![]() ![]() In Tartakovsky's all-too-brief closing remarks, he argues that attending to rhyme as readers and listeners of poetry demands a kind of sensory and sensual attunement through which we learn to listen out more broadly for what otherwise "could easily go unheard" (160). In part it is a defense of critical attention to rhyme: a rejoinder against literary critics' cloth ear to the sonic texture of those literary works they purport to understand ("our somewhat impoverished habits of listening" is Tartakovsky's diplomatic phrase, 16) but this is not simply a polemical strike for formalist poetics. The title's allusion is to Milton's Paradise Lost (or rather, to Stanley Fish's famous study of it), and more specifically Milton's note on the verse of his epic, which remains perhaps the preeminent statement in the English "antirhyme" tradition: "no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter." This allusion to Milton, even before the numerous sensitive readings of individual rhymes, indicates that Tartakovsky's project is a defense of rhyme as much as it is a study of it. ![]() "Surprised by sound" is an apposite title for Roi Tartakovsky's study of the "inner workings" of rhyme, and not simply because the work continually attends to the surprises that rhyming sounds pose, and bring about: the surprising semantic link that a rhyme invites us to make between two words, for example or the surprising, or an unexpected sonorous echo in a notionally unrhyming poem that makes us notice retrospectively that there is rhyme here after all, and attunes us to listen differently in our mind's ear as we read on.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |