Define scansion in literature3/4/2023 The history of Hopkins's verse reception is one of readers feeling acutely aware of the singular auditoryachievement these poems constitute, and yet frequently at a loss to know how best to sound these poems. Hopkins considered his ‘sprung rhythm’, which did not regulate the number of unstressed syllables between each stress, closer to ‘natural’ speech than foot metrics and yet, sprung rhythm necessitated a notation system. Like Olson, Hopkins is searching for records of, and means of recording, poetic sound. The phonograph, Hopkins suggests, offers the possibility of belatedly creating a tradition of verse recitation: “the phonograph may give us, but hitherto there could be no record of fine spoken utterance”. In a letter to his brother Everard in November 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that, “with the aid of a phonograph each phrase could be fixed and learnt by heart like a song” (Hopkins: 749). That Olson should embrace such technologies is perhaps unsurprising it is less expected in my second example. What is striking about Olson’s depiction of the typewriter is that, as “the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work”, it comes to resemble an auditory technology as much as a technology of script. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work (ibid.). For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. And yet, far from returning poetry straightforwardly “to the voice”, whatever that would mean, Olson invokes the technology of typescript-notably the invention of the typewriter and the possibilities of the tabular page. In “Projective Verse” Olson argues that “we have suffered from manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination” (Olson: 245). Yet both thought that new technologies of their respective days would return poetry to what both considered its source, the human voice. One might not instinctively think that Charles Olson and Gerard Manley Hopkins should have had a great deal in common (barring, perhaps, a fondness for kingfishers).
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