Chapter 6 takes a relevance theory approach to the question of how sound-patterning in poetic language can contribute to interpretation. It includes a survey of approaches from linguistics and stylistics which consider the relationship between sound and meaning, including those which claim an inherent sound–meaning correspondence and those which dismiss such associations as phonaesthetic fallacy. The chapter then moves to a description and analysis of parts of ‘Ode on Melancholy’ by John Keats. The poem’s form is described using bracketed grid theory and a broad phonetic transcription. The question of whether and how sound patterns can come to seem meaningful in interpretation is addressed using the idea that salience of form, whether metrical or phonetic, encourages the reader to explore interpretive possibilities. In parts of this analysis the chapter uses a spreading activation model of lexical access alongside relevance theory. A key claim is that lines of alliteration in poetry cause a lingering of activation and reactivation between words, which enables a merging of conceptual material. The approaches taken in this chapter explain variable interpretations of sound patterns in the reading of poetic language without resorting to a claim that sounds inherently hold meaning, or that such readings are fallacious.

The Classic Bardic period is remarkable for its conservation of dán díreach, a highly elaborate set of formal protocols that underwrote bardic composition of eulogy, elegy, and satire. Dán díreach features complex syllabic meters, such as deibhidhe and rannuigheacht, that accompanied a rich set of rhetorical and generic conventions at the core of the bardic repertoire. This chapter examines the intricacies and affordances of such forms, as well as other styles that traveled outside of the aristocratic milieu, which were characterized by an increased use of alliterative meters such as ógláchas and brúilingeacht, a preponderance of folk motifs and song forms, and an emphasis on topics and concerns that tended not to find their way into the poems of the professional bards.

As the accentual and highly alliterative meters of pre-Christian poetry came in contact with Latin hymnody, they incorporated forms of syllabic versification. These nùa chrutha [new forms] emerged from an ecclesiastical setting and were initially resisted by the filid, but they were then slowly folded together with native compositional tendencies on the way to the highly formal dán díreach style (syllabic, stanzaic, complexly rhymed) that would dominate professional Irish poetry until the seventeenth century. This chapter will look at the development of early Irish versification.

This chapter focuses on patterns and principles describing the distribution of sounds in sequences. It is shown that syllables are subject to the same concept of chunking (constituency) as words in a sentences or morphemes within a word. Poetry, speech errors, and experimental studies about pronunciation and perception of sounds are discussed.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

This chapter examines hip-hop’s rhyme history. With attention to examples from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Big Daddy Kane, and Busta Rhymes, it identifies three main modes of rhyme: “normal,” “extraordinary,” and “impossible.” Popular during hip-hop’s early development, normal rhymes clearly and predictably mark line endings. Sometimes dismissed as unsophisticated, they invite the listener to experience the depicted experience as communal. Extraordinary rhymes concentrate normal rhymes’ infrequent technical flourishes into a defining characteristic. They play intonation against line breaks and feature denser, more complicated multisyllabic rhymes such as mosaic and forced rhymes. They aim for a conspicuous virtuosity. Impossible rhymes are often performed at a formidable speed, without any clear sense of where lines start or end. Riddling passages also cannot be conclusively understood. While normal and extraordinary rhymes encourage their listeners to remember and perform them, impossible rhymes aim for irreproducibility.

This chapter examines the transformative work of Danielle Dumile, the masked rapper who went by the stage name DOOM (among other aliases), and who was known for his complex lyricism and innovative personae. Adrian Matejka considers the MC’s use of persona through the dual lenses of hip-hop and poetry, highlighting the ways in which DOOM’s lyrics borrow from and enhance these twinned literary traditions. Drawing parallels between DOOM’s innovative lyricism and the tradition of persona poetry, Matejka considers how contemporary poets – particularly Black American poets – adopt various masks to explore history, culture, and identity. This longer tradition is related back to DOOM, whose layered personae subverted mainstream rap in the early 2000s. Matejka frames the rapper’s work as an enduring testament to persona’s power in mythmaking and cultural commentary.

Reduplicative patterns are relatively restricted in English, as are their functions. As well as outlining the patterns, and introducing a new pattern, this chapter considers the ways in which these structures are used.

The effect of phonetics on word-formation in phonaesthemes, diminutives and the influence of rhyme are discussed. A new way of looking at phonaesthemes is proposed, to avoid some contradictory findings.

The syllable is a unit in-between the phoneme and the word. It minimally consists of one phoneme, but usually is consists of more. While even preschool children have no trouble telling you how many syllables a word contains and can clap the syllable structure, we are going to investigate why a word has as many syllables as it does. We will discover the internal structure of syllables and which phonemes combine with one another into syllables and which do not. Finally, we will consider some principles that help us syllabify words and split them into syllables.

This chapter explores Hopkins and rhyme: both his views on the subject and his practice as a poet. It considers Hopkins as an artist caught between two conceptions of rhyme that stood in tension with one another. In the first view, rhyme is a metaphor for thinking about questions of cosmic design and coherence, and hence carries philosophical weight, and a religious and ethical charge. In the second, rhyme is aligned with pleasure and beauty, and needs to be disciplined and harnessed if it is not to be decadent or self-indulgent. The chapter considers Hopkins’s observations and pronouncements on the subject of rhyme in his letters and lectures and compares and contrasts them with the evidence of his poems, in which he often breaks his own rules. The chapter argues that Hopkins needed to be in more than one mind about rhyme in order to write the way he did.

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

Summarising this study’s findings, this concluding chapter explores a little-discussed and much-maligned text in their light: the relatively late, formally innovative, and greatly enigmatic Rhyming Poem of the Exeter Book. This poem is known for its apparently disorganised structure and ambiguous subject matter, moving rapidly between human and nonhuman referents, and operating on both a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. Yet The Rhyming Poem gains a great deal of clarity when approached as an articulation of a human life course, blurring with that of the world itself. Drawing on arguments built throughout the book, this final chapter sets out a new account of the poem, finding more coherence to its structure than scholars have previously detected, and pointing particularly to key connections between form and content in the poet’s bold use of rhyme to accentuate the sudden shifts and transformations of the life course.

In this chapter, we move from discussing English segmentals – individual consonant and vowel sounds – to suprasegmentals, the units of sound above the level of the segment. This includes stress, pitch, and tone, and extends above individual vowel and consonants to syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. At the core of our discussion of suprasegmentals is the syllable, which can be defined as a unit of organization for sound sequences. Every word is made up of minimally one syllable; in some languages, including English, words often contain multiple syllables.

We begin the chapter by examining what we mean by 'syllable', and the components of a syllable, including the onset, nucleus, and coda. We then examine syllable inventories cross-linguistically, with a special focus on the languages that influence varieties of English. An overview of English syllable structure is then provided, with a focus on how syllable structure varies across varieties. In the final section of the chapter, you will be guided through exercises designed to check your understanding of the content of the chapter and to analyse your own English syllable inventory.

England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

It did not take long for Molière’s plays to travel across the Channel, but the forms in which they appeared on the early modern English stage and page were varied. The first translations of the 1660s were marked by a hybridising tendency in which one or more Molière plots were absorbed into composite plays, thereby satisfying the English taste for dramatic variety. Although this trend dwindled in favour of single-play translations, the hybridising approach was not abandoned altogether – comedy-ballets, as compound forms, were still blended. Even where single plays were translated, it was common for extra characters and small subplots to be added. But what one hand giveth the other taketh away: rhyme was, at this time, described as ‘an effeminate practice’ and, except for Dryden’s Amphitryon, was largely eschewed for its unnaturalness. Early translations of Molière were occasionally undertaken by women; Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre took up the medical satires and their work reveals that translation could be used to explore gender-based power imbalances. In the early eighteenth century, there was a notable drive towards preserving Molière’s plays in monumental collected editions, but these were seen as a complement to continued translation experimentation.

This part of the book demonstrates the many ways in which we can come to understand and enjoy a poem. It takes the reader through a series of shorter sections, each of them showing how by asking a particular question of a poem – about its verbal effects, about its form, about its emotional impact, about its subject matter – we can start to develop an understanding of it. The sections offer accessible introductions to technical matters such as rhyme and metre, but they also show how questions of technique in poetry are inseparable from the questions of what a poem has to say and to show us. Examples from a broad range of poetry written in English are used to illustrate the different approaches.

This chapter begins from the premise that poetry affords specific modes of attention and linguistic play, and that both are central to poetry’s value. It is a truism that poems tend to require a slower, more deliberate pace of reading in order for their intricacies and meanings to become fully apparent. Our contemporary culture is deeply inattentive, with distraction, multitasking, and disengagement all symptoms of social and cultural life. Many contemporary poems push against these conditions, whether implicitly or explicitly, by offering a space for noncoercive attention. The compaction or density of poetry isn’t simply a sign of its difficulty or unapproachability, it is more centrally an index of readerly possibilities. Poems condense, arrange, and splay language. On top of language’s system of syntax and grammar, poetry places a rhythmic and sonic grid – whether based on a conventional metrical scheme or not. In part, this chapter exfoliates Roman Jakobson’s “poetic function” in order to suggest the various ways that contemporary poetry mobilizes an assortment of grids, patterns, and schemes as part of its compositional unfolding. It includes readings of poems by Paul Muldoon, Maggie O’Sullivan, Seamus Heaney, Jen Hadfield, and Harryette Mullen.