J.H. PRYNNE

Mental Ears and Poetic Work

In current, customary practice a lecture is rather generally expectedto be a type of public performance in which a well-informed speakercommunicates to an assembly of listeners some orderly sequence ofinformation and argument or discussion which is shaped around adistinct topic; to be useful to the listeners a spoken discourse willcommonly aim for clarity and accuracy: this is the format of instruc-tion. The present occasion will not quite fit this model because it'smy intention to explore some thinking which is not yet fully clear tome, and to bring in information and methods in which I claim noexpert knowledge. This will sound like a recipe for confusion, andit is. The project is difficult because much abstractness is involved,and because of a refiexive application in which explaining oneself tooneself quickly discovers areas of rather crucial obscurity. All this hasto do with presenting some thoughts about poetry, from the admit-ted position of being a poet involved over many years with readingand writing poetry as an engrossed way of life. This may look not sounusual in demographic terms, but is actually a highly eccentric modeof life when inspected from within.

I want to present experimentally a scheme for the description andanalysis of poetic language mounted in the domain of poetic discourse.The specific domain is that of English poetry and the English languageconsidered as a system and as a history; this choice is arbitrary exceptthat a native-language aspect may be important, and in my own caseI have only one of these. The task is not attempted with systematic ref-erence to any known practice of explanation, though drawing on several;and to be satisfactory it should be inclusive, that is, give account of thecentrally normative characteristics of how poems work. This becausefor all the pungent games in which poetry can engage, it comprises atits most fully extended an envelope which finds and sets the textualcontours in writing of how things are; while also activating a systemof discontinuities and breaks which interrupt and contest the intrinsiccohesion and boundary profiles of its domain, so that there is constant

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leakage inwards and outwards across the connection with the largerworld order. That's an outline in broadest abstraction, for a start.

To attempt a description of poetic language is difficult for onewho is persistently a poet, because the knowledge of and in poemswhich sets the pace for wider knowledge more generally is distinctiveby virtue of interior perspective: poets know the opérant features oftheir own language-work from the inside, and along the real-timesequence of composition, starting at the beginning.' They may alsowithin a writing career be conscious of their own previous and shift-ing usages of style and manner, as a set of evolutionary gradients andeven ruptures, linked in many cases to a particular responsiveness tothe historical record correspondent with attentiveness to exemplars.Whereas for any reader thereafter, the way into poems is by retrospectand from the finished outside, through the shell of the boundarylayer. And of course the many variant types of writing activity andproductive outcome which express the practice of poetic work covera broad spectrum of difference and historical succession, within manyfar-flung distinct language communities across the world. Being a poetis not a specific job description. But even within these spread-out anddisparate lines of access to poetry there may just be grounds enoughfor some shots at diagnosis.

What initially resembles a generalizing overview must now be re-focused, as an idiosyncratic singular perspective. An English-languagepoet, from England itself, carries just one of the world dialects as in-herent mental wiring, the circuit diagrams of a cradle speech whichare cross-wired into the cultural history of a ramified national identity.All this wiring is also, of course, the site and motive for a vigilant resis-tance, for non-compliance: using a set of implements does not meanbeing used by them. I'll accept the risk of self-reference now as in noclaimed sense a type case, in order to offer a particular scheme for thepurpose of reference and as a tryout. To build a writing framework overan extent of regular practice, across many years, accumulates a profilemore and more singular. Even family likeness may not be sufficient toaccomplish recognition in full detail. At the same time the isolation ofa self-interior retrospect is highly dangerous, because an encroachingnarcissism of preoccupation will promote unrecognized claims of en-dorsement from chance occurrence, locked into the habits of procedure.Or maybe this is not exactly a danger, depending on point of view.

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In my own case the language of unrealized possible poeticcomposition has drawn, initially and constantly, with profound hun-ger and gratitude upon the rich embankments of the English poeticrecord. As a vivid penumbra there are the poetic records of neighborcultural traditions and indeed the whole range of poetry across theworld, some in foreign languages with which I am acquainted, somein languages powerfully exotic and strange; but outside of transla-tion, most (not all) of my own composition has been in the mediumof my native speech. By no means all writing work sets down thesetraditional roots of origination; but the recovery of speech and songacross former generations, and the span of many layers and locations ofpractice, set out a format of provisional continuity. That in turn primesthe double twin directives of a textual-language process—inwards andoutwards, backwards and forwards—to justify stereophonic markingfor orientation in overt space and time, mental and social by parallelcomposure. It's widely believed that to read deeply and with enhancedattention the sedimented products of an earlier poetic history is to en-counter the meaning of a cultural process, the intricate play of ethicalagency and imaginative conjecture as composing a pedigree for fullpresent-tense creative empowerment.^ But for an emergent poet toread the output of precursory eras is a complex and recursive activity,because what in the record is output must for the poet-reader also beinput, dismantled from its bounded emplacement as re-fluidized forsoluble modularity.

The poet works with mental ears. Via this specialized audition thereal-time sounds of speech and vocalized utterance are disintegratedinto sub-lexical acoustic noise by analogy with the striking clatter ofreal work in the material world. Plus also bird-song, weather sounds,and the cognates. From this first reduction the array of voice-soundscan then be transposed into a textual constellation in which composi-tional purpose begins to remake the anecdotal variety of actual speech.By this means the sociology of utterance-occasions is part-replaced bythe textuality of a language domain.^ All human speech performanceoperates by hybridizing the components of possible word narratives;but the textual domain is an intermediary condition very specific topoetic work."* This domain is constructed from the realized humansounds of words in voluble sequence, utterance as carried throughto expression by the apportionment of phrase and sentence and the

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paragraph or strophic boundaries of their profession, the mental spanof serial completions.' Written discourse projects into a representa-tional text-composure the altered acoustics of speech events, real andconjectural. But the discourse of poetry installs a variable set of yetfurther dimensions.

The mental ears of the poet make here a second reduction, a pro-cess rather explicitly described by Mallarmé, which imposes selectionconstraints with the purpose to define and empower the mode of adistinct and distinctive poetic textuality.* Within this further reduc-tion the tendency of a composed text towards its completion can takeon, via acts of free-ranging intelligence and sensibility, the formats ofsignifying deliberateness. These constraints are not only or primar-ily those of prosody or versification; they comprise a re-modelledschedule of speech-sounds and performance features within theconstrained language itself.'' Mental ears also permit reconstructionof raw phonetic data, in particular across precedent historical eras, sothat the alert poet as reader can "tune in" to earlier schedules of poeticcomposition: the percipient self re-locates so as to occupy a prior sta-tion already inflected by knowledge of successor historical conditions.Mental ears are thus evolutionary by retroflex recognizance, from theoutcomes of experiment back to the experimental matrix itself andits shifting points of origin.

It's often asserted that the rhythmical deployment of sense carriedinto sound is what gives poetic discourse its special power of makinga grateful living-space for readerly attention and remembrance; thatpattern by varied repetition captures the speech habits of interior andsociable language use, and profiles these into the formats of record thatcan re-emerge into a reader's vicarious experience, through the mentalears. And thus indeed for readers who learn to read by reading it mustoften be: it is the sonic domain of completeness as composed by thedynamic boundary lineations, chiefly intonational and stress-markedin Western metrical disposition, that works towards significant end-ings which are the bounds and conclusions of significance: the unitmeasures of part and whole.'

The scheme to be proposed here does not denounce this diagnosisof rhythmic contour as formative in the transfer of text composure intomental reception; but it comprises nonetheless an alternative (if alsocomplementary) mode of reckoning: by the methods of descriptive

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and historical phonology. Nor shall this be a usage of these methodsin normative application, because a distinct sub-variant of the genericphonology of a specific language and its derivational antecedents isto be claimed, perhaps for the first time, as the working phonologicaltemplate for poetic language, the language-use of actual poems. Whatis a phonology? It's the system of sound forms in a speech practice thatis structural to the coherence of a language and its evolution throughtime; a part-abstract mental representation that's to be somewhatdistinguished from a phonetics, which is more concerned with themechanics and acoustics of voice-sound production.' This distinctionbetween phonology and phonetics, though often crossed over andblurred, is rather crucial to the present purpose, because the soundsthat poems make are not here treated as acoustic sonorities, but assemi-abstract representations of relations and orderings between andacross sounds, within a textual domain.'"

It's from this distinction that my own lack of interest in theperformance of poems in their author's own voice takes its origin;the specific occasional delivery is no more than an accidentalism ofsound and behavior, since it is the language of the text that has andproduces voice, and not the mere vocal equipment and habits of aspeaker." An author-speaker of text in self-performance may seemto be a special case, in that features of such delivery can seem to becommunicating an authentic textual inwardness, from the stance ofan authorized knowledge and self-interpretation. But such semblanceis really delusional; this is to undo the work of mental ears, by a kindof primitive literal-mindedness: "Look, the poet is wearing red socks!Now at last we understand everything!"

I should make clear at once that I have no formal expertise in eitherphonology or phonetics. But the discovery of explicit phonologicalfeatures within a poetic discourse practice is perhaps enabled becauseboth phonology and poetry make a reduction upon the language baseof their raw counterparts.'^ To recognize and identify the phonologi-cal systematics of poetic idiolects also does in all likelihood requireenhanced proficiency in reading and construing poetic texts, and tocharacterize such features as indigenous within procedures of poeticcomposition probably also requires experience of original poeticauthorship. What in this context of reading poetry in and across anhistorical culture-span can give phonology as a discipline its especial

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relevance are the realized links in the stages of an evolving speech us-age discovered in alteration of sound-values over time, mutations notarbitrary or accidental but following observable regularities amount-ing to descriptive and also proscriptive regulation. The rule-structureof descriptive and historical phonology, in its many variant and indeedmutually contesting versions, is a complex elaboration, and as the termstrongly suggests, is intimately involved with the sound-formats oflanguage as an acoustic modality.'' A community of readers and listen-ers, the audience for poetry, will be familiar with sound-patterns andsonic performance, as if an argument from phonology could presentlittle that's new. But now we must insert some refinements. First, thepatterns discovered by phonological analysis are in varying degreesbinding, and not selective options (like for instance a poet's metricalchoices): they function as rules of the base structure. And second, thesound-values in a description are abstract, by reference from surfacefeatures to underlying typologies: how an actual poet speaks, the upsand down and elisions and quirks of the spoken occasion, are excludedby reduction. And third, the rules give shape and expression to thegrammar of speech, to its rational and evolutionary linguistic skeletonwhich supports the productive inventiveness of textuality.

Do these features make a difference, to any claimed similaritywith prosodie and metrical formalisms within the composition ofpoetry? The answer must for sure be^es. The rule-patterns of rhyme,for example, or of metrical regularity or strophic enclosure and repeti-tion, are arbitrary in regard to grammatical structure, and much oftheir effect arises from cross-play between one system and another,maneuvered by composing habits of practice into productive contrastsand parallelisms.''' This versification activity is thus not intrinsic tothe base language, although it may appropriate base features andmanipulate them into secondary formalisms. The lexicon may be re-stricted in poetic employment by reductions which may be systematicor maybe habitual ("signature-features"), but the lexicon itself is notinflected or modified at base level by reference to poetic usage, evenif a vocabulary may indeed be altered by surface variation;'^ and thesame is true of the base-grammar as opposed to variation in appliedsyntax. Even when selection of vocabulary for stress and accent fea-tures (under metrical surface-rules) may be modelled on aspects ofnatural speech, these too don't regulate a grammar or sound-value

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structures, or, come to that, a lexical meaning-profile.Thus the novel claim here is two-fold: that a phonological analysis

of poetic speech usage may disclose base-level rule patterns and theirhistorical evolutionary forms; and that such analysis may provide adiagnostic template for some of the ways in which an attentive readerof poems may intuitively model the surface features of performanceinto a mental representation of signifjdng relations and connectionswithin the textual ordering of poetic language in action. This tenta-tive claim gives a new and sharper sense to the expression "mentalears," because by this analysis we hear through (by means of) abstractrepresentation, and also because we integrate the surface formalismswith explicit cognitive recognition of the underlying base forms: ineach case we know by such hearing because the mere anecdotalism ofsonic variety in speech sounds and phrasal accent-contours is broughtinto diagnosticaUy understood formalization.'' All this, we should note,must call upon the rules of a grammar in construing word-sequence butis concerned with dimensions and features not merely subordinate tosyntax or morphology; and it has not yet been necessary at all to invokequestions of meaning. For features in an analysis to be significant orsignifying does not transfer into a requirement that they be meaning-ful, that is, semantically productive in a discoverable way.

Suppose that we take stock of what's at issue so far. As I have ad-mitted, I develop these inchoate thoughts in order somewhat to reflecton my own writerly practice. The discourse of poems is rather usuallyless directly able to be construed and normalized than the ordinarylanguage of every day. The discourses of modernism in Western poet-ics make steeper descents into sub-intelligibility; and in my own caseI am rather frequently accused of having more or less altogether takenleave of discernible sense. In fact I believe this accusation to be moreor less true, and not to me alarmingly so, because what for so long hasseemed the arduous royal road into the domain of poetry ("what doesit mean?") seems less and less an unavoidably necessary preconditionfor successful reading. The task, however, is not to subside into dis-tracted ingenious playfulness with the lexicon and cross-inflectionalidiomatics, but to write and read with maximum focused intelligenceand passion, each of these two aspects bearing so strongly into theother as to fuse them into the enhanced state once in an old-fashionedway termed the province of the imagination.'^ "Mental ears" do not

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relegate us to the dominion of performative sonority, nor do they el-evate us into the paramount abstraction of inferred ideas and beliefs:they are an intense hybrid and I treat them as the essential equipmentfor reading poetry in today's post-traditional world space, and alsoas required attentional receptors for the professional phonologist; asindeed they were for the philologists of previous eras.'*

It's the usual practice of phonologists to analyze the abstract sound-structures of a specific language or dialect, often in wider contextof comparative purview; the smallest units of scrutiny are probablysub-group communities like creolized or immigrant populations, thesound world of young children learning a native speech, or the non-sound world of sign language used by deaf people." But not muchhas so far been done to analyze the interface between the phoneticsof poetic formalisms and the phonology of their underlying structuralrepresentation. Intuitively I have an increasing sense of the instructivework that might be done here. It will perhaps be recognized that thisargument has up to now not strongly distinguished between a descrip-tive phonology and its historical or evolutionary counterpart. But byrestricting the field of analysis to the current surface features of onelanguage only, English, and by further restricting the set of linguisticdata to poetic composition and its procedures and to the textuality thusimphed, the historical axis must assume a strongly paramount positionas characteristic of this material. And a certain type of professing poetworking along the span of a productive career will construct a self-history that may infold parallels with the generic histories of Englishand pre-English poetries, and trace out a specifically evolutionaryversion of the more inclusively historical dimension: one thing leadsin and out of another, in dispositions not merely chronological noreven accumulative. So that "mental ears" are also empowered by link-ages of memory and retrospect, as reconstruction of what originallyfaced towards the undeclared future, just as today's practice also does."Mental ears" will hear in older sounds the then new sounds of makingand marking a track into forward space: a future in the past.̂ °

What may be referenced as an evolutionary phonology may thusopen some not previously acknowledged gateways into understand-ing and analyzing some baseline procedures in poetic composition:not as a key to all the mythologies but maybe to some of them. It'stime to mount up at least one example, and here I again warn that the

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methods to be adopted are a long way from professional within anyof the variant pursuits of current phonology: they are intuitive, andnon-technical, and are put forward by way of untested conjecture. Beready, then, for some wonky thinking and part-connection, especiallyif any present have some phonological training or expertise: this maybe a bumpy ride.

At the conclusion of a walking tour with his sister Dorothy in thesummer of 1798, William Wordsworth composed a now-famous poemwith the title: "Lines[,] Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, OnRevisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798." Thispoem has been much discussed and, indeed, argued over; to speakpersonally, I can add that I have loved this poem deeply, almost sincechildhood. Describing his memories of an earlier visit to this samelocation, confirmed by again viewing the same prospect, the poetspeaks of the influence which subsequently these remembered sceneshad upon his mental and emotional life; also, indeed, upon his spirituallife and inward personal being:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the dinOf towns and cities, I have owed to them.In hours of weariness, sensations sweet.Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.And passing even into my purer mindWith tranquil restoration: —feelings tooOf unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps.As may have had no trivial influenceOn that best portion of a good man's life;His little, nameless, unremembered actsOf kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,To them I may have owed another gift.Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,In which the burthen of the mystery.In which the heavy and the weary weightOf all this unintelligible worldIs lighten'd: —that serene and blessed mood.In which the affections gently lead us on,Until, the breath of this corporeal frame.And even the motion of our living bloodAlmost suspended, we are laid asleepIn body, and become a living soul. '̂

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I want first to give close attention to the line, "Felt in the blood,and felt along the heart," and to notice the word-final stops, plosive {tand d) and nasal {ng). If we reverse-trace the morphology here we shallfind "felt" as derived by regular suffixation from "feel," which is notend-stopped; the -t of "felt" being a rule-governed assimilated form ofthe regular weak-verb inflectional suffix, -ed (properly -d).^^ We shallfind "blood" derived, not quite so regularly, from "bleed," since "blood"is a kind of preterite outcome of bleeding as it comes to visible self-knowledge: "living blood" precedes bleeding but our observationallyconfirmed knowledge of blood has been until recent times consequentupon bleeding events." "Heart," Middle English herte. Old Englishheorte, proto-Germanic *hertan-, has been word-final end-stoppedthroughout its evolutionary history; vowel shifts mark out these stagesof historical development, part rule-governed and part by pragmaticadaptation.^'' The underlying forms here represented by these word-final or syllabic-final stops demonstrate conditions originally continu-ing, chiefly in tense structure systems, that have been clipped or stoppedand thus marked as concluded, so that they shift out of immediatelypresent knowledge into recognition by retrospect."

This argument regarding Wordsworth's text may be extended.The poem continues:

Nor less, I trust.To them I may have owed another gift.Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood.In which the burthen of the mystery.Of all this unintelligible worldIs lighten'd...

Here the word "trust," inserted as a parenthesis, implicates anotherhistorical transmission of formal outcome, from "true," attested e.g.in the cognate link with Old Icelandic tryggr, "faithful, safe, true."^*Thus to have or keep trust is to derive confidence and consolationfrom a condition of grateful dependence upon a sustaining verity; wemay compare Gothic trausti, "agreement, covenant." Once more theword-final stop in "trust" represents a derived completion or ended-ness, continuing but secondary to its unstopped original form. Inthis context we may note too that "mind" (Old High German ̂ imwni,"memory", and minna, "love") is end-stopped; also for Wordsworth

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"purer" because not distiracted and thus more free to assimilate bless-ing, but also held strongly in place by the more fixed emplacementsof memory and of trust."

In like fashion "gift" puts the same stop to "give," as some finiteoutcome of open giving;̂ * "burthen" (though not end-stopped) is thedefinitive end-consequence of "bear" (in the sense of "load" and alsoof "birth"); and "blessed" locates the endowment of benefit in the pasttenses of "bless." '̂ This in turn traces a formal link with "blood" and"bleed", as deriving from ME Messen, OE bletsian, bloedsian, all linkedthrough the sense-development of "to make sacred or holy by ritualshedding of blood."'" Thus, "bless" performs an outcome from "bleed"through the performative derivation of "blood", and "blessed" marksout a threshold for the sublime, sub + limen, where the end-stop is word-medial but syllabic-final, in the affix sub, "up to, as far as" the lintel orentrance portal to the spirit world of beatitude and love.'' The word-medial stop in "sublime" is displaced in "suspend" by usual b>s beforep, but the double-final stop in "suspend-ed" is then echoed in similarend-stopping to "almost," "laid," and "asleep"; thus, almost the soul isfreed from the body, and this almost is the two-way threshold into thespiritual sublime, the uppermost dialectic of stop and release.

See how this works. "Heart" is end-stopped, and the "living blood"that flows by its agency will come to its final stop, as all mortal heartsmust do at the end of human life.'̂ At precisely this point, accordingto Christian doctrine, the soul gains immortal freedom and rises toan unstopped spiritual enlargement. The soul becomes "living" in thisnew life because the heart has surrendered the blood-life that held thesoul back. What is passionately daring in these lines is to take impetusfrom the heart's own life so as to reach the very threshold itself of thesoul's subsequently continuing immortality: the closed end of one stateopening the portal to the freedom of the other, fronl heart to soul,across the line marked by the end-stopped "almost." The daring lies inasserting not that the soul at the last becomes free of the expired body,but that while still within our mortal frame it is not merely the exaltedpoet but, inclusively, we who become living souls. The mortal beingsthat we are can be stopped, almost, in gentle anticipation of our finalend so as to glimpse the soul's flight beyond the blood-limits, and inthis singular moment to be present at this flight and to be part of it.The "blessed mood" (both words end-stopped) may be transient but it

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can be trusted to recur, leaving a permanent alterative trace in gratefulmemory; for the poet and, by transfer of hope, for the reader also.̂ ^

At this point in an already far-conjectural reconstruction mayfurther be observed that the vocabulary of blood and blessing andtrust are all terms in a Christian dispensation, which gives the finalend of man a special function in the ways and means of a divine im-mortality for the soul. To have trust in the resurrection of the bodyand the inextinguishable prospect of a blessed future state was part ofa covenant which placed life-endings outside the reach of fear, becausethe shedding of innocent blood in divine sacrifice had redeemedthe mortal limits of the human spirit; but this covenant, thoughWordsworth's terminology is redolent with its structure of assurance,is not called on here and indeed may not at that moment have beenquite felt by him as valid beyond any question; so that the end-stopsof mortality take on function as the markers of a personal dialectic,between past and future and between fear and hope. "Blessing" in thatunstopped form is the mark of future trust in an alternative naturalcovenant of joy, as for instance in the very first line of the 1805-6 textof The Prelude:

Oh there is blessing in this gentle breezeThat blows from the green fields and from the cloudsAnd from the sky.. .'•*

And yet of course the phonological features of preterite tense-structuremarking reach back to eras of Indo-European language formation longbefore the development of Christian doctrine in any form. Blood-sacrifice as a concept and practice is found in some of the earliestcultic behaviors evidenced in the archaeological record.̂ ^

All these risky elaborations borrow formal phonological featuresin order to analyze, conjecturally and by reconstruction, a surmisedevolutionary process in language history which gives Wordsworth's textsome of its complicated sense of the past in the present and future, thestoppage of one dimension part-sublimated into acknowledgement andderived renewal in another. These features are by no means instancesof adventitious sound symbolism, or association of semantic valueswith surface features; they are within the structure and history ofEnglish as an evolved system, and furthermore they are selected here

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for a mutually reinforcing, if latent, prominence: in other words, theyare motivated. I should not wish to claim that this selection was in anysense deliberate or conscious; if the underlying textual features exist itis because poets are tuned into their language structures to an unusualdegree of linguistic susceptibility. Such features are neither inventednor discovered, they are disclosed. Also perhaps to be asked is, doessuch motivation (if it exists) extend into other parts of Wordsworth'scopious and varied output, and into the work of other poets: thesewould be questions for a much larger and more elaborate enquiry.̂ *

This, I'd by this first experiment tentatively claim, is the kind ofrecovery that a phonological analysis could advance. In the specificcontext of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" poem, and maybe moreacutely in the localized context of these few lines, there is a latentdialectic of contradiction which this reconstructed outline narrativehas been (perhaps) able to bring to view. It concerns mortality andthe closure of human life, the stopping of heart and mind when bloodwill no longer infuse the power of feeling or of being itself. A genericfeature of word-sounds that is commonplace within the system ofEnglish could not bear this implication ordinarily; but here, I con-tend, this feature is persistent in recognizably signifying ways, andis thus tacitly motivated by its proximate collocations. In the midstof joyous continuity, the steady pulse and flow of verse movement,these intimations point towards a possible immortality as the dia-lectical counterpart to a certain prospect of eventual mortal finalityand decease. The actions or forms of agency spoken of here are notacts of will but acts of being and human life, of a lifetime extendedtowards its terminus and also its fulfillment.'̂ What is felt "along theheart" follows the stream of blood flow, parallel with the duration ofself-being and its bodily precondition, even though circular and thusnot properly linear; but what is thus stored and restored in personalmemory ("mind," Gothic gamunds, "memory," etc.) will not outlastthe beating heart: "long" is a finite span (the word closed with a nasalword-final stop) and is not immortal.'^

This must also bring "love" into the frame, since "mind" connectsintimately both with memory and with love, the latter as affectionrather than desire: Old English myne has been textually interpreted inthis sense of "love," by a development from thought to kindly thoughtand gratitude, to love; the wide-ranging discussion of an Old English

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textual crux in the edition by Dunning and Bliss of The Wanderer (c.early tenth century) is highly informative. '̂ For Wordsworth theselittle nameless acts of kindness and of love were "unremembered," notheld in finite recollection, so that their influence can still flow onwardswhen the specific occasions have been lost to mind and memory; theyform the tacit habitual prosody of a man's ethical character.''" Latentpresence of these system links and connections is stored textuallywithin a knowledge that belongs with the underlying base forms,not declared directly in surface features but implicit in the motivatedsound-structures and time-logic of phonological evolution.'"

In equally experimental spirit another text-example may be morebriefly nominated: Paradise Lost, IV. 449-91, Eve's narrative of herearliest moment of self-encounter as a determinate identity.''̂ To themodern reader this initial failure of resolved, other-directed lovingattachment strongly suggests an attributed primal narcissism, as if,very obliquely. Eve is being prepared for sacrifice; but an alternativelydirected enquiry may observe in the diction employed a preponder-ant density of end-stopped formations: "That day I oft remember,when from sleep /1 first awaked, and found myself reposed, / Undera shade of flowers..."(449-51).''^ The past-tense re-telling causes -edverb-forms to be expected: but oft, sleep, first, shade, together withawaked, found, reposed, comprise once again a phonologically recog-nizable tendency, accentuated by Milton's own regular if not alwaysconsistent preference for -t and -d spellings (awak't, repos'd, etc.), todemonstrate the restricted sound-closure of these word-forms.'"

The effect of these surface features, symptomatic of an underlyingstructural sound-patterning, points to closure and time-process cutback from its own continuity or development. Here these end-stoppedmarkers may indeed intimate a tacit critique of Eve's predicament: shehas been taken out of Adam (membered) but now she self-discovers tobe shut in, unable to escape this initial regression. In semantic force,oft and first should point to onwardness; but all the Germanic familycognates for oft, though of somewhat obscure ultimate origin, areend-stopped, before often enters early Modern English (c. 1250) byadaptive extension;''̂ this modernized replacement (without end-stop)is then nullified by Milton's archaizing preference (massive) for theoft-form, even though in "avoidance of obsolescent verb terminals"he was "outstandingly modern";''* znd first traces back to the same

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source as Old English/ore (adv.), "formerly, previously" also Sanskritpura, "formerly, before": thus in closed-anterior even more than open-forward reference.'*'

From the very first the reader is forewarned of Eve's trial by or-deal (the "first disobedience," PL, I.I), which is the necessary engineof Milton's poem and to the logic of which he must as its narrator beobedient; God did not at first predetermine the transgression (III.97-128), but Milton did, and the ensuing divine punishment is incom-mensurate, unforgiving, and sacrificial.̂ * The phonological tendencyof these end-stops to oft and first may demonstrate in Eve a prolepticloss of future self, or self-future, from which she is here (though notlater) assisted to escape by Adam's impassioned rescue (IV. 481-91).All too soon she and Adam together will be under darker shadesthan the umbrage of flowers. Thus what has opened the story also bystrong entail comes duly to pass, and forecloses it: first may look tobe innocently open, but it is already shut.

But now after so much untested conjecture there is more to besaid about the work of "mental ears," even more riskily and even lesssupported by established professional methods. These word-final orsegment-final speech stops allow various modes of continuing processor states of being to be interrupted or broken into, opening faults andcleavages within the representation of language and thought in ac-tion. This observation must be in some general sense true for most ifnot all human language usage: a language system operates in discretepackets not as an unbroken linear continuity; it is unitized in fun-damental ordering, unlike for example the system of color in whichthe transitions are seamless and gradualized.^' But poets in especialhave incorporated prosodie breakage into almost all systems of poeticcomposition, whether by traditional versification or oral performanceor by verse in experimental free forms. The word-boundary markerswithin "natural" phrasal sequencing are cross-structured by textualconstraints of formal division and metricality.'"

Here to cite only the most conspicuous instance, the line-breaksor step-ordering that override the unfeatured page space of normalprinted language perform the overt function of continuity by ver-sus and retroflex, manipulating syntax and sentence completion bycomplementary but also rivalrous formalisms." These are not merelycontrastive or format-based features; this is the dialectical argument

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of poetic form within the textual domain, when fully activated to en-counter the contradictions in poetic diction and discourse, to disrupta complaisant surface harmony by the head-on turns which generateenergy of conception and conscience and bring discrepant aspectsface to face.̂ ^ How can the blessing of benediction, as Wordsworthnominated this to be the source of his profoundest gratitude, berooted not just in the living bloodstream but in the deliberate priorspillage of innocent blood?" Is this just an "accident" of Europeanlanguage-history, assimilated opportunistically into Christian dogma,or an aspect of global-humane values emerging from earlier epochs ofbarbaric superstition? In W^ordsworth's own case, what in some finalreckoning did the French Revolution really mean to him?

The very medium of poetic textuality incorporates and instantiatesthe features of breakage at local and microscopic levels, as discoverableby phonological and other types of analysis, into a dialectic which maylook arbitrary or merely optional but which polarizes the task of po-etic composition. Formal and structural features within the languagesystem, the selective-discourse system, the prosodie and formal versesystem, all within the contrastive perspectives of historical develop-ment, compete to provoke the formation of shifting hybrids acrossboundaries of sometimes radical counter-tension. The active poetictext is thus characteristically in dispute with its own ways and means,contrary implication running inwards to its roots and outwards toits surface proliferations: not as acrobatic display but as working thework that, when fit for purpose, poetry needs to do.'" These are theproper arguments of poetry as a non-trivial pursuit, the templatesfor ethical seriousness. As just one example, the condoned spillageof innocent blood is everywhere around us, now, and the artificersof consolatory blessing who are the leaders of organized religion areup to their dainty necks in this blood.'' I have believed throughoutmy writing career that no poet has or can have clean hands, becauseclean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction. Clean handsdo no worthwhile work.

In these ways maybe it's possible and perhaps even obligatory tothink with "mental ears," focused via the fault-lines in language andthought as a discontinuous system upon the inevitable fault-lines inethical being and in material reality.'* There is no mere reconciliationof these profoundly discrepant aspects that is not also, in differing and

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reckonable degrees, corrosive to strong knowledge and understanding:the systems of public and private ethical awareness ensue in contestedpractical agency by means of this knowledge. Because active humanknowledge is thus inherently dialectical and in dispute with itselfand its base in reality, the apparently segregated domains of poetryturn out, by reverse transit through the mental ears, to connect at fullintensity with the disorders of public conscience; so that, in my ownview at least, even silence on this account must be reckoned and heldaccountable." We get direction and sometimes proper warning fromthe "mental ears" active in poetic work and in our reading practice ofpoetic textuality. Language is itself an intrinsic fault system, and it isworse than a mistake not to understand this as best ever we can.

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Notes

This lecture was given by invitation at the University of Chicago in April 2009,for which occasion grateful thanks are here expressed; subsequently in June2009 it was also re-presented to the Cambridge Graduate Theory Seminar,for which occasion further thanks are also placed on record.

1/ "My unique relation with my work—and it is a tenuous one—is themaking relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fumbUng of making, aslong as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to throw on it myself and itseems a stranger in the light that others throw" (Samuel Beckett, letter to Ar-land Ussher, 6 November 1962, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,Texas, cit. in Samuel Beckett, The Letters, Vol. 1:1929-1940, ed. Martha DowFehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck [Cambridge, 2009], p. xi).

2/ Thus e.g. Matthew Arnold: "The substance and matter of the bestpoetry acquire their special character from possessing, in an eminent degree,truth and seriousness. We may add yet further, what is in itself evident, that tothe style and manner of the best poetry their special character, their accent, isgiven by their diction, and, even yet more, by their movement.... So far as highpoetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet's matter and substance, sofar also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of diction and movementbe wanting to his style and manner" ("The Study of Poetry" [1880], in TheComplete Prose Works, IX, ed. R.H. Super [Ann Arbor, MI, 1973], p. 171); andthen e.g. this: "If to our English race an inadequate sense for perfection of workis a real danger, if the discipline of respect for a high and flawless excellenceis peculiarly needed by us, Milton is of all our gifted men the best lesson, themost salutary influence" ("Milton" [1888], in Complete Prose Works, XI, ed.Super [Ann Arbor, MI, 1977], p. 330). Such orotund self-confidence had surelyblunted Arnold's ears: Chaucer "lacks the high seriousness of the great classics,and therewith an important part of their virtue" ("The Study of Poetry," ProseWorks, IX, p. 177).

3/ Textuality has undergone much discussion and counter-definition overrecent time. What is here meant is roughly the conceptual manifold of writerlyscript in production format of projection beyond the confines of compositionalselfhood. Poetic textuality is thus a discourse of language signs founded indispositions corresponding generically to historically current beliefs aboutpoetry at time of origin, as distinguished from other forms of literary discourse.

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based on reduction (transformation) of natural language into the adaptiveschedules of poetic usage as variably characterized by schemes of versification,figurai transformation and so on. This status may be realized (performed) inshape of book or manuscript, etc., but the underlying immanent formalism isabstract and conceptual, a homeland for deep thought and radical critique. Fora fiill review discussion see Jorge J.E. Gracia, A Theory of Textuality. the Logicand Epistemobgy (Albany, NY, 1995): on texts and language, pp. 42-4, 70-1,118-9, etc., on textual meaning as culturally determined, pp. 86-98, 123-7,135,140-1,188-9,207-9 etc.

4/ It is indifference to the alterative effect of textuality that causes DerekAttridge to write, following the consensus, that "Poems are made out of spokenlanguage" {Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction [Cambridge, 1995], p. 2). I believethis statement to be decisively not true, unless it is also to be believed thattables and chairs are made out of living trees. For implicit historical strain inthe reduction of voice to text compare J.H. Prynne, Field Notes: 'The SolitaryReaper' and Others (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 8-11.

5/ Gerald Bruns has proposed a somewhat comparable starting-point:"Poetry is made of language but is not a use of it—that is, poetry is made ofwords but not of what we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, proposi-tions, descriptions, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. ...Poetry islanguage in excess of the functions of language" (Gerald L. Bnms, The Materialof Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics [Athens, GA, 2005], p. 7); but thenthis recognition is confounded with the vocalizations of text-performance:"The poet in this event does not so much use language as interact with usesof it, playing these uses by ear in the literal sense that the poet's position withrespect to language is no longer simply that of the speaking suiîject but also,and perhaps mainly, that of one who listens" (p. 30; compare pp. 49-50 etc).This "literal sense" is instructive by being almost entirely alternative to theargument about "mental ears" that is advanced here.

6/ "Le vers qui de plusiers vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étrangerà la langue et comme incantatoire, achève cet isolement de la parole: niant,d'un train souverain, le hasard demeuré aux termes malgré l'artifice de leurretrempe alternée en le sens et la sonorité, et vous cause cette surprise den'avoir ouï jamais tel fragment ordinaire d'elocution, en même temps que laréminiscence de l'objet nommé baigne dans une neuve atmosphère" ("Crisede vers", in Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchai [2vols., Paris, 1998-2003], II, p. 213). "The verse-line of several word-soundswhich remakes a total word, new, unknown to the language and as if incan-tatory, achieves this isolation of speech: denying, in a sovereign gesture, thearbitrariness that clings to words despite the artifice of their being alternatelyplunged in meaning and in sound, and causes you that surprise at not havingheard before such an ordinary fragment of speech, at the same time as the re-

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membrance of the named object bathes in a new atmosphere" ("Crise de vers,"trans, [entire] by Rosemary Lloyd, in her Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle[Ithaca, N.Y., 1999], p. 233 [here modified]). See also Albert Cook, "'Etendre,simplifier le monde': The Philosophical Purchase of Mallarmé," in RobertCreer Cohn (ed.j, Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century (Cranbury, N.J., 1998),53-85 (esp. pp. 71-2). On vers see Graham Robb, Unlocking Mallarmé (NewHaven, CT, 1996), esp. pp. 33-4.

7/ The reduction of natural experience into the domain of textuality mayfocus upon cognitive and affective aspects as much as on linguistic features:"The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinaryones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are notin actual emotion at all. And emotions which he has never experienced willserve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believethat emotion recollected in tranquillity' is an inexact formula. For it is neitheremotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. Itis a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a verygreat number of experiences which to the practical and active person wouldnot seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happenconsciously or of deliberation...."(T.S. Eliot, "Tradition and the IndividualTalent" [1917], in his Selected Essays [3rd enl. ed., London, 1951], p. 21); fordiscussion see e.g. Richard Bradford, Silence and Sound: Theories of Poeticsfrom the Eighteenth Century (Cranbury, NJ, 1992), pp. 127-31, and Charles 1.Armstrong, Figures of Memory: Poetry, Space, and the Past (Houndmüls, 2009),pp. 99-101; Eliot's objection to "recollection" in Wordsworth signally fails toobserve the full complexity of this process.

8/ "The long and short of the matter is this. We now regulate English verseby the strong and determinate element of stress: its management is what dis-tinguishes verse from prose. The weak and indeterminate element of quantitywe subordinate: its management is one of the many things which distinguish,not verse from prose, but good verse from bad" (A.E. Housman, review ofW.J. Stone, "On the Use of Classical Metres in English," Classical Review, XIII[1899], here from Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Christopher Ricks[London, 1988], pp. 421-2); see also Charles Olson, "Quantity in Verse, andShakespeare's Late Plays" (1956) in his Human Universe and Other Essays, ed.Donald Allen (San Francisco, 1965), pp. 81-94, and (e.g.) John Coldsmith,"Harmonic Phonology," in Coldsmith (ed.). The Last Phonological Rule:Reflections on Constraints and Derivations (Chicago, 1993), pp. 21-60 (pp.54-6).

9/ This distinction is much contested. There is a more or less completelyadversary, neo-empiricist position which argues that "our mental representa-tions of the form of words are essentially phonetic," that "word forms are storedas memories of psychophysical (auditory and articulatory) experience (not

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abstract structures of distinctive features)" and that "phonological constituentsare statistical regularities over these psychophysical spaces" (Jacques Durandand Bernard Laks [eds.], Phonetics, Phonology, and Cognition [Oxford, 2001],pp. 38,126, and see John Coleman, "Phonetic Representations in the MentalLexicon," vol. cit., pp. 96-130). There are problems with this view in an histori-cal, evolutionary perspective, where immediate and remembered articulatoryexperience is of course mostly lacking. But it could certainly be argued that anextant historical tradition of poetic textuality is a stored database of articulatorypractice, and that so-called base features can perhaps be accessed chiefly or evenexclusively through the re-performed phonetic surface; see also Juliette Blevins,Evolutionary Phonology: The Emergence of Sound Patterns (Cambridge, 2004):"The association between generalizations which can be derived directly fromsurface forms and productive phonological rules or constraints is, surely, highlysignificant. This is reflected in the way that phonological theory has movedsteadily closer to modeling surface forms" (p. 312). For my purposes here theexact route-map of such recuperation will matter less than its outcomes.

10/ On abstractness in phonological representation see e.g. DavidOdden, Introducing Phonology (Cambridge, 2005), Chap. 9, esp. pp. 258-63,271-4, 297-8. Alternative terminologies are also current: "Phonologicalrepresentations of words consist of two separate tiers of which one—the skel-eton—captures the linear and temporal order of units, while the other—themelody—provides the phonetic substance associated with skeletal positions.Crucially...there does not have to be a one-to-one correspondence betweenthe units of the melodic and the units of the skeletal subrepresentation: a cer-tain melodic property may be associated with more than one position and,conversely, skeletal positions may have no melody attached to them and thusremain empty. Phonological regularities can hold between units of either ofthe two tiers or may invoke more complex structures at both levels" (EdmundGussmann, Phonology: Analysis and Theory [Cambridge, 2002 (2008)], p.45; compare pp. 26-7; the analytic cogency of distinct "tiers" or "levels" iscurrently much debated). Further on abstract representation see John C.L.Ingram, Neurolinguistics: An Introduction to Spoken Language Processing andits Disorders (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 377-8.

11/ For comment see Peter Middleton, Distant Reading: Performance,Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2005),pp. 49-51; but see also John Wilkinson, "Cadence" (1987, revised), in The LyricTouch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 151-4, and yetalso his "Mouthing Off" (2000), pp. 168-75.

12/ "Sound patterns are argued to be learned aspects of language structure,while the feature system, prosodie organization, and their combinatorics, arepotentially innate" (Blevins, Evolutionary Phonology, p. 22; compare pp. 91-2).In radical advanced (musical) composition practice this separation can be

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near-complete: "The form as a sequence of structural lengths bore no preciserelation to the material chosen for use in the form. Form and material aretaken as separate for the purposes of composition. That form, as a structureindicated on a score, can be derived out of the nature of the sound material is,I think, illusory. So [,] conversely, a piece is not played to exhibit its composedstructure. Form as structure is simply ["schlichtweg"] a matter of technique"(Christian Wolff, "On Form," orig. pub. in Die Reihe, 7 [Wien, 1960], reworked& re-printed as "Precise Actions under Variously Indeterminate Conditions:On Form" in his Cues: Writings and Conversations I Hinweise: Schriflen &Gespräche [MusikTexte, Köln, 1998] pp. 38-51 [facing English & German][p. 48]). Thus the composed feature-system is mosdy not directly or eveninferentially accessible to a listener.

13/ Gerald Bruns has wittily proposed a format of (poetic) language rulesand structures in which the rules "do not descend all the way to the bottom",supported by a "passing theory" that's a kind of pragmatic adaptation (TheMaterial of Poetry, pp. 107-9).

14/ It may be appropriate here to indicate two conventions of meaningfor "prosody" and "prosodie": in literary (poetic) description the terms referto patterns and structures of formal versification; in linguistic description theterms refer to "properties 'above' the segment which pertain to syllabification,length, stress, and rhythm"; "prosodie processes are those that pertain to thestructure of syllables, stress, and the rhythmic structure of words, and phenom-ena which relate to the position of segments in a phonological string" (Odden,Introducing Phonology, pp. 336, 228); see also John J. McCarthy and Alan S.Prince, "Prosodie Morphology," in John A. Goldsmith (ed. j . The Handbook ofPhonological Theory (Oxford, 1995), pp. 318-66; Ingram, Neurolinguistics, pp.23-4,26-30). On rhyme, see Michael McKie, "The Origins and Early Develop-ment of Rhyme in English Verse", Modem Language Review, 92 ( 1997), 817-31,and Bradford, Silence and Sound, Chap. 6: "Rhyme" (pp. 133-58); for currentinterest in poetic prosody as cognitive see Wilkinson, "Following the Poem"(2004), in The Lyric Touch, pp. 195-211 and refs cited in n. 115 (p. 293). Forcurrent performance formats including a resurgence in social rhyme see KevinFitzgerald (aka DJ Organic, directed by). Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme [film](U.S.A., 2000), and Doug Pray (directed by). Scratch [film] (U.S.A., 2002).

15/ Concerning poetic discourse-levels and choices within conventionsof style and register, deliberate options will determine the surface in terms ofdiction and textual performance-pitch, including historicaUy back-referencedlexical or idiomatic allusiveness, often in stylistic mutation within a single text-domain. For a classic statement see Erich Auerbach, Literary Language & ItsPublic in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Lon-don, 1965), Chap. 4: "The Western Public and Its Language" (pp. 235-338).

16/ On identification and analysis of "underlying forms" see Odden,Introducing Phonology, pp. 68-93.

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17/ The formula suggests Coleridge and his aftermath, but a dialecticalstance will ultimately part company with Coleridge's idealizing fusion of differ-ence into unity (Biographia Literaria [1817], ed. James Engell and W. JacksonBate [2 vois., Princeton, 1983], II, pp. 15-17). David Simpson has argued thepolitical case against such assimilation, perhaps a shade too fiercely but withfitting directness: "Those who understand the strategy whereby Coleridgeseeks to compose us and our worlds into organic wholes, based on the covertauthority of the derisy (in social governance) and of God and the will (in ourspiritual lives), but do not wish to subscribe to it, could do worse than to castaside this particular theory of the imagination..." (David Simpson, "Coleridgeand Wordsworth and the Form of Poetry" in Christine Gallant [ed.], Coleridge'sTheory of Imagination Today [New York, 1989], pp. 211 -225 [p. 224] ). On "idealtext" status see Gracia, A Theory of Textuality, pp. 83-6,97,221-3: "The idealtext is the product of an interpreter and not of the historical author" (p. 222).Idealized textuality has also come under strong critique in matters of redaction:see Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, 1991), esp. Chap. 3:"The Socialization of Texts" (pp. 69-87).

18/ "To read attentively, think correctly, omit no relevant consideration,and repress self-will, are not ordinary accomplishments; yet an emendatorneeds much besides: just literary perception, congenial intimacy with the au-thor, experience which must have been won by study, and mother wit whichhe must have brought from his mother's womb" ( A.E. Housman, "The Editingof Manilius" [1930], here from Collected Poems and Selected Prose, p. 393). Fordiscussion of philology as prototype for historical linguistics see contribu-tions in Anders Ahlqvist (edj. Papers from the Piflh International Conferenceon Historical Linguistics (Amsterdam, 1982); and see also David Greetham,"The Philosophical Discourse of [Textuality]?" (a wide-ranging overview) inElizabeth Bergmann Loizeau and Neil Fraistat (eds.), Reimagining Textuality:Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print (Madison, WI., 2002), pp. 31-47.

19/ On creolized or immigrant communities see e.g. Peter Mühlhäusler,Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (2nd rev ed., London, 1997); Jeff Siegel, TheEmergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Oxford, 2008); Pedro Costa (writtenand directed by), Juventude em Marcha (= Colossal Youth) [film] (Portugal,2006); special interest attaches to the work of Victor Segalen (1878-1919),exotic traveler and poet: see e.g. Nicolas Bourriaud, "Victor Segalen and theTwenty-First-Century Creole," The Radicant, trans. James Güssen and LiliPorten (New York, 2009), pp. 60-77. On infant-stage language learning see e.g.John L. Locke and Dawn M. Pearson, "Vocal Learning and the Emergence ofPhonological Capacity: A Neurobiological Approach" in Charles A. Ferguson etal. (eds.). Phonological Development: Models, Research, Implications (Timonium,MD, 1992), pp. 91-129; Blevins, Evolutionary Phonology, pp. 217-32,267-9.On the phonology of sign-language for the deaf see e.g. Dianne Brentari, "Sign

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Language Phonology" in Goldsmith (ed.), Handbook of Phonological Theory,pp. 615-39; Linda Uyechi, The Geometry of Visual Phonology (Stanford, 1996);Werner Herzog (pseud.) (written and directed by). Land des Schweigens und derDunkelheit (= Land of Silence and Darkness) [film] (West Germany, 1971).

20/ Compare John Wuldnson, "Cadence," in The Lyric Touch, esp. pp.143-4.

21/ lyrical Ballads' and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler andKaren Green (The Cornell Wordsworth; Ithaca and London, 1992), p. 117;the Cornell editors' comment: "composed in 1798 between possibly July 10(or more probably July 11) and probably July 13" (p. 116); their text of theselines is identical with that of [WUliam Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge,] LyricalBallads, with a Few Other Poems (London, 1798), pp. 203-4.

22/ Robert Barnhart distinguishes -ed' and -ed^. The first "an inflectionalsuffix forming the past tense of many verbs in English.... The suffix was reducedin Middle English to -d from earlier -ed and -ede, both forms being a develop-ment ñ"om Old English -de, also noted as -ade, -ede, and -ode" The second (-etf )"a derivational suffix forming the past participle of many verbs in English.. .andused as if from a verb to form adjectives from nouns... .The suffix appeared inOld English as -d, -ed, -ad, or -od" (Robert Barnhart [ed.]. Chambers Dictionaryof Etymology [Edinburgh, c. 1999], p. 314, earlier pub. as the Barnhart Dictionaryof Etymology [Bronx, N.Y., 1988]); compare also fiiU discussion in OED, ed. 2,s.v. -ed\ where the contraction oî-ded, -ted after /, n, r to -d, -t (thus accountingfor feel >felt) is also noted; and see also Ingram, Neurolinguistics, pp. 183-4. The-ed, -d past-tense affixation may be regarded as a resultant from use of did (OldEnglish dide, dyde), past tense of do (Old English don), a reduplicative of thepresent stem employed in Proto-Germanic "as suffix to form the past tense ofother verbs," being then reduced to -da in Gothic, to -de in Old English, thenceto -d (-ed) in English (Barnhart, op. cit., p. 292; OED 2, s.v. do [verb]; see JuliusPokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch {2vols.,BeTn, 1959-69),s.v. "2. dhe-" (I, pp. 235-9); Vladimir Orel, A Handbook of Germanic Etymology(Leiden, 2003), s.v. "*donan (str. vb.)," p. 73.

23/ See Pokorny, Wörterbuch, s.v. "4. bhel-" etc. (I, p. 122); Orel, Handbook,entries on pp. 50-51.

24/ Pokorny, Wörterbuch, s.v. "kerd-, krd, kred-" (I, pp. 579-80); Orel,Handbook, s.v "*xerton (sb.n.)," p. 170. On phonetic variability in historicalsound-change development see e.g. Blevins, Evolutionary Phonology, esp. pp.6-8,314; and passim.

25/ Definition of past-tense structures (within the IE family) is naturallycomplex. Opérant forms maybe categorized as simple anteriors (actions priorto reference time), perfectives (past actions bounded temporally) or complé-tives (actions done fuUy to completion); all in the variably close context of apresent-tense ("here now") relevance frame (adapted from Joan Bybee et al.,

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The Evolution ofCrammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages ofthe World [Chicago, 1994], Chap. 3: "Anterior, Perfective, and Related Senses,"pp. 51-105; the approach here is longitudinal and evolutionary as well as syn-chronie-descriptive).

26/ Pokorny, Wörterbuch, I, pp. 214-17; Orel, Handbook, entries on pp.409-11.

27/Pokorny, Wörterbuch,s.v. "3. men-','etc. (I,pp. 726-8);Orel,Handbook,s.v. "*mundiz" (p. 275). The intense rhythmic end-stopping of "mind," "sleep"and so on in sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins is noted urgently by SusanStewart in her Poetry and the Eate of the Senses (Chicago, 2002), pp. 90-105, butthe analysis locates no more than expressivist motivation and is phonologicallyinnocent.

28/ Pokorny, Wörterbuch, s.v. "ghabh-" (I, pp. 407-9); Orel, Handbook,entries on p. 130.

29/ The passive-mood construction of "felt... felt" warrants also the herepassive-recipient aspect of "gift"; in each case the question of initiating agencyis occluded. On the "gift" of "blessing" compare The Prelude, 1798-1799, ed.Stephen Parrish (Hassocks, 1977), Second Part, 491 (p. 66), and The Prelude(1805-6): The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed (2 vols., Ithaca, N.Y.,1991), I, AB Text, II: School Time Continued, 461 (p. 135). For comparativeusage-data see Bernard Comrie, "Recipient Person Suppletion in the Verb'give'," in Mary Ruth Wise et al. (eds.). Language and Life: Essays in Memoryof Kenneth L. Pike (Dallas, TX, 2003), pp. 265-281.

30/ For the profound connection between gift and the struggle for bloodof sacrifice compare Arnold Schönberg, Moses und Aron (1930-32): Aron:"Volk Israels! / Deine Cotter geb'ich dir wieder / und dich ihnen; wie es dichverlangt" ("People of Israel! Your gods I give back to you, and you to them; as itis demanded of you" [my trans.]) {Moses und Aron; Oper in drei Akten; Textbuch[Mainz, (1957)], Il.ii, p. 21, reprised in the incomplete Ill.i, p. 32). Further onthe relation of gift to sacrifice see Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracksof Biology in Early Religions (Cambridge, MA, 1996), Chap. 6: "The Reciprocityof Civing" (pp. 129-55), esp. "Cift and Sacrifice" (pp. 149-52).

31/ Westermann argues for the re-instatement of blessing as funda-mental to the biblical theology of Cod's purposes and practice in relation toman: "From the beginning to the end of the biblical story. Cod's two ways ofdealing with mankind—deliverance and blessing—are found together. Theycannot be reduced to a single concept because, for one reason, they are expe-rienced differently. Deliverance is experienced in events that represent God'sintervention. Blessing is a continuing activity of God that is either present ornot present. It cannot be experienced in an event any more than can growthor motivation or a decline of strength" (Claus Westermann, Blessing: In theBible and the Life of the Church, trans. Keith Crim from the original German

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ed. of 1968 [Philadelphia, 1974],pp. 3-4). Summarizing Pedersen's discussionWestermann continues: "As a translation of the Hebrew nephesh, 'soul' is seenas expressing the person's total state of being alive. The soul is a totality, filledwith power. This power lets the soul grow and prosper so that it can maintainitself and do its work in the world. This vital power, without which no livingbeing can exist, the Israelites called berakhah, 'blessing.' Blessing is both internaland external—the inner power of the soul and the good fortune that producesthat power" (op. cit., p. 18; further on such gifted power ["bestowal"] as naturalwisdom, see pp. 37-9, also 43-4, 77). Westermann's study is translated fromGerman and indicates no knowledge of the distinctive etymology and culturalframing of English bless, blessing, which would contradict the contention thatblessing "cannot be experienced in an event" (compare pp. 35-6,52-3,90).

32/ At this point must be clearly acknowledged that the articulatory buc-cal constriction of a stopped consonant in English does model the stoppageof breath which is life-concluding, but only by suggestive resemblance; thesame phonological coding, if an iterated real effect, would apply even if thecorresponding surface-phonetic feature had not been a breath-stop but someother voice-sound characteristic; in languages outside the Germanic family thiseffect is not found in this form (e.g. romance language past-tense forms are notphonetically end-stopped). And yet language-specific "suggestive resemblances,"even where accidental, can be in poetic discourse practice intensely motivated,as the example of rhyme clearly demonstrates. For the reconstructed historyof IE voiced/unvoiced root-final and word-final stops, see Kenneth C. Shields,A History of Indo-European Verb Morphology (Amsterdam, 1992), pp. 30-35,40-44. For overview of recent approaches to motivation, see Günter Radden andKlaus-Uwe Panther (eds.). Studies in Linguistic Motivation (Berlin, 2004).

33/ For the reinforced fixation of end-stopped features compare also theeffect of punctuation: "sweet,"; "blood,"; "heart,"; "trust,"; "gift,"; "mood," (twice);"suspended,"; these end-stops are also pause-stopped, and this suspensive gram-matical pausing is also intensely motivated. David Trotter has pointed out tome that the effect can extend even to medial stops: "on, / Until," with commaplus line-break immediately before and comma directly after.

34/ The Prelude (1805-6), I, 1-3; The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Reed,I, p. 107; Reed comments: "Main composition of these lines [1-54] probablybegan in November 1799 and was finished in early 1800" (p. 107); there is adistinct echo of "Tintern Abby" in lines 19-24: "I breathe again; / Trances ofthought and mountings of the mind / Come fast upon me: it is shaken off, /As by miraculous gift 'tis shaken off, / That burthen of my own unnatural self,/ The heavy weight of many a weary day" (p. 107); this self-borrowing waspart-noted by Jonathan Wordsworth (ed.). The Prelude; The Four Texts (1798,1799,1805,1850) (London, 1995), p. 556, as previously also in The Prelude,or. Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, (Oxford, 1933), p. 246,

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2d rev ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1959), p. 511.35/ See e.g. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans; The Anthropology of Ancient

Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 4-5and seriatim.

36/ Such enquiry might find evidence for extremely localized motivation,in which an inherently latent phonological effect maybe triggered into recog-nizable operation across a relatively confined passage of text by a small clusterof activating features. Compare also J.H. Prynne, Stars, Tigers and the Shapeof Words (London, 1993), esp. pp. 33-5. But bear in mind also the editor'swarning about Ferdinand de Saussure's obsessive cryptology: "L'erreur deFerdinand de Saussure (si erreur il y a) aura aussi été une leçon exemplaire. Ilnous aura appris combien il est difficile, pour le critique, d'éviter de prendresa propre trouvaille pour la règle suivie par le poète. Le critique, ayant cru faireune découverte, se résigne mal à accepter que le poète n'ait pas consciemmentou inconsciemment voulu ce que l'analyse ne fait que supposer" ("The errorof Ferdinand de Saussure (if error there be), would also have comprised anexemplary lesson. It would have taught us how difficult it is for the criticto avoid taking his own discovery for the rule followed by the poet. Thecritic, believing to have made a discovery, resigns himself unwillingly to ac-cept that the poet did not consciously or unconsciously will that which theanalysis merely presumes") (Jean Starobinski [ed.], Les Mots sous les Mots; lesAnagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure [Paris, 1971], p. 154 [my trans.]; for"les lois de la mise en oeuvre" see also pp. 20ff; and see also Malcolm Bowie,Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult [Cambridge, 1978], pp. 65-6). And yetthe condition of phonological textuality as here outlined may at least partlydissolve or side-step the stumbling-block question of deliberateness.

37/ We should note that the word act is terminally end-stopped, again byclose derivational link to the morphology of past-tense structures, here ensu-ing from Latin act-, past-participle stem of a^ere ("do, perform"); see Pokorny,Wörterbuch, s.v. 'ag-', (I, p. 4); Orel, Handbook, s.v. "*akanan (st.vb)", p. 11. It'sfurther to be noted that act (verb) is of later date in English than act (sb.) andthe verb was likely formed under influence from the noun; an act is also theinscribed and stored record of some public transaction (Latin actum, acta),so that the doing of an act is already its own record.

38/ Compare Carl Darling Buck (ed.), A Dictionary of Selected Synonymsin the Principal Indo-European Languages: A Contribution to the History ofIdeas (Chicago, 1949), s.v "mind" (pp. 1198-9).

39/ T.P Dunning and A.J. Bliss (eds.). The Wanderer (London, 1969), line27, note ad loc. (pp. 109-10), and esp. pp. 61-5; compare R.E Leslie (ed.). TheWanderer (Manchester, 1966), pp. 70-1, and see also T.G. Tucker, A ConciseEtymological Dictionary of Latin (Halle/Saale, 1931), s.w. "memini^ "memor"(p. 154). On the textual compositionality of the poem see Carol Braun Pas-

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ternack, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge, 1995), Chap. 2:"The Polyphony of The Wanderer" (pp. 33-59). Discussion here of the poem'sdialogic construction (acknowledging Kristeva) concedes the multiple aspectsof contrastive text-modes (pp. 51-2) but stops short of fully recognizing athought-dialectic between and by means of discrepant components.

40/ These actions to which Wordsworth refers are not at a peak of noblebenevolence in the soul, but in the baseline details of daily life, virtuous andunreflective habituation (compare "moral virtue comes about as a resultof habit": Aristotle, Nich. Ethics, trans. David Ross, rev. J.L. AckriU and J.O.Urmson [Oxford, 1980], 11.1 [p. 28]) The formation of what is a person, in-timated here, is in steep contrast to other models, as in argument about thepsychoanalytic development of individuated selfhood: that human love spursregression to the satisfaction of previously undifferentiated self-identity, butthat also "the libidinal, sexual or life instincts.. .are best comprised under thename love; their purpose would be to form living substance into even greaterunities, so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development"(Freud, cited by Jonathan Lear, Love and its Place in Nature: A PhilosophicalInterpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis [London, 1990], p. 150). Lear com-ments (paraphrasing Freud): "Whatever its regressive tendencies, love is also aforce within us for development into an ever more complex and higher unity"(p. 153). But then: "Because my love affair is with a distinctly existing world, Imust be disappointed by it. A distinctly existing world cannot possible satisfyall my wishes. Out of the ensuing frustration and disappointment, I am born"(p. 160). And thus: "Psychic structure, Freud realizes, is created by a dialecticof love and loss" (p. 160, compare also p. 177), and "There is thus establisheda libidinal dialectic of development" (p. 162). Love is thereby a self-concept,endued with a function similar to Coleridge's imagination, to promote a nobleresolving unity, "a certain harmony in the soul" (p. 187) as the good telos evenif ultimately delusional, in the sense of what Lear describes as sublimation (p.179). Validation of autonomy by these procedures can in last resort only becircular and self-fulfilling, because the baseline order of material reality hasbeen pre-emptively subsumed into the drama of uplifted human purpose.

41/ Thus the tacit phonological trace, shadowing and directing the activismof surface, releases the power of latent thematic presence: "But terms such as'humanity,' however dislocated and estranged, remain no more than totems ifuncarried and unsustained through integrative cadence, tensed against a viscousor obdurate semantics—inconsistent and impure in diction also. The vocabularyfor describing cadence is embarrassingly inadequate; I understand cadence asthe relation between a particular body of syntactic gestures in the writer's work,and the involuntary but acknowledged participations in the larger and moreimpersonal careers of death and love, so cadence would both reincorpórate andis tensed against the depressive complexities of the local" (Wilkinson, "Cadence,"

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in his The Lyric Touch, p. 146). Cadence is termed integrative because, in theterms being advanced here, it arises within the textual domain subsequent to allthe reductions which separate this domain from natural experience, recuperat-ing and reinstating a new utterance manifold that can set in excursive relationthe counter-positions of poetic argument: what Wilkinson terms "the poem'sambition" (p. 146): "What I call integrative cadence, at least proposes for poetryan ethical future; so to write is an endless forward cast" (p. 147).

42/ John Milton, The Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London,1968), Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, IV. 449-91 (pp. 639-41). The passageis discussed in close detail in Bradford, Silence and Sound, pp. 74-9, also inRichard J. DuRocher, Milton and Ovid (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 85-93, and MarkEdmundson, Towards Reading Freud: Self-Creation in Milton, Wordsworth,Emerson, and Sigmund Freud (Princeton, 1990), Chap. 2: "New Thresholds:'On Narcissism, an Introduction,' 1914" (pp. 55-86); compare also P.H. [PatrickHume], Annotations on Milton's Paradise Lost.. .(London, 1695), pp. 150-1.

43/ "[0]n flours" is modernized by Fowler to "flowers" and emended (onflimsy grounds), from "on" to "of"; Ricks prints "flow'rs" for "flours" but doesnot tamper with "on" (Christopher Ricks [ed.], lohn Milton: Paradise Lost [NewYork, 1968; London, 1989], p.91).

44/ Compare the first-edition spelling practice of Paradise Lost (London,1667 [the Scolar Press Facsimile, Menston, 1972]), where the lines quotedare printed thus: "That day I oft remember, when from sleep /1 first awak't,and found myself repos'd / Under a shade on flours" (sig. N2'""); for detaileddiscussion see R.G. Moyles, The Text of Paradise Lost: A Study in Editorial Pro-cedure ÇToionto, 1985), "Spelling Preterites and Past Participles" (pp. 102-106).Milton (or perhaps his compositor) will also employ such forms as "seemd,""returnd," "fixt," "warnd," inconsistent with the use of the apostrophe (Moyles,pp. 106-111) but, in the view experimentally advanced here, consistent witha phonologically motivated practice.

45/ Barnhart, Dictionary, s.v. (p. 724).46/ Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, p. 429; but per contra, B.A. Wright (ed.)

Milton: Poems (London, 1956), p. vii, and compare Ricks (ed.) Paradise Lost,p. xxix.

47/ Barnhart, Dictionary, s.v. (p. 385); Pokorny, Wörterbuch, s.v. "e. pr-"(I, p. 813); Orel, Handbook, s.v. "*ñirai (adv.)", p. 119; Tucker, Concise Ety-mological Dictionary, s.w. "per" (p. 182), "prior" (p. 194). Other retrospectproblems concerning the firstness of the "first parents" became a celebratedconundrum: Sir Thomas Browne described Eve as one "who was not solemnlybegotten, but suddenly framed, and anomalously proceeded from Adam"; andyet "the formation of things at first was different from their generation after;,and although it had no thing to precede, it was aptly contrived for that whichshould succeed it" (Thonias Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidémica: Or, Enquiries

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into Very Many received Tenents, And commonly presumed Truths [London,1646], Book V, Chap. V: "Of the Picture of Adam and Eve with Navells" [pp.239-40], pp. 239,240).

48/ Sacrificial: the consequent necessary mortality is not individuallyspecific, even by typology, but is generic for all mankind and in all ages fol-lowing; and see also William Empson, Milton's Cod (rev. ed., London, 1965),pp. 236-53 and ff

49/ Consider also this contrast within the concept of language per-formance: "This points to one of the most basic properties of phonology, andclarifies another essential difference between phonetics and phonology. Phonet-ics studies language sound as a continuous property. A phonological analysisrelies on an important idealization of language sound, that the continuousspeech signal can be analyzed as a series of discrete segments with constantproperties.... For the purposes of grammar, physical sound contains way toomuch information to allow us to make meaningful and general statementsabout language sound, and we require a way to represent just the essentialsof language sounds. A phonological representation of an utterance reducesthis great mass of phonetic information to a cognitively based minimum, asequence of discrete segments" (Odden, Introducing Phonology, pp. 14-15).

50/ Compare e.g. Bradford, Silence and Sound, pp. 48-9,91-2; also JamesLongenbach: "Unlike Frost, Moore and Williams sometimes want their formalgestures to feel more calculated than organic: rather than allowing us to takethe formal procedures of art for granted, they want us to feel the imposition ofpattern on language, and that imposition forces us to ask questions we mightprofitable ask of any poem, no matter how natural or inevitable its proceduresmight seem. How can one tell when the effect created by the relationship be-tween syntax and line is driven by necessity? How can one make arbitrarinessitself a necessity?" (James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line [Saint Paul,MN, 2008], p. 61). And yet the questions which Longenbach here assigns tothe reader {us, we) must reside and be active within the textual domain, itsargument not at first with us but with itself

51/ On the textual constitution of printed and visible page-formats seee.g. Joseph Loewenstein, "Printing and 'The Multitudinous Presse': The Con-tentious Texts of Jonson's Masques," in Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen(eds.), Ben fonson's 1616Eolio (Cranbury, NJ, 1991), pp. 168-91; and René RieseHubert, "The Postmodern Line and the Postmodern Page," in Robert Frankand Henry Sayre (eds.). The Line in Postmodern Poetry (Urbana, IL, 1988), pp.132-51 ("warning...not to confuse optical and mental space", p. 133).

52/ Compare e.g. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult,pp. 66-89; Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, "The Kenyon Review, XXV [2003], 144-63 (esp. pp. 152-3); also Hugh Kenner,"Rhyme; An Unfinished Monograph" (1983), Common Knowledge, 10 [2004],377-425.

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53/ The semantic connection between "bless" and "blood" by the link ofconsecration through mortal sacrifice is in fact virtually unique to English;most other IE word-forms are from roots with the sense "speak well oC or"make the sign of the cross" (thus invoking divine favour). Compare on theVulgate vocabulary J.K. Aitken, The Semantics of Blessing and Cursing in AncientHebrew (Louvain, 2007), p. 36. But the IE pedigrees for words with the sense"blood" and the sense "sacrifice" are very close: Old English Mod ("blood").Old Norse blot ("sacrifice, worship"); see Pokorny, Wörterbuch, s.v. 'bhlagh-men- (I, p. 154),- Orel, Handbook, pp. 50-1. It is also contentious to speak of"innocent" blood, since in cultic sacrifice the purgation of contamination andtransgression within a community, in propitiation of divine anger, presumescollective or at least arbitrary but non-optional vicarious guUt (the "Antigone"question). "As religious reality claims precedence over mundane reality, fright-ful dealings with death and killing gain overwhelming importance in the formof funerary and sacrificial rituals"; "Here the magical interpretation avoids therealization of self-incurred guilt and projects the cause to malign aggressioncoming from without, even if the cure the innocent victim has to undergo maybe circumstantial, unpleasant, and costly" (Burkert, Creation of the Sacred, pp.32,120). And further, the comment by René Girard: "One must note the factthat, in sacrifice, before the victim is sacrificed, he, she, or it is made to ap-pear guilty" (Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly [ed.]. Violent Origins: Walter Burkert,René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation[Stanford, 1987], p. 182; on sacrifice and gift see pp. 166-7).

54/ Acrobatic displays or sociological rivalries expressed in style contestsare sometimes the quite fiimsy basis for assertion of "a dialectic perspective";see e.g. Catherine M. Cameron, Dialectics in the Art: The Rise ofExperimen-talism in American Music (Westport, CT, 1996), pp. 122-3. For a more trulysubstantive musical dialectic compare the finale to Bellini's Norma (1831): "Theopera culminates in Norma's recovery of all her most noble and fuUy humanattributes: love—romantic, maternal, filial; self-sacrifice and courage. Andin manifesting these qualities Norma simultaneously redeems Pollione andOroveso, enabling them too to become fully human. The tragic irony of thescene resides in the fact that this moment, transcendental in terms of Norma'shumanity, coincides with her utmost humiliation as high priestess: the strippingof her priestly coronet, the black veü, the funeral pyre, the commination.... Themetrical organization of this scene is more complex than anything else in theopera..." (David Kimbell, Vincenzo Bellini, "Norma" [Cambridge, 1998], p. 64;see also pp. 40-1). To be considered here is: "It is very likely that at an earlystage of its composition Paradise Lost was conceived not as an epic but as atragedy" and "the whole poem can be seen as tragic, because of our knowledgeof the fatefiil conclusion" {Paradise Lost, ed. Fowler, pp. 419,422).

55/ Compare Noam Chomsky's view: "Preserving 'historical memory'

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unsullied by apologetics is no less important for the permanent victors, whocan be called to account only by their own citizens. That is particularly truewhen the institutional roots of past practices persist. Those who want to un-derstand today's world will take note of Britain's actions from the days whenit created modern Iraq for its own convenience, ensuring Iraq's dependency.And they will not overlook Britain's practices until the regime it imposed andsupported was overthrown in 1958" (Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuseof Power and the Assault on Democracy [New York, 2007], p. 142; on ChristianFundamentalism in American politics see pp. 223-4). For a more placatoryview compare Edmundson, Towards Reading Freud, p. 165.

56/ Not thus to focus even when the issue is recognized is to slide awayinto opposition rather than commit to dialectic: "Here [in George Oppen'sencounter with Jacques Maritain] we can trace an emergent poetics committedto acknowledging the world's materiality but at the same time to making the actof creative perception a defence against what Maritain had called the subject asmatter, marked with the opacity and voracity of matter, like the I of the egoist'(106)" (Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and The Fate of Modernism [Oxford, 2007],p. 43; the whole of Chap. 2 [pp. 30-61] bears around this issue). Tim Woodsidentifies a comparable oscillation of focus: "It is as if the language-metaphorbest exemplifies the unsettling of the self between subject and object" (ThePoetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary AmericanPoetry [New York, 2002], Chap. 7: "'Things at the limits of reason': George Op-pen's Materialist Ethics" [pp. 215-33], p. 219); this unsettling may be a site ofacute ethical discomfort, but it also develops aspects of a comfortable occupancy("tentativeness" and "hesitation" [pp. 223-4] are also rhetorical habitats, as theytoo often were in Robert Creeley's work). For needle-point irony concerningsuch comforts, be reminded of Chaucer's "character" of the Prioresse ("Amorvincit omnia") in his "General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales, 118-62(L.D. Benson [ed.]. The Riverside Chaucer [3rd ed., Boston, 1987], pp. 25-6).For pre-Socratic counter-values compare this comment on Parmenides, frag.8: "Justice and True Trust operate on coming-to-be and perishing in order todeny them" (Scott Austin, "Parmenidean Dialectic" in his Parmenides and theHistory of Dialectic: Three Essays [Las Vegas, 2007], p.l 1).

57/ Compare e.g., J.H. Prynne, "Huts," Textual Practice, 22 (2008), 613-33(esp. pp. 628-31); Ellen E Fitzpatrick (ed.). Muckraking: Three LandmarkArticles (New York, 1994); James Scully, Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice(Seattle, 1988; Willimantic, CT, 2005), esp. pp. 128-69, somewhat revisedfrom The Line in Postmodern Poetry, pp. 97-131; Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn &the Western World (Austin, TX, 2008).

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