Sean Pryor
In the summer of 1938, W.B. Yeats began to think again about measure.
‘Measurement began our might’, he announced in ‘Under Ben Bulben’:
‘Forms a stark Egyptian thought, / Forms that gentler Phidias wrought’ (Yeats 1966: 638). In another poem written that summer, ‘The Statues’, he praised the Greek sculptors who ‘with a mallet or a chisel modelled […] Calculations that look but casual flesh’ (610). So successful was their modelling of the human body, Yeats says, that Greek girls and boys ‘pressed at midnight in some public place / Live lips upon a plummet-measured face’. Amorous adolescents kissed cold statues, thanks to mathematics. When the late Yeats thinks about calculation, number, and measurement, in poems which denounce the ‘formless’ tide of modernity (611), he thinks about ancient precedent and ancient instruments: the Greeks and their plumb bobs.
When Yeats dies the following winter and W.H. Auden writes an elegy, he thinks about thermometers and photometers:
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day. (Auden 1988: 241)
Auden’s modern instruments measure light and heat; they quantify the weather on January 28, 1939, which was indeed a dark cold day. It reached 36 degrees Fahrenheit and was cloudy in New York, where Auden wrote the poem, and it reached 52 degrees Fahrenheit and was unsettled on the French Riviera, where Yeats died (‘The Weather’ 1939). But Auden’s instruments also measure grief, the thoughts and the feelings that accompany loss, and so his line measures the legitimacy of poetry which makes low temperatures and heavy clouds share and express grief. To measure the pathetic fallacy with a thermometer is, it seems, to measure the distance between quantity and quality.
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When Auden revised the poem, he changed the fifth line from ‘O all the instruments agree’ to ‘What instruments we have agree’ (Auden 1991: 247). He shifted from bardic exclamation to plainspoken qualification: the instruments we have are limited, and give only provisional measurements. The revised line includes us: it makes us reconsider the instruments we have; and the revised line returns upon itself: it makes us ask which instruments the poem has. It makes us think of Auden’s other instrument, verse, which measures Yeats’s achievement by rising from the first section’s loose, mostly unrhymed lines to the third section’s resounding tetrameter couplets:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start. (249)
This is precisely the metre or measure in which Yeats had, some six months earlier, declared that ‘Measurement began our might’. Auden rises to Yeats’s measure. This instrument does not agree that the day of Yeats’s death was a dark cold day, or not simply so: it heralds that healing fountain, even in the prison of mortality. How then, is the measurement of heat and light related to the measurement of syllables, stresses, and lines? This is my question here:
how can we understand the relation between measuring instruments and verse measures in modernism?
The problem can be approached in three ways. The first is simple: to consider the representation of measuring devices, old and new, in modernist poetry. The second is to consider the emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of a materialist metrics, which saw acoustic scientists seeking to graph or image poetic rhythm and metre with sophisticated new measuring instruments. These scientists wanted to understand what makes poetry poetry, and what separates it from prose. But we do not have to think either of measuring instruments or of poems merely as objects to be represented. Both instruments and poems are also modes of representation, and they are both forms or manifestations of subjectivity. For this reason, the significance of modernist measure emerges only when, third, we allow poetry to be a measurement technology too.
To do that means to reflect theoretically on modernist verse, and to remember the necessary and mutual mediation of quantity and quality. It is certainly not the case that scientific instruments are concerned only with quantity, nor that poetry is concerned only with quality. Without counting, said William Carlos Williams, there is no verse, only prose (Williams 1959:
145). But the separation seemed straightforward to some. In 1893 the American psychologist James McKeen Cattell proclaimed that we ‘no longer speak of the boundless sea and the innumerable host of the Argives. We ask, how many? how much?’ (Cattell 1893: 317). Having sung of the Fenians’ ‘swift innumerable spears’ in The Wanderings of Oisin (Yeats 1966: 2), Yeats would
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surely have objected. But Cattell was emphatic: the ‘history of science is the history of measurement’, he wrote.
Clocks, balances, and foot-rules seem indispensable to our present civilization. Thermometers, barometers, lactometers, etc., are no longer looked upon as scientific instruments, and these and other means of measurement will soon be used by everyone. (Cattell 1893: 316)
This was the modern empiricism against which Yeats, at the height of the fin de siècle, set his poetry. ‘Everything that can be seen, touched, measured’, he insisted, ‘is to the imaginative artist nothing more than a means’ (Yeats 2007: 143). By 1927, Joseph Macleod lamented that poets ‘have ceased to be prophets’ and have instead ‘become barometers’ (Macleod 1927: 257).
This is a familiar conflict. In the period stretching from the 1890s to the Second World War, there are countless examples of poetry’s apparent antipathy to measuring instruments. D.H. Lawrence opposed quantitative measurement to the natural world. ‘[Y]ou to whom the sun is merely something that makes the thermometer rise!’ he cries in ‘Oh Wonderful Machine!’ (Lawrence 2013: 1.554). In ‘Dreams’, Walter de le Mare recoiled at the thought that our every action and desire could be gauged quantitatively:
Nay, is that Prince of the Dust – a man, But a tissue of parts, dissectable?
Lancet, balances, callipers – can The least of his actions by human skill
Be measured as so much Sex, Want, Will? (de la Mare 1979: 237) Instruments of measurement frequently figure the intrusion of quantitative science into intimate, natural, sacred, political, or aesthetic realms. The science of psychology was a common culprit, as was the science of economics.
In this, poets exploited associations made by economic journalists and theorists themselves. The phrase ‘business barometer’, for instance, appeared in the New York Times in 1868 and in London’s Economist in 1875 (‘The Business Barometer’ 1868; ‘Germany And Austria’ 1875); by the 1910s and 1920s it was standard currency (Persons 1916; Gerstenberg 1919: 573-4; ‘The Business Barometer’ 1922). But for Kenneth Allott, capitalist quantification was a curse: ‘Enumerate your riches, get them by heart. […] The pins in the tidy are numbered off and treasured, / With callipers the width of each twig is measured’ (Allott 2008: 48). In a similar vein, Louis MacNeice attacked liberal democracy’s ‘Moderates’, their ‘brains a mere barometer’, for having sold their ‘birthright for a fat / Mess of pottage’ (MacNeice 2007: 767). Politics becomes merely the calculation of private gain. Finally there is Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, reduced from out-of-date aesthete to seismographer:
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Unable in the supervening blankness To sift TO AGATHON from the chaff Until he found his sieve ...
Ultimately, his seismograph. (Pound 1990: 197)
Mauberley passively records the shockwaves made by others’ blasts, the genuine innovations of an Ezra Pound or a Wyndham Lewis. And though callipers are as old as Greek plumb bobs, this, I believe, is the earliest use of the word seismograph in poetry in English.
But what really was new, especially in the late nineteenth century, was the graphing of poetry itself. This turned the tables of representation. Building on the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, experimental psychologists and phoneticians applied kymographs, ergographs, and phonautographs to the measurement of speech and of poetry (Hall 2009).
Edward Wheeler Scripture’s 1902 study, The Elements of Experimental Phonetics, sought to ground the lofty realm of poetic inspiration and intuition in objective, empirical science. The old debates about classical prosody, and even the musical prosodies of Coventry Patmore and Sidney Lanier, now seemed redundant. But for modernism, perhaps the most important example was William Morrison Patterson’s The Rhythm of Prose (1916). Harriet Monroe gave Patterson’s book an excited review in the April 1918 issue of Poetry:
‘systems of verse-scansion inherited from our ancestors’, Monroe urged, ‘are as unscientific and out of date as pre-Galileo astronomy’ (Monroe 1918:
31). The Rhythm of Prose proved especially exciting because it closes with a discussion of free verse. In order to decide whether free verse is simply prose, genuinely poetry, or some third thing, Patterson had Amy Lowell perform her own and others’ works to be measured by his instruments. Lowell in turn described their collaboration in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, offering a detailed analysis of H.D.’s ‘Oread’ in terms of isochronous ‘time units’
(Lowell 1917: 264-5). Quantitative calculation could also be turned against experimental forms. In 1931 Max Eastman imagined placing ‘two of the most enthusiastic admirers of this poetry’ in separate sound-proof chambers and then asking each to read a poem by E.E. Cummings ‘in the august presence of a sphygmograph’ (Eastman 1935: 62). This machine was ‘designed to record in a white line on a black roller the actual pulsations’ of what, as Eastman remarks, Paul Rosenfeld called the new poetry’s ‘rapid, capricious, and melodic line’. Is there any chance, Eastman asks, that the two readers would produce the same curve, and so justify Cummings’s typographical experiments? ‘Of course they would not.’
Eastman was by no means alone in his objections. John Gould Fletcher complained that we ‘cannot measure poetry with a metronome, or even classify it with a phonograph, as Dr Patterson would have us do’ (Fletcher 1919: 13). Lascelles Abercrombie protested that investigating the ‘physiological or physical origins of metre’ is like ‘expecting a man to describe a railway
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journey by telling you […] how the thermodynamics of the engine may be drawn in a graph’ (Abercrombie 1923: 8). And as Jason David Hall has shown, critics such as I.A. Richards and W.K. Wimsatt maintained a ‘belief that machines, in spite of their demonstrable sonic sensitivity, could not account for an intuitive aspect of the metrical phenomenon’ (Hall 2011: 193).
Works like The Rhythm of Prose and The Elements of Experimental Phonetics do raise the problem that to measure particular performances, and even, given a large sample of performances, to arrive statistically at some average performance, may not be to measure the poem itself. The poem can seem instead an ideal object, or partly ideal, never wholly material, reducible neither to a single performance nor to performance as such. There is also the problem that a material metrics must decide in advance which features or qualities to quantify. Patterson writes:
we first of all conceive the rhythm of either prose or verse in the form of a rhythmic tune, combining patterns of time, stress, and, to some extent, pitch. Patterns of tone-color are superimposed, as soon as we consider the actual sounds of the words, and patterns of subjective weight, as soon as we consider the words as vehicles of thought and feeling. (Patterson 1916: 75)
Patterson’s and Scripture’s phonautographs, which transcribed sound waves as the undulations of a line traced on paper or glass, were sophisticated devices for measuring time, stress, and pitch. But far from being empirical givens, such features must be abstracted in order to be quantified. Patterson’s sequence of rhythmic tune, tone-colour, and subjective weight is an abstraction, too:
the progression is a fiction that enables and prioritises material measurement.
Patterson seems to sense something of this, for he says that we have to listen for tone-colour as soon as we consider the ‘actual’ sounds of the words. Before that, the phonautograph had been measuring something else.
What, we should also ask, does the poem itself measure? Materialist metrics begs this old question by abstracting time, stress, and pitch. Classical prosody would answer instead that verse measures feet. Spurred by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Williams proposed that modern verse counts, or ought to count, relatively equal or ‘variable’ feet (Williams 1959: 151). But even for metrical verse the answers vary. Two years after Monroe reviewed Patterson, Bliss Perry surveyed the evidence produced by laboratory psychology and concluded that
The individual’s standard of measurement – his poetic foot-rule, so to speak – is very elastic – ‘made of rubber’ […] Furthermore, the composers of poetry build it out of very elastic units. They are simply putting syllables of words together into a rhythmical design, and these ‘airy syllables’, in themselves mere symbols of
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ideas and feelings, cannot be weighed by any absolutely correct sound-scales. (Perry 1920: 148)
There are two apparent contradictions here, which both Perry and Patterson struggle to reconcile: the contradiction between quantity and quality, and between matter and spirit. One good modernist solution would be to invoke Bergson’s metaphysics. In that case we would have, on the one hand, the extensive magnitudes of matter, of space, and, in our case, of speech measured by scientific instruments. On the other hand we would have intensive magnitudes, which, as Bergson reminds us, are not really magnitudes at all since they cannot be quantified (Bergson 1912: 4). These include the phenomenon of durée, and the ideas and feelings of which spoken sounds are, as Perry puts it, symbols. For Bergson, to measure the grief in Auden’s elegy or the healing praise would be to falsify it, illegitimately confusing the intensive and the extensive.
But before looking at the actual measures of some actual poems, I want to suggest that rather than Bergson, we would do well to remember Hegel.
Hegel, too, was sceptical about the claims made for quantitative measurement.
When ‘quantity is not reached through the action of thought, but taken uncritically’, he writes, ‘the title of exact science is restricted to those sciences the objects of which can be submitted to mathematical calculation’ (Hegel 1975b: 146). A scientific understanding of human actions, desires, and works will then be sought only by subjecting them to callipers. Better, for Hegel, is a dialectic of quality, quantity, and measure, and by measure Hegel does not mean simple quantification. If our apprehension of an object begins with its qualitative determination – water, say, which is not milk – quantification abstracts some feature of that object and construes it in terms of identical or equal units. This then allows us to assess the temperature of the water in a saucepan, to ‘measure’ it, and to compare it to the temperature of the milk in another saucepan on the stove. But at a certain point, the quantitative increase in the water’s temperature means a qualitative change: the water boils, and is no longer water. This, for Hegel, is measure as such: ‘the qualitative quantum’, a quantum ‘to which a determinate being or a quality is attached’ (157).
Measure is the quantity which determines quality. And we only engage in quantitative calculation, says Hegel, for the purposes of measure, even when we fail to recognise that that is what we are doing. If I am working in the field of materialist metrics, I set my phonautograph to image Amy Lowell’s performances of free verse precisely so as to decide whether that free verse is prose, poetry, or some third form with its own quality.
Hegel also knows that Amy Lowell’s timing and stress and pitch, her material or embodied performances, are always already mediated by spirit.
The sounds have sense from the start. He works through this problem by comparing poetry to music. For Hegel, poetry
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need not be subject, so abstractly as is the case with a musical beat, to an absolutely fixed measure of time for its communication and progress. In music the note is a fading sound without support which imperatively requires a stability like that introduced by the beat; but speech does not need this support, for it has this already in the idea that it expresses, and, furthermore, it does not enter completely and without qualification into the external sphere of sounding and fading but retains precisely the inner idea as its essential artistic medium. For this reason poetry actually finds directly in the ideas and feelings which it puts clearly into words the more substantive determinant for measuring retard, acceleration, lingering, dawdling, and so forth. (Hegel 1975a: 2.1017)
So the substance which poetry measures is at once both matter and spirit, stress and idea, pitch and feeling. What does this mean for modernist poetry, at a time when callipers, seismographs, business barometers, and stock exchanges seemed to some the only mechanisms for apprehending truth or value? And what does measure as qualitative quantum mean at a historical moment when the quantitative study of poetry coincided with poems which ostensibly abandon quantification: poems which replace the calculation of stresses or syllables with the measureless measures of free verse? To conclude, I want to consider two examples.
The first is from Wallace Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:
Perhaps there are times of inherent excellence, As when the cock crows on the left and all Is well, incalculable balances,
At which a kind of Swiss perfection comes And a familiar music of the machine Sets up its Schwärmerei, not balances That we achieve but balances that happen,
As a man and woman meet and love forthwith. (Stevens 1997: 334) How are Stevens’s pentameters and Swiss chronometers related? Part of the answer lies in the puzzling association of Swiss perfection with incalculable balances, since the balance wheels in Swiss watches are calibrated to produce precise calculations. Then there is the puzzling association of that seemingly inhuman machine with the very human Schwärmerei, swarmings or enthusiasm or eros. The Swiss perfection may accompany or supersede those balances, in accordance with them or in contrast. Then, as if in reverse, the machine’s routine music sets up rare or remarkable Schwärmerei, as singular
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and unprecedented as falling in love. Or, since that music seems to accompany the Swiss perfection and so to be contingent upon those particular times of inherent excellence, maybe the machine’s music is itself rare and remarkable.
And because the event of falling in love is archetypal it is typical, familiar, even routine. Part of the answer therefore lies in the single deft sentence’s constantly shifting balance of measurement and the immeasurable, indifferent iteration and singular event, quantity and quality.
But part of the answer lies in the quality of Stevens’s metre. We can be fairly sure that Stevens had encountered materialist metrics, at least in passing and if only at second hand. Stevens read the first volume of Paul Elmer More’s Shelburne Essays with enthusiasm (Stevens 1977: 220; Stevens 1996: 133), and in his essay on ‘The Science of English Verse’ More first quotes Helmholtz and then concludes: ‘rhythm in verse is a branch of the scientific study of sound,
But part of the answer lies in the quality of Stevens’s metre. We can be fairly sure that Stevens had encountered materialist metrics, at least in passing and if only at second hand. Stevens read the first volume of Paul Elmer More’s Shelburne Essays with enthusiasm (Stevens 1977: 220; Stevens 1996: 133), and in his essay on ‘The Science of English Verse’ More first quotes Helmholtz and then concludes: ‘rhythm in verse is a branch of the scientific study of sound,