Who was written in sprung rhythm?

October 25, 2005 2:40 PM

Today, in my graduate linguistics class, we studied Gerard Manley Hopkins' "sprung rhythm." It seems an interesting experiment, but I'm now curious: do any metafilter literary types know if a poet (or poets) since Hopkins has used sprung rhythm in poetry?
posted by rockstar to Writing & Language (9 answers total)

Hopkin's sprung rhythm has some vague similarity to the form of Old English poetry (minus the alliteration and line-splitting).

Hopkins was a fairly isolated poet, and I don't really know any body else that does it. But I'm no expert.
posted by teece at 2:57 PM on October 25, 2005

Wikipedia says that Robin Jeffers' rejected standard poetic meter by use of "rolling stresses," just as Hopkins did before him with his "sprung rhythm."
posted by CrunchyFrog at 3:34 PM on October 25, 2005

A lot of Bob Dylan sounds like sprung rhythm to me. For example: Masters of War, Tangled Up in Blue, and the talking blues songs.
posted by naomi at 3:56 PM on October 25, 2005

Why, when you write in English,
would you use something quite so subtle,
scanning by subjective voice stress,
pulsing, waiting, stumbling, not like iambs
you'd ploddingly deploy instead? I am
guilty as charged, my friends,
when I write fluff for people's birthdays,
weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate events.
Sullivan-esque whimsy, straining to the beat;
rhythms to be heard, not seen
(for auditory application only),
stashed finally with souvenirs somewhere.
Don't know what's sprung, if springing strictly takes its shape from Anglo-Saxon structures;
I doubt that Hopkins cared about exactness,
I doubt he'd ever say "exactitude."
Point being: sprung rhythm isn't dead,
You might say it's stressed out.
Resting, like a parrot with the flu;
shaky, like Jello San Francisco;
queasy like Tuesday evening,
cluttering up Metafilter.
(PS: Agreed about Bob Dylan.)
posted by tangerine at 4:36 PM on October 25, 2005

I STRONGLY recommend the Robinson Jeffers, a giant of American poetry who's sadly under-taught & under-discussed. His work has immense meaning to me, and is incredibly consistent in its excellence, a rare thing.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 6:41 PM on October 25, 2005

Wikipedia on sprung rhythm, for those who aren't familar with it (like me! thanks for asking this question!)
posted by fishfucker at 7:21 PM on October 25, 2005

See also Brian Henry on Charles Wright's revision of Hopkins' "outrider."
posted by thomas j wise at 7:37 PM on October 25, 2005

i'll second the recommendation of robinson jeffers ... i think sprung rhythm has been a vague influence on some later poetry, but it's difficult to tell from free verse at times ... i can't really think of anyone who's noticably patterned their poetry after hopkins

on the other hand, a lot of rap music seems to operate on a similar principle ... but then we're leaving the world of meter for polyrhythms ...
posted by pyramid termite at 9:49 PM on October 25, 2005

Why, when you write in English,
would you use something quite so subtle,
scanning by subjective voice stress,
pulsing, waiting, stumbling, not like iambs
you'd ploddingly deploy instead?

Actually, Robert Frost, who deployed iambs anything but ploddingly, stressed (heh) the importance of natural-sounding voices and rhythms.
posted by kenko at 12:35 AM on October 26, 2005