Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science: Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm

Michael Golston

Published by Columbia University Press 2007

Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science

Pound, Yeats, Williams, and Modern Sciences of Rhythm

Michael Golston

https://doi.org/10.7312/gols14276

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Michael Golston received his bachelor's degree from the University of New Mexico, his master's degree from the University of California, Berekeley, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He currently lives in New York City, where he teaches twentieth-century poetry and poetics at Columbia University.

Reviews

Leonard Diepeveen:
This book deserves to change how we understand the place of rhythm in modernism.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Introduction Phonoscopic Modernism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Pulsanda Tellus Ezra Pound’s Absolutist Rhythms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
2. Double Registrations In The River Of Blood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	100
3. Machining Convictions W. B. Yeats’s Sanguineous Rhythms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
4. Singing The Crisis Itself Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
5. Williams’S Measured Interventions Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	208
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	255
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 296
Illustrations
- Other: 17 illustrations

eBook

Published: December 21, 2007
ISBN: 9780231512336