Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science

by Golston, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780231142762
• ISBN10: 0231142765
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

In the half-century between 1890 and 1950, a variety of fields and disciplines, from musicology and literary studies to biology, psychology, genetics, and eugenics, expressed a profound interest in the subject of rhythm. In this book, Michael Golston recovers much of the work done in this area and situates it in the society, politics, and culture of the Modernist period. He then filters selected Modernist poems through this archive to demonstrate that innovations in prosody, form, and subject matter are based on a largely forgotten ideology of rhythm and that beneath Modernist prosody is a science and an accompanying technology. In his analysis, Golston first examines psychological and physiological experiments that purportedly proved that races responded differently to rhythmic stimuli. He then demonstrates how poets like Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams either absorbed or echoed the information in these studies, using it to hone the innovative edge of Modernist practice and fundamentally alter the way poetry was written. Golston performs close readings of canonical texts such as Pound's Cantos, Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree," and William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and examines the role the sciences of rhythm played in racist discourses and fascist political thinking in the years leading up to World War II. Recovering obscure texts written in France, Germany, England, and America, Golston argues that "Rhythmics" was instrumental in generating an international modern art and should become a major consideration in our reading of reactionary avant-garde poetry.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: Phonoscopic Modernism	p. 1
Thaddeus Bolton and the Omnipresence of Rhythm	p. 12
Mapping Rhythmic Bodies	p. 19
Rhythm, Blood, Pulse, Heredity	p. 26
Rhythm, Nation, Race	p. 29
Nietzsche, Wagner, Spengler, Jung	p. 34
Rhythm and/as Political Ideology: Germany in the 1930s	p. 40
Rhythm and Constructing the Fascist Subject	p. 42
Summary	p. 43
Rhythmics in Modernist Poetics	p. 47
Racial Origins of Prosody	p. 54
Pulsanda Tellus: Ezra Pound's Absolutist Rhythms	p. 59
The Root of the Matter	p. 59
Invisible Motors	p. 64
Pisan Symmetries	p. 73
The Dancer and the Corpus	p. 79
We Who Have Passed Over Lethe	p. 87
Double Registrations in the River of Blood	p. 100
Primalities	p. 103
Amphibious Centaurs	p. 107
Rivers of Blood	p. 111
A Sort of Eugenic Paganism	p. 123
Ripples, Spirals, Fat Lines: Rhythmical Hormonies	p. 128
Inaudible Codes: Structuring the Corporate Text	p. 137
Codifying Political Bodies	p. 138
Machining Convictions: W.B. Yeats's Sanguineous Rhythms	p. 146
"The subject of which I am most ignorant"	p. 146
Monotonous Fire	p. 149
The Bull and the Nightingale	p. 152
Haunting the Edge of Trance	p. 155
Ancient Salt	p. 158
Those Images That Waken in the Blood	p. 164
Singing the Crisis Itself	p. 269
Cinematic Reversals; or, the Ghost of Abel in the Whale's Belly	p. 172
Bad Breath and Ghost Limbs	p. 177
Agents of Intensity Unrocking to a Pulse	p. 182
Auguries of the Inaudible: Strange Hearts and Wing Beats	p. 184
What Magic Drum? The Rhythms of Mummies, Vampires, Centaurs, and Butterflies	p. 193
Alexander and the Books of Prosody	p. 202
Williams's Measured Interventions	p. 208
Measuring the Weather with Euclid and Einstein	p. 211
Angelic Cubes and Cubist Angels	p. 216
Notes	p. 225
Bibliography	p. 255
Index	p. 267
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