I sparked a small feud last month when I wrote in this blog that “Iambic Pentameter Has Nothing to Do with Your Heart.” My essay took issue with a “pulse exercise” that Annie Finch performed at AWP and, by extension, certain arguments linking iambs and the heart. Dr. Finch has kindly responded to my piece, clarifying her presentation and making new claims.
I was pleased to read her comments and to discuss these issues further. Here is my reply:
Dr. Finch writes that her exercise—in which she asked her audience to take a deep breath, count their pulse, and come up with five beats—was not about iambic pentameter alone. I am delighted to read this; it squares with her long career of advocating for metrical diversity. It’s a career that I admire, made a point of acknowledging in my essay, and applaud. My interpretation, however, was only so far off base. Dr. Finch does believe—alongside Ian McKellen and the other actors who’ve held their pulse while practicing blank verse—that the heart gives us the iamb. Her response, which you can read here, shows that her claim is much broader. It is not, however, any less physiological.
So let us turn to her claim, new to me, that all meters are physiologically united by breath:
What I said was that, as far as I know, lines of poetry the world over, whether based in accentual, syllabic, accentual-syllabic, tonal, or other prosodies, tend to come out about the same length—the length of a breath. There may be exceptions, but I’ve never found one after decades of asking people from a myriad of cultures about poetry in their languages.
Dr. Finch goes on to calculate a global metrical ratio, applicable to all poetries, based on an average person’s breath rate and an average person’s heart rate. That ratio, which is 1:5, “doesn’t seem to be culturally determined,” she tells us. (You can see how iambic pentameter fits this mold.) I am weary of any pan-cultural claims that declare jurisdiction over 6,500 world languages. I am wearier still when the claim is grounded on something as unquantifiable as breath.
Here’s why: unlike moras, syllables, or accents, breath is very hard to measure. It changes based on lung capacity, sex, age, exercise, altitude, or even height. Dr. Finch’s own figures—“12-20 breaths a minute” and “60-100 beats per minute”—vary by almost a factor of two, the difference, say, between a dimeter and a tetrameter. Her ratio assumes an ur-breath accessible to all people everywhere for all time. Breathing, however, is not that constant, and her theory, if adjusted for the actual variations in human breath rate, produces some comically inexplicable situations. Shouldn’t women, who generally have smaller lung capacities than men, write shorter lines? How did “[t]iny Alexander Pope,” my colleague J.D. Porter asks, manage such robust dactylic hexameters at a height of 4’6”? Did he have “a snorkeling hobby” that we didn’t know about? As one linguist friend told me when I asked him about breath as a metric: “If anything, the timing of breathing during speech would derive from the prosody, not vice versa.”
Breath’s fungibility has always been clear to the avant-garde. Charles Olson writes that poetry, “if it is to be of essential use, must…put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes.” He sounds a bit like Annie Finch when he claims that “the HEART, by way of the BREATH,” gives us “the LINE.” When W.C. Williams goes looking for his new line in the 1940s, he measures it out by his breath and the so-called “variable foot.” (This produces the triadic lines used in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.) For Ginsberg, each line of Howl was “a single breath.” How could these poets get away with measuring such different lines by the same unit? Because breath is an intangible metric, as meaningless—in Alan Stephens’s critique of the “variable foot”—“as an elastic inch.” It is the last refuge for many an esoteric theory of the line.
I need not remind Dr. Finch that these are free verse poets looking to clarify and explain what are, in essence, free verse lines. Nor am I writing critically of Olson, Williams, and Ginsberg. There is room within poetics for these wild-eyed justifications. Traditional prosody, however, should value the verifiable and reproducible. Dr. Finch writes of breath and heart rate as if they were poetic constants. Combine one figure (average breaths) with another (average beats), and you get a metrical rubric that works “the world over.” But no human being is actually average, and her theory works backward from a pair of conveniently squishy statistics. It also assumes that all humans breathe and pump as one. What would the arrhythmic poet say to her theory? Or our poetry-quoting Pope with his single lung? There are two underlying problems here: 1) her theory is implicitly ablist, and 2) it wants to trace the world’s meters back to a pre-Babel source.
And while her theory is universal, her examples are all Anglophone: “[A] line of my own current favorite meter in English, dactylic tetrameter, takes about the length of a breath to say and has four accents,” she writes. Or, if we return to the source of the pulse exercise: “A line of iambic pentameter takes about the length of a breath to say and has five.” How though do we explain the eight-mora template of the haiku, as I noted in my first essay? Where does it fit into the global 1:5 ratio? Dr. Finch offers anecdotal evidence—she has talked to “people from a myriad of cultures about poetry”—but no studies or scansions. Even her take on ballad meter feels shaky. If a stress-prominent language will, as she writes, carry “between 4-6 [stresses] per line,” how do we explain a 4-3-4-3 quatrain? Do we read it as fourteener couplets (seven beats) and exceed her six-beat ceiling? Or do we concede that all the trimeter lines fall short?
Let me be clear about my position. I do not believe there is a universal theory of meter, or at least not one with the physiological explanation that Annie Finch prizes. This isn’t to say that our bodies don’t affect our art. Humans love patterns; some cherish symmetry. But we can honor that fact without being over-deterministic in our claims. (Richard Kenney muses on this very point in an essay-length comment to my original thesis.) This doesn’t detract, of course, from the felt nature of a metrical poem. Meter gives comfort in the way our hearts and breathing give comfort: it is reliable, repetitive, and reassuring. That comfort can have physiological benefits, as Dr. Finch points out, but there’s a difference between meter’s effects on the body and a bodily explanation for all the world’s meters. The first is a form of healing; the latter is hocus-pocus.
Here’s a question that may get at the heart of this controversy: what is at stake when one argues for meter as physiological? Dr. Finch hints at an answer in her closing lines. She wishes to “counter the popular misconception that meter is a strictly mental construction.” This is not a misconception I’m aware of, but I fail to see its harm. Would Frost, Merrill, or Wilbur be any less astonishing if we traced their meters back to their minds instead of their hearts? Where is the loss in meter as a cultural or intellectual conceit? Annie Finch believes, as I do, that no “one meter” is more pure, innate, or “biologically determined” than another. We differ, however, in the following: she believes that all meters are biologically determined, and thus more pure and innate than the alternative: free verse. Free verse is a mere “mental construction.” And that, I would argue, is what’s really at stake. Annie Finch wants to prove that her favorite poetry has a better claim for the body. This play for poetry a priori has an obvious motivation: it would return us to a pre-Modernist state. The body will provide if you just give it time, Finch’s theory implies. Two of poetry’s most lasting tropes—the heart and the lungs—ensure that free verse will wane as the flesh helps our form self-correct.
The irony is that her argument sounds essentialist in ways that Eliot and Pound would adore. I do not agree with her theory on its merits—I’ve yet to meet a linguist who makes a case based on breath; I’ve not read a peer-reviewed study that compares meters “the world over”—but I object to its latent defensiveness just as much. This too feels Modernist. Metrical poetry is not anywhere near the dominant aesthetic in America today, but it doesn’t need pseudo-science claims to prove its beauty or truth. What it does need is better teaching, more readers, and a demystifying of its elements. Annie Finch has spent much of her career doing this work and doing it well. That should be enough.