple
and triple patterning and strongly preferring, at any given level of the
hierarchy, the continuous occurrence of one or other of these patterns.
Cureton represents meter by means of dot grids, in which vertical col-
umns represent the relative strength of the beats and each horizontal
series of dots represents one level in the hierarchy; here, for example,
are the first two lines of Yeats's poem "The Pity of Love" (presented as
part of the scansion of the entire eight-line poem, which, as we shall see,
determines the prominence of the strongest beats):
A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
. : . . . (B.(RPEV, 132)4
4. The spacing of some of the dots in this example in RPEVappears to be incorrect;

I have attempted to correct it.
What this shows is that at the lowest level of the metrical hierarchy there
is simply a succession of pulses (not necessarily corresponding to syl-
lables).5 At the next highest level (the level of the ictus or tactical beat),
the rhythm is identified as triple: once the meter has got going, there is
a dot at this level over every third first-level dot. At the next level up, the
rhythm is duple; that is, every second second-level dot receives an addi-
tional dot; and so on up the hierarchy. The first salient beat has seven
dots because the largest metrical span consists of the entire poem, and
this first beat is the strongest of all and needs seven levels to establish its
supremacy. (Prominence here should not be confused with any kind of
physical signaling. An especially salient beat in the structure need not be
especially loud or long in performance.) Cureton's claim is that when it
operates in conjunction with phrasing, meter is, in this sense, projective:
it starts with its most powerful gesture and then inexorably unwinds, its
second most powerful gesture occurring at the start of the second half
of the unit (represented in this poem by a six-dot column), with inter-
mediate saliences falling regularly at the quarter mark, the eighth mark,
and so on. It should be noted, too, that at the second (tactical) level
all the fourth beats, with their accompanying subbeats, occur beyond
the actual words of the line; they occur as beats experienced internally
by the reader as a result of expectations soon established by the meter.
It is also noteworthy that directionality ("rising" or "falling" rhythms)
and segmentation ("feet," "measures," "lines") are not achieved within
the metrical domain; they arise out of the conjunction of grouping
and meter.
Not all meters have such a strongly "vertical" grid as the above ex-
ample, however. Yeats's poem uses a form common in popular verse:
strongly demarcated four-beat units with a variation (between one and
two) in the number of syllables between tactical beats. At the other
extreme is the iambic pentameter, which tends to work in single-line
units and has an asymmetry that prevents a strong metrical grid from
emerging-seldom more than four dots high on the first tactical beat,
with a three-dot column on either the third or the fourth tactical beat.
That the favored meter for artistic verse should be among the weak-
est imaginable is, as Cureton observes, clearly not fortuitous, and the
dot-column formalization provides an excellent means of capturing its
distinctiveness.
5. When space permits, Cureton represents hierarchies with the shortest spans at
the bottom and the longest ones at the top, and this formalization underlies all the
spatial metaphors he uses. Other metaphorical schemes are, of course, possible (the
longest span as "foundation," "deep structure," or "background," for instance); but
more important than the choice of visual representation is the care that needs to be
taken to prevent that essentially arbitrary choice from conditioning the argument
and analyses.
Grouping
The rhythmic component to which Cureton devotes the most attention
is grouping, and it is here that his theory advances onto ground that
is virtually unexplored in prosodic studies. Grouping is a reflection of
our perceptual habit of organizing stimuli into units with one peak and
a number of subsidiary elements; but once again, the crucial feature
in Cureton's argument is the operation of hierarchical patterns. At the
lowest level, words are grouped into "clitic phrases," each with a strong
syllable and up to six weak syllables. (It should be noted that a clitic
phrase can be a single word). At the next level, clitic phrases are them-
selves grouped into units, one phrase in each unit experienced as strong
and the others as weak. These units are grouped in their turn, and so on
up to the highest level, which usually corresponds to the whole poem.
Although grouping is influenced by phonological and syntactic con-
siderations (at the lowest level, for instance, the stress pattern is crucial,
and at higher levels the boundaries of groups coincide with syntactic
boundaries), the most important factor in determining the length of
groups and the occurrence of the peak is what Cureton calls informa-
tional weight. Units are units of meaning; peaks are peaks in the poem's
unfolding semantic and emotional drama. A grouping scansion is there-
fore an attempt to map not the poem's organization of perceived sounds
(as in the case of a traditional metrical scansion) but its organization of
meaning-though clearly in practice the two categories are constantly
in a state of mutual interaction.
Cureton represents grouping hierarchies either by a tree diagram

(borrowed from linguistics) or by means of brackets around each group,
labeled S or W if it forms part of a higher-level group. One of the ex-
amples that Cureton examines at length is a passage (a single sentence
twenty-one lines long) from Williams's Paterson, which begins as follows:
Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness.
(Quoted in RPEV, 278)
In scanning the passage, the highest level of the grouping hierarchy

embraces the whole text; at the next lowest level, the passage is di-
vided into two, this excerpt (W) and the remainder (S). (Cureton notes
that he regards the text as a "canonically rising duple" because "the
text speaks its message, and then speaks it again [in heightened tones]"
[RPEV, 300].) This excerpt is then divided into two, a weak segment
consisting of the first line and a strong segment-the peak, therefore-
consisting of all the remaining lines. At the next level down, the long
section is further divided at the colon, forming a strong-weak group.
Below that again, each unit is further divided into two: the first line
breaks into "Without invention" and "nothing is well spaced" (WS); the
next unit (up to the colon) is divided after "positions" (WS); and the
third unit is divided after "mind" (WS). Three segmentations occur at
the next level down: "unless the mind change," (S) / "unless the stars are
new measured, according to their relative positions" (W); "the line will
not change," (S) / "the necessity will not matriculate" (W); and "there
cannot be a new line," (S) / "the old will go on repeating itself with
recurring deadliness" (W).
This grouping scansion at the highest levels reflects the distinctive
rhetorical movement of the quoted passage. The striking opening line
summarizes the theme and is therefore the equivalent of the following
eight and a half lines, but compared with the following lines, this line is
nevertheless informationally weak. We note the repetition of this same
pattern in "unless... the line.. ." / "unless ... the old ... ," in which the
second unit is the weak one, since it repeats in different, but presumably
not "heightened," terms the statement made by the first unit (and this
pattern echoes the higher-level unit "Without ... nothing .. ."). Within
each of these units, however, the first subunit (the "Without" or "unless"
clause) is weak, since it is subordinate to the information conveyed in
the following clause; and in this way a strong rising rhythm is estab-
lished. Counterpointing this rhythm on the next level down, however,
is a falling rhythm, produced by a series of informational repetitions.
Clearly, what is instanced here is not an algorithmic procedure or a
representation of a wholly inherent structure: different readers may well
disagree with the particular decisions reflected in this scansion. But the
value of Cureton's apparatus is that such disagreements can be precisely
indicated by the presentation of alternative scansions (indeed, RPEV
might have been improved by fuller exemplification of alternative read-
ings mapped by different scansions). If I feel that the opening line does
not summarize the passage but is the first attempt to state the poet's
concern, followed by two further attempts, and that the third attempt is
the most successful, I can indicate this reading by dividing the highest
level into three units and marking them WWS. Each different scansion
reflects a difference in interpretation as well as a difference in poetic
movement and balance.6
6. To take a different example, I find Cureton's grouping analysis of Frost's "Nothing

Gold Can Stay" (RPEV, 142-46) implausible, because it puts the last line (which re-
peats the title and therefore has a refrainlike quality) in balance with all the previous
lines in a strong-to-weak relation; regards the logical division halfway through the
It will be evident that Cureton's grouping analysis at these higher

levels is confined to groups of two and that there are more WS than SW
groups. These two features, in fact, reflect two of Cureton's proposed
grouping preference rules, which are intended as descriptive statements in-
dicating our preferred ways of grouping potentially rhythmic stimuli.
The two rules in question state that binary groups are preferred to longer
ones (and to single-element groups, which we tend to avoid) and that
peaks in final position are preferred to peaks in earlier positions. Cure-
ton gives seventeen preference rules in all, this large number being a
measure of the complexity of the perceptual process that occurs when
we respond to this aspect of language, and of the numerous possibilities
for disagreement among readers. They include a number of rules that
relate grouping preferences to other domains of rhythm (one instance
being the preference for a peak whose strongest syllable is a beat) and
thus formalize some of the correspondences among meter, grouping,
and prolongation. Cureton proposes another set of rules as well: the
grouping well-formedness rules, which state the constraints on the forma-
tion of groups (for instance, no more than seven constituents, no more
than three adjacent weak constituents, no overlapping of constituents).
As the names of the two types of rules suggest, the preference rules
do no more than articulate tendencies that guide choices, while the
well-formedness rules specify strict structural principles.
We have looked at only the six highest levels of the scansion of the
passage from Williams's poem, but grouping occurs all the way down to
the clitic phrases. Here are the opening lines scanned at the lowest levels
(I have substituted a bracketing diagram for Cureton's tree diagram):
/ \
w s
/ / \
s w
/ \/
w s w s
w s w s w s w w s
Without invention nothing is well spaced
This scansion indicates that the clitic phrases (all consisting of single
words except "is well") have a variety of rhythms: WS, WSW, SW, and
another WS. (The final word, "spaced," is a monosyllabic clitic phrase
poem ("Then leaf subsides to leaf") as only a subsidiary articulation; fails to register
the unity of the three lines that begin "Then ... ," "So ... ," "So .. ."; and misses en-
tirely the informational weight and shock of the line "So Eden sank to grief," whose
poetic power resides precisely in the contradiction between its extraordinary content
and its formally subdued position. But with Cureton's formal devices I am able to
construct a grouping scansion that represents my preferred reading of the poem-
and a number of other readings that I think are possible.
and therefore bears no indication of W or S, though at the next level up

it functions as the strong element in a binary group.) At this lowest level,
of course, the determining factor is phonological. Above this, the clause
has two rising units, with a single-constituent group between them; at
the next level up, the second half of the clause has a falling rhythm,
while the first half consists of a group already constituted at the level
below; and at the level of the whole clause, we find a rising pattern once
more. At this point we join the scansion of the higher levels already
examined. (In the scansion of the whole twenty-one-line passage, there
are several levels between what are shown in this diagram as adjacent
upper levels, produced by rhythmic complexities later in the poem.)
Once again, a given reader's choices of emphasis will be reflected in the
scansion (though there are more constraints operating here than at the
higher levels). Thus, for instance, "nothing" is given more weight than
"invention" in the reading represented by this scansion; the rhythmic
implications of a reading that reversed this emphasis would be made
clear by the different scansion that reflected it.
Reduction
One more technical device needs to be mentioned. Cureton subjects

texts he has scanned to "reduction," a procedure borrowed, like much
of his method, from the musical analyses of Lerdahl andJackendoff. (He
offers both "grouping" and "prolongational" reductions, but, as noted
earlier, I shall limit this exposition to the former.) Just as a musical
reduction reveals both the harmonic progression that constitutes the
skeleton of a piece and the harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic details that
are hung on it, so a grouping reduction reveals both the informational
heart of the text and, as the analysis moves to more and more local-
ized groupings, its gradual accretion of more subsidiary detail. Grouping
reduction, a largely mechanical procedure based on the hierarchical
structures identified in the scansion, offers an acid test for the claim that
the strength of strong constituents consists partly in their tendency to
subsume the information in the weaker constituents at the same level,
so that the removal of these does not result in the loss of any informa-
tion crucial to the poem. Equally, lower peaks may be removed without
incurring vital damage, since the higher peaks will preserve the text's
semantic core.
As the word suggests, reductions are actually presented in order of in-

creasing simplification; the text is given in successively shorter versions,
each created by removing all the weak segments at a given level. Thus
after five reductions the passage we are considering becomes "Without
invention nothing is well spaced, / unless the mind change, . . the /
line will not change, ... unless there is / a new mind there cannot be
a new line, .. ." (where the ellipses indicate material that has been ex-
cised) (RPEV, 285). Three reductions later, it has become "[unless the
mind change,] . . . the line will not change," (where the brackets in-
dicate a phrase removed in the reduction process but shown for the
sake of syntactic information) (RPEV, 287). In the final reduction of the
whole passage discussed by Cureton, the excerpt we were looking at has
disappeared altogether (as the weaker unit in the binary group that con-
stitutes the entire text). As Cureton notes, this practice "amounts to the
common claim that most poems have a semiotic core (a 'matrix,' 'theme,'
etc.) whose structure is 'played out' ('modelled,' 'projected,' etc.) in an
organized way into the hierarchical structure of the text at lower levels"
(RPEV, 199). Thus any of the wider spans of the hierarchy can be thought
of as "spreading" the informational content of its most prominent unit
over the entire text that it covers; when the quoted passage from Wil-
liams's poem is considered as a single unit, its strongest element (strong
at every level of the hierarchy), "the line will not change," is seen to
stand for the main thrust of the text. The procedure of reduction re-
veals more clearly than anything else the theoretical underpinning of
Cureton's approach to poetry: the assumption that any given poem (or
perhaps any poem that is worthy of the name) is a tightly organized unit
whose structure can be shown to be "organic" in a much more precise,
detailed, and explicit manner than has traditionally been the case with
this term. The imperatives of Jakobsonian structuralism and romantic
poetics have never been so minutely respected.
Critique
RPEVis like all other groundbreaking work in the way it challenges the
received positions held dear by many in the field, but Cureton's confi-
dently confrontational style may obscure the way it manifests continuities
with earlier accepted positions.7 It would be a pity, certainly, if this book
were to have less than its deserved impact because of its uncompro-
mising stance, its somewhat formidable new vocabulary and notational
apparatus, and the more extreme tendencies in its argumentation. For
its demands are a product of its originality and thoroughness, not of
any willful disregard of the reader's comfort. The following critical en-
gagement with certain aspects of Cureton's theory is intended to carry
the discussion forward, in the hope that combined efforts will establish
some agreed positions as a point of departure for continued advances
into this difficult territory.
A word of caution: it is important that discussions of Cureton's pro-
7. Cureton begins his book with a chapter on current approaches and follows it with
one on "the myths of traditional prosody." In this essay I have not discussed these
chapters, nor have I tried to relate Cureton's work to that of others in the field; even
with these deliberate exclusions, I am conscious of having had space to touch on
only a small part of his densely argued study.
posals do not get caught up in merely terminological disputes. Words

such as meter, rhythm, prosody, and versification are notoriously varied in
the meanings they have for different writers, and anyone undertaking a
project as ambitious as this one is obliged to specify, with an unavoid-
able touch of Humpty Dumptyism, what they mean for him or her. The
possibility of disagreement arises most markedly with respect to Cure-
ton's key word, rhythm. For most of us, I believe, the word implies some
quality of movement, except if it is used, more or less figuratively, for
a purely visual phenomenon. Dictionary definitions usually specify this
quality more narrowly in terms of repetition and regularity (they are
fond of instancing "the rhythm of the seasons" in illustration of these
characteristics). For Cureton, however, none of these features is nec-
essary to the perception of rhythm; as indicated by the example from
"The Windhover," the term designates something like "organized rela-
tions of prominence in a temporal medium," with the theory as a whole
specifying the meaning of organized. Thus readers' responses to the re-
lations among the books of an epic (hardly experienced as movement,
and not necessarily repetitive or regular) can be just as "rhythmic" as
their responses to the beats of a tetrameter; there is, theoretically, no
upper limit to the domain of rhythm, since "readers try to organize an
entire text into a well-formed grouping hierarchy" (RPEV, 185), and in
principle a text can be any length. Though this usage produces some
problems, the only alternative would probably be to deny the use of a
single overarching term (which would also remove a substantial plank
from Cureton's argument). Terms like balance, shape, and organization sug-
gest wholly static relations, while a longer phrase would be more accu-
rate but also more clumsy.9 To take the discussion further, we need to
accept Cureton's terminology, provisionally at least, and to concentrate
on the theoretical, and practical, work it does.
The most fundamental question that every reader has to ask is, "Do I
perceive the rhythmic features that Cureton claims to find, and are they
organized in the way in which he represents them?" Of course, percep-
8. Cureton is reluctant to describe rhythm in psychological or physiological terms,

though he does begin a section titled "A Definition of Rhythm" with the statement
"In this theory I assume that rhythmic structures are cognitive representations of
the flow of energy in the stream of our experience" (RPEV, 121). Notions such as
"energy" and "experience" are not given any precise content, however.
9. Cureton does use the term shape extensively, apparently without considering its
static and visual connotations; thus he proposes to replace considerations of rhyth-
mic regularity with considerations of rhythmic shape (RPEV, 108-9), and in a final
chapter on "implications" he asserts, "Internal to the theory, the most significant con-
tribution of this book is its notion of rhythmic shape" (426). This preference might be
regarded as nothing but an unhappy choice of word were it not consistent with other
technical terms and representational conventions that tend to convert movement,
aurality, and temporality to stasis, visuality, and spatial extension.
tion here is not a simple matter; it is a matter of training as well as of

innate rhythmic capacity, and if the reader's answer contains an element
of the negative, Cureton could reply either that the reader's ear requires
training (and his book could then be considered, in part, as a training
manual) or that the reader's ear has been trained, by exposure to tradi-
tional theories of prosody, to misperceive and that his theory accurately
represents the "natural" response to rhythmic phenomena. That there
are elements of both replies in Cureton's arguments suggests the com-
plexity of the issue. To be certain that you "hear" a particular pattern in
a poem is no guarantee that it exists beyond your idiosyncratically nur-
tured perceptual faculties; the history of prosodic theorizing is littered
with assured claims about the existence of complex rhythmic features
that have found no echo in the experience of other readers. Yet it may
not simply be a question of searching for the inner reality under the
distortions of acquired artifice; poems and readings of poems are ines-
capably cultural products, and if there exists in a culture a dominant way
of responding to rhythmic organization, it cannot be pronounced wrong
in favor of some supposedly purer mode. (Often Cureton will appeal
to a theory of music as if it were evidence for a particular claim about
linguistic rhythm, but such an appeal succeeds only in transferring the
question to another vexed field.)10 When I admit, then, that I cannot
perceive some of the rhythmic features and structural properties that
Cureton discusses, I am well aware that this proves little other than that
we differ. Many more readers will have to test his assertions before any
pronouncement about their correctness can be ventured; if his book has
the impact it deserves, it may redefine what constitutes a "correct" analy-
sis as it teaches readers to hear in new ways and thus alters the cultural
consensus.1.
10. There is a tendency to refer to the work of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, and the
tradition to which it belongs, as if it represented the only analytic methodology of
importance in current music theory. Thus Cureton more than once begins an as-
sertion about language with the phrase "Following the music theorists . . ." (RPEV,
126, 135, 136) and insists that to reject his theory is either to deny the connection
between our rhythmic responses to language and to music or to claim "that the con-
temporary tradition of rhythmic analysis in music theory is misconceived and should
be discarded" (435), both exaggerating the status of the Lerdahl-Jackendoff theory
and ignoring the possibility that musical and linguistic analysis might be conjoined
in ways other than his own. This is not to say that the work of Lerdahl and Jacken-
doff does not have a great deal to offer prosodic study; it most certainly does, and
Cureton has mined it with wonderful results.
11. When Cureton states in his preface, "I take the goal of a rhythmic theory to be a
formal description of the rhythmic intuitions of the experienced reader" (RPEV, xii),
he makes the traditional claim of the descriptive linguist, overlooking the degree
to which those "intuitions" and that "experience" are matters of cultural training;
at the same time, he lays himself open to the simple denial "I am an experienced
reader; these are not my perceptions," when a more nuanced view might allow him
One of Cureton's most striking claims is that prominence relations at

different levels of the hierarchy are in some sense "the same" (besides
their susceptibility to being represented in the terms Cureton has de-
vised). While the analysis of phrasal relations at adjoining levels is often
revealing and convincing, I find myself asking if "strong" and "weak" at
the level of the syllable, the intonational phrase, and the stanza can all
mean the same thing in the reader's experience. Is it legitimate to reduce
the many ways in which units of language can relate to one another-by
virtue of physical weight, length, importance of information, newness
of information, emotional coloring, continuity or rupture, to name just
a few-to a single axis of "strong" versus "weak"? Does, for example,
the use of a Greek foot to name both an arrangement of stressed and
unstressed syllables and an arrangement of informationally central and
dependent clauses encapsulate a real identity-what one might term
a rhythmically significant generalization? If the answer to such ques-
tions is no, the fruit of the analytic labor that brings these phenomena
together is little more than a neat diagram; if it is yes, real progress in
understanding has been made. A useful way to test the claims being
made would be to compare texts as we have them with slightly rewritten
versions that upset the interlevel equivalences. Would these rewritings
have the predicted effect on the reader's response?
What is at issue here, of course, is the degree to which the percep-
tual organization of domains above the metrical (in Cureton's sense) is
a stable and shared cognitive system, making possible a viable notion
of rhythmic competence and rhythmic rules-an issue that only the
community of readers can resolve, as they have, historically, resolved
it at the level of meter in most linguistic traditions (albeit by means of
prosodic accounts that often misrepresented the operative agreements).
Cureton's use of grouping preference rules is one reflection of the rela-
tive instability of rhythmic competence, because they allow for an array
of individual readings, none of which would be deemed incorrect. At
the same time, they do encode a considerable body of shared habits,
and Cureton's examples frequently throw light on the sources of subtle
but definite responses to poetry that cannot be explained in traditional
terms. One issue that will require further discussion is the major de-
termining factor in the system of grouping rules as Cureton portrays
it: informational weight, or "contextual significance." This is a property
quite unlike, the major organizing features of music, and until it can
be more explicitly defined, disagreements among readers are likely to
proliferate. It may turn out that, in spite of his wish to be read within
the tradition of prosody, Cureton has identified a new object of textual
to encourage readers to change their habits in order to hear more detail (which in
other places he seems to want to do).
study, which would have to be called something like "phrasal relations"

or "informational structuring."
As the example of interlevel echoes shows, a striking feature of Cure-
ton's theory is its immense power, in the sense that any stretch of lan-
guage can be subjected to an extraordinarily intricate formal analysis.
The tools thus provided are extremely valuable for the purposes of de-
tailed commentary, but one question that arises is whether such a power-
ful apparatus is necessary to account for the most significant aspects of
our rhythmic experience, or whether it sometimes succeeds in blurring
them by treating all details as having equal weight. Given that no ac-
count of such experience will ever be exhaustive-at the limit, every
phonic feature, every syntactic relation, every semantic nuance has its
part to play in rhythm conceived as broadly as Cureton conceives it-
the task of rhythmic analysis becomes one of simplification, of devising
a technique that highlights the most salient properties of the perceptual
manifold. Once more, further discrimination among the different levels
might be useful here: which are perceptually most marked, which con-
tribute to a general sense of balance, which articulate an experience of
physical movement through time? This issue is closely connected to that
of evaluation. Cureton frequently deploys his rich vocabulary to praise
the skill of the poet and to admire the intricacy and subtlety of the
poem, but it is not clear that the same formal structures would not be in-
effectual or damaging in another poetic context. It might be better, for
the time being, to concentrate on the task of describing features that a
large proportion of competent readers perceive and to leave evaluation
for later.12
One danger of elaborate formal systems is that they might begin to

replace the objects they are intended to represent. There are times when
Cureton's commentary on a poem seems on the verge of turning into
a commentary on his scansion, especially when the spatial terms of the
formal apparatus begin to sound as though they have value in them-
selves, as in his comments on what he calls a large "'tower'" in the
hierarchical scansion of Yeats's "When You Are Old": "This sudden
shift from low levels to high has a kinaesthetic effect. We are literally
'lifted up' by the shift in vertical focus within the rhythmic articulation"
(RPEV, 411). The image of the tower, the spatialization of "low" and
"high" levels, the "lifting up," and the "vertical" focus seem anything
but literal; it is hard not to read them as a response to the metaphori-
12. The problem of an extremely powerful analytic method is familiar from Jakob-
son's analyses of poetic language, which operate with such a battery of descriptive
terms that they can make the most banal verse appear rich and subtle, but leave one
with the suspicion that some rather unpoetic examples of language could be similarly
analyzed. The spirit of Cureton's work has clear affinities withJakobson's, though he
has a much stronger sense of the reader's role in the production of "poetic" qualities.
cal possibilities inherent in the diagram Cureton has drawn rather than
as a description of the reader's experience of the poem. The argument
would be more persuasive if it were presented in terms that the reader
untrained in Cureton's formalisms could recognize as tallying with his
or her intuitions and then were translated into the spatial vocabulary.
The power and intricacy of the method, and the lack of any algo-
rithmic force in its operations, also raise questions about the relation
between rhythmic and nonrhythmic language. I noted earlier that Cure-
ton regards most language as nonrhythmic; his theory should in prin-
ciple distinguish the small body of rhythmic language from this more
widespread category (though he rightly insists that this kind of bor-
der patrolling is not the central task of a rhythmic theory). As far as
grouping is concerned, it is the well-formedness rules that encode this
distinction; texts that resist these rules are nonrhythmic. Unfortunately,
Cureton does not give examples of such texts, and it is not clear how
they would contravene the rules, just as it is not clear in traditional
foot prosody in what ways lines can be nonmetrical, since it is always
possible to divide a sequence of words into recognized metrical feet.
An alternative approach would be to regard all speech as rhythmic to
some degree or other (in English, for instance, the pulsing quality of
both syllable and stress production and the conflictual relation between
these two pulses produce a distinctive type of rhythm, and all syntactic
constructions involve structural relations that might be called "rhyth-
mic" in the widest sense). The scansion process could then be employed
to identify the specific rhythmic qualities of a given text, with metrical
regularity being one relatively clearly marked domain. Thus the rule that
no group, whether of syllables or of stanzas, may have more than seven
constituents would lose its rather mystical flavor (which Cureton seems
to allude to by calling the rule "Magic 7") and become a statement about
the point at which groups become less well defined, which might vary
at different levels of the hierarchy.'3 This approach would also allow for
the cross-linguistic studies crucial to testing any claims for rhythmic uni-
versals, each language having its own distinctive rhythmic character and
therefore producing recognizable poetic rhythms in different ways.14
13. Cureton makes it a fundamental principle that well-formedness rules operate

identically at every level of the hierarchy, but it is hard to see why this should be such
a significant issue. It offers an attractive simplicity, but this in itself is no guarantee
of accurate description.
14. RPEV has little to say about languages other than English, though its argu-
ments imply that the role played by language-specific features is less than has usually
been considered the case, since rhythm is regarded as a medium-independent cog-
nitive phenomenon. A passing reference to French verse as "predominantly non-
metrical" (84) is suggestive but puzzling, since regular verse in French traditionally
controls syllables and stresses very tightly.
One of Cureton's most emphatically made points is that in theorizing

we have yoked rhythm too closely to the physical and structural prop-
erties of language, instead of paying attention to the inherent patterns
of rhythmic organizations (RPEV, 98-106, 119-20). This is certainly true
of much traditional prosody, but the difficulty lies in knowing how far
it is possible to detach rhythm from a material base. In poetry, the
only stimuli acting to produce a response experienced as "rhythm" are
physical or linguistic, and the points of debate are how they trigger the
preexisting rhythmic schemata of the experienced reader and to what
extent they can then deviate from those schemata without causing a re-
interpretation. The input remains physical or linguistic throughout, and
the interest of poetic rhythm lies partly in the relation between predicted
and actual stimuli. Cureton occasionally writes as though rhythmic ex-
perience were a purely internal, mental event rather than a complex re-
sponse to a continuously unfolding event in the external world. Though
rhythm should not be identified with any particular physical medium,
there is no rhythm without a physical medium.
In Cureton's brief account of the metrical component of rhythm, the
problem of the relation between the physical and psychological material
and the hierarchical analysis becomes acute. He does not, for instance,
explain how a poem can turn on a particular metrical switch when some-
one begins to read it; indeed, his scansions sometimes imply that the
reader can foretell the metrical hierarchy of an entire poem on en-
countering its first strong beat (since the strength relation between that
beat and its neighbors depends on the length and metrical character
of the whole poem). As is evident from the metrical scansion of lines
from Yeats's "Pity of Love," Cureton also feels no obligation to align
the lowest-level pulses with the syllables of the verse. I have no prin-
cipled objection to this; once a meter is established, it is quite capable
of continuing without one-to-one reinforcement from the linguistic in-
put (though nonreinforcement will, at a certain point, produce a shift
in the perceived meter). But Cureton's rather rigid understanding of
meter produces a grid that sometimes seems oblivious to what is hap-
pening in the verse itself; for instance, in Yeats's poem, what is to me
a continuing variation between single and double offbeats, resulting in
an ambiguity as to duple or triple movement, is to Cureton a consistent
triple rhythm with a large number of double weak pulses realized by a
single syllable. Ironically, given his sensitivity to complex variations in
rhythm, this places Cureton within the tradition of temporalist prosody,
in which verse of this type is scanned as if performed to a fixed meter,
as a song is sung to a predetermined pattern of note lengths. I do not
quarrel with the fundamentals of his approach, but I suggest that the
scansion should show more clearly the interrelation between language
and meter and should be less inclined to impose a theoretically defined

shape on the language.'5
These difficulties are more evident in Cureton's treatment of the met-
rical domain in free verse. Although his discussion of grouping gives
him a superb set of tools to show how rhythm operates in free verse
without recourse to a metrical dimension, he reduces the impact of this
insight (and casts doubt on the metrical theory) by insisting that verse
normally regarded as nonmetrical does in fact have a regular meter.'6
Thus he asserts that the Williams passage examined above can be read,
at least as one "important rhythmic possibility" (RPEV, 294), as four-
beat metrical verse, beginning as follows (the meter is said to override
the lineation of the poem):17
Without invention nothing is well spaced
unless the mind change, unless the stars are new measured,
according to their relative positions

;: ~~ . '~: [.] (RPEV, 279, 313-16)
The very tight constraints that English meter imposes on the disposi-
tion of stressed and unstressed syllables are ignored, and one is left with
15. A small conundrum in Cureton's treatment of the relation between stress contour
and meter is his handling of what has traditionally been called "inversion." When
inversion occurs at the beginning of the line, his scansions consistently show a beat
on the first syllable, followed by two syllables that correspond to the next pulse, be-
fore one-to-one alignment is restored; but when mismatches occur in midline, he
shows the beat falling on an unstressed syllable and the offbeat falling on the stress
(RPEV, 134, 399, 402, 404, 413). No doubt in his further work on meter this apparent
inconsistency will be explained.
16. Curiously (and more plausibly), Cureton also argues that "poetic practice for the
last hundred years has demonstrated" that "poems can achieve astonishing rhythmic
powers even though they dispense with meter altogether" (RPEV, 438).
17. In spite of the tendency toward spatialization in this book, the role of visual linea-
tion in producing rhythmic effects is, it seems to me, underestimated by Cureton,
who in the Williams example prefers to read lineation against rhythmic patterns. It is
true that the general absence of any developed terms for discussing free-verse rhythm
has led to inordinate weight being given to lineation, but the visual or aural signal
that the line has ended remains a crucial part of the input to rhythmic processing,
in much blank verse as well as in free verse. It is possible to imagine a verse-reading
culture in which line ends are ignored, but my impression is that ours is not such a
culture. In general, Cureton allows visual aspects such as line divisions little produc-
tive role in rhythm, only the power to "blur or support rhythmic prominence and
divisioning" (RPEV, 23), and often relineates poems to show the rhythmic units that
are masked by the poet's own choice of line breaks.
a theory of meter that, like the theory of grouping, is all too easy to
apply to any stretch of language. That it would be possible to read the
Williams passage to a regular beat (as if it were rap verse, for instance)
says very little about its inherent rhythmic qualities; most readers value
precisely the constant refusal of the regular meter that often lurks, as
Eliot put it, behind the arras. It would be more helpful to show where a
metrical norm begins to emerge from a "prose" reading of an example
of free verse than it is to imply that meter exists as a clock ticking away
continuously in the background. The theory of grouping and prolon-
gation provides analytic tools of admirable subtlety for discussing free
verse (and prose), without any need to reintroduce the patterning whose
absence is part of the rhythmic quality being analyzed.
Another example of analytic overkill is Cureton's insistence on strict
hierarchies in all domains of rhythm; this notion appeals to the tidy (or
scientific) mind but is no more plausible than a theory of inexact re-
lations, overlapping groups, leftover constituents, and variable meters.
Such a loosening of the theory would reduce the strength of its claims
about cognitive processes, but it would not greatly alter its procedures
in dealing with poetry; the use of preference rules already allows for
substantial variability from reader to reader, and although the minutely
worked-out analyses in RPEV look like a claim to finality and correctness,
they are advanced only as examples of one of many possible readings.
It would be too complex to demonstrate with this machinery the way a
single reading can be suspended among several possibilities in a mode
of hesitation, which may itself be part of the text's effectiveness.
Cureton's strong formalizing streak-he wants rules to apply uni-
formly and without exception; he dislikes excesses and ambiguities; he
attempts exhaustiveness in impressive feats of analytic patience-goes
with an attitude to poems that borders on the mechnical: each one has a
core that can be reached by progressive reduction; their meters unfold
with inexorable momentum; they combine global unity with complex
inner variations. For Cureton, the fact that his three components exhibit
an "elegantly complementary relation" is "one of the strongest possible
arguments for a componential theory of rhythm" (RPEV, 150), but it
could also be interpreted as evidence of a certain kind of theorizing
mind. Such attitudes are probably necessary for someone to make the
headway that Cureton has made in these swampy waters. Those who
enjoy poems for their resistance to systematicity, who find more frag-
mentation and tension than unity and centeredness and are happy that
it should be so, who try to read a poem each time as if it were a fresh,
unpredictable challenge rather than a piece already mastered, need not
think that this work is irrelevant to them. For in pursuing his goals with
this degree of persistence and intellectual clarity, Cureton has estab-
lished a usable set of terms and tools to examine in detail the effects of
one great urge in the history of Western art (for which "organicism" is
only one name); and it is only against this background that other ten-
dencies can be understood. This book makes possible a new level of
sophistication in prosodic studies, and it is very much to be hoped that
it heralds an increasing interest in the way rhythmically and semantically
organized language stirs the mind and the body.
References
Cureton, Richard D.
1985 "Rhythm: A Multilevel Analysis," Style 19: 242-57.
1986a "Traditional Scansion: Myths and Muddles," Journal of Literary Semantics 15:
171-208.
1986b Review of William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure, by S. Cushman,
William Carlos Williams Review 12: 34-52.
1992 Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London: Longman).
Lerdahl, Fred, and RayJackendoff
1983 A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Attridge Beyond Metrics

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Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Beyond Metrics: Richard Cureton's Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse

Into the Beyond

For Cureton, rhythm embraces what have traditionally been regarded

The strictness of the rhythmic hierarchy is a feature of the theory on

A pity beyond all telling

Is hid in the heart of love:

4. The spacing of some of the dots in this example in RPEVappears to be incorrect;

Cureton represents grouping hierarchies either by a tree diagram

In scanning the passage, the highest level of the grouping hierarchy

6. To take a different example, I find Cureton's grouping analysis of Frost's "Nothing

It will be evident that Cureton's grouping analysis at these higher

Without invention nothing is well spaced

and therefore bears no indication of W or S, though at the next level up

One more technical device needs to be mentioned. Cureton subjects

As the word suggests, reductions are actually presented in order of in-

posals do not get caught up in merely terminological disputes. Words

8. Cureton is reluctant to describe rhythm in psychological or physiological terms,

tion here is not a simple matter; it is a matter of training as well as of

One of Cureton's most striking claims is that prominence relations at

study, which would have to be called something like "phrasal relations"

One danger of elaborate formal systems is that they might begin to

13. Cureton makes it a fundamental principle that well-formedness rules operate

One of Cureton's most emphatically made points is that in theorizing

and meter and should be less inclined to impose a theoretically defined

Without invention nothing is well spaced

according to their relative positions

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