Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science
Michael Golston
Columbia University Press, 2007
296 pages, $50.00
The obvious challenge of good academic writing is to find something interesting to say. Michael Golston tries to meet it with Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science by choosing an intrinsically interesting subject. The enduring fascination with such studies as physiognomy (the pseudo-science of determining personality from physical features) is clear even in Columbia classrooms—does anyone else remember that lecture in Frontiers?
But that was a science course—what does this stuff mean to a professor of English? Rhythm and Race fails most where it asks—but fails to fully answer—precisely that question. Above all, Golston is an English scholar. And he tackles intellectual historical, scientific, and anthropological issues as only an English scholar would: with close readings and lots of quotations.
Rhythm and Race is mostly about the poetry and poetics of the Modernist poets Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. In the final chapter on William Carlos Williams (included, of course, only to "indicate directions for future investigation"), Golston summarizes his thesis: Pound and Yeats "considered innovations in rhythm critical to the creation of a modern poetry, and both derived their ideas of rhythm in part from contemporary theories of Rhythmics, which generally regarded rhythm as a fundamental and organic periodicity linking the human body, language, history, landscape, and culture." Golston writes mostly about the critical status of rhythm in the creation of Modernist poetry; he is less concerned with its derivation from Rhythmics, and he scarcely more than mentions the contemporaneous scientific examination of rhythm as an "organic periodicity," despite the promise of the book's title.
Which is really too bad—some of these sciences are really, really weird. Golston seems to include them not because they are fascinating in themselves, but because he will need them for his poetry analysis. He quickly sketches a conception of America as a curious racial experiment, where the march-like rhythms of Europeans are polluted by the jungle beats of slaves and the primordial tribal rhythms of the native inhabitants. Another great pseudo-science is "Vorticism": "Will and consciousness are our VORTEX," declared the first Vortex manifesto. Most of these "sciences" seem remarkably like literary theory: carefully crafted and aesthetically motivated. Undoubtedly this is part of what made them compelling to the poets whose work is examined here, but this is the sort of direct historical statement that Golston cautiously avoids.
Perhaps Golston aims to show that there is a poetical reading of, for example, Jacques-Dalcroze's science of Eurythmics, which aimed to develop a racially informed regimen of dance and movement to develop a healthy and physiologically appropriate relationship between body and mind (and which inspired an 80s duo with one really catchy song). But despite his extremely careful and astute readings, he does not prove that the "absolute, primal" rhythm in Pound's Pisan Cantos or Yeats' belief that prosodic ability lies in the blood would have been substantially different without weird science.
The book's chapter titles are key. Who wouldn't want to read about "Amphibious Centaurs?" How about "Bad breath and Ghost Limbs?" Readers more familiar with Yeats might be interested in exactly what he meant when he said that using blank verse gave him "bad breath." And it's disappointing that the chapter on "A sort of Eugenic Paganism" has nothing to do with Eugenics or Paganism and everything to do with Walter Benjamin. Like the book generally, the idea may be insightful, even profound, but it somehow doesn't deliver on an exciting but ultimately false promise.
