Little Boxes: The Effects of the Stanza on Poetic Narrative

TLDR: This article explored the relationship between stanzas and comic or romance narratives and also investigated how different stanza forms develop different types of narrative. But their focus was on the structure of the stanza and not the content of the narrative itself.

Abstract: This article deals with the effects of stanza form on the discourse of narrative poetry. It starts by exploring the antagonistic relationship between stanzas and epic. Milton, writing in an age of rhyme, eschews stanzas in Paradise Lost. Dante invents a stanza, terza rima, that is not self-contained, but allows forward extension. Tasso remains dissatisfied with his ottava rima Gerusalemme liberata and eventually writes an unrhyming epic, Il mondo creato. The article goes on to examine the more harmonious relationship between stanzas and comic or romance narrative and also investigates how different stanzas develop different types of narrative. Ottava rima lends itself to medley poems such as Orlando furioso and Don Juan, which delight in antithesis. Both rhyme-royal and the Spenserian stanza avoid the blatant contrasts inherent in ottava rima and are hence suited to less directly ironic types of narrative voice. A recent handful of books suggests that a renewed interest in formalism may be becoming a trend in literary studies. Formalism-or the aesthetic-in general is defended in Michael P. Clark's Revenge of the Aesthetic, George Levine's Aesthetics and Ideology, and Susan J. Wolfson's Formal Charges, while a prosodic-grammatical approach to poetry is advocated by Donald Wesling in The Scissors of Meter. Even Steven Knapp, in Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism, who sets out to deconstruct formalism, finds it finally irreducible, because "formalism is built into our conception of ourselves as agents" (138). Of course some branches of formalist criticism and theory have continued unabated all through the years of post-colonialism and cultural studies, if not in the forefront of prestige and influence. The study of narrative structure, for example, has never decreased in popularity, in contrast to literary prosody, whose star has waned somewhat since the first half of the twentieth century. Narratologists have generally confined their investigations to prose narratives of various kinds, perhaps because literary academics tend to specialize as to genre-and poetry and narrative are usually categorized as separate genres. Consequently, even though many poems are narrative, the relationship between poetic form and narrative has never been a popular area of research. This paper attempts to redress that neglect, though it makes only a beginning. It deals with only certain aspects of narrative, including the minute particulars of narrator's tone and attitude and the grammatical and pragmatic units of utterance into which narrative discourse divides itself. The structure of verse is discussed in more detail, with the sharpest focus trained on the capacity of rhyme to concentrate and enclose spaces of discourse, a capacity that lends itself to certain kinds of narration-and, hence, genre-rather than others. Although considerable attention is paid to some texts that are composed in non-rhyming or continuous poetic forms, the main study concentrates on the longer rhymed narrative stanzas, most of which originated during the late Middle Ages and the early Modern period. The word stanza means "room." A poem divided into stanzas is a house of many rooms, as opposed to a hall or pavilion whose inner spaces are not formally separated by walls and doors. Writing a narrative in stanzas instead of prose or a continuous poetic form such as blank verse has one very obvious effect: to divide the narrative up. When the little boxes, or rooms, into which it is divided are standard forms, such as ottava rima or rhyme-royal, another effect is also evident: the divisions all have the same size and shape. This effect comprises an additional stylization of language over and above the basic markers of poetry, for example metre, rhyme, and showy or frequent use of devices such as motif, metaphor, or onomatopoeia. Making the formalist's assumption that style and meaning are inextricably connected, we shall investigate the effects that this additional stylization has on narrative discourse. …