TY - JOUR
T1 - Free Verse, enjambment, irony
T2 - A case study
AU - Tsur, Reuven
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Dr. Johnson suggested that "blank verse is often verse for the eye." If this were true, it would apply even more to free verse. The empty space that indicates line endings in printed verse is not available in vocal performance. I claim that just as white spaces break up the series of black marks on the paper into smaller perceptual units whose end may or may not coincide with the end of syntactic units, in aural perception, certain vocal devices may break up the text into versification units, and even indicate conflicts of versification and syntactic units. I discuss such a conflict in the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai's brief masterpiece "Rain in the Battlefield." In an instrumental analysis of a recorded reading, I demonstrate the vocal strategies by which the performer indicates the conflict between verse and clause boundaries in this poem. Readers perceive here subtler irony than in a version in which verse and clause boundaries coincide.
AB - Dr. Johnson suggested that "blank verse is often verse for the eye." If this were true, it would apply even more to free verse. The empty space that indicates line endings in printed verse is not available in vocal performance. I claim that just as white spaces break up the series of black marks on the paper into smaller perceptual units whose end may or may not coincide with the end of syntactic units, in aural perception, certain vocal devices may break up the text into versification units, and even indicate conflicts of versification and syntactic units. I discuss such a conflict in the Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai's brief masterpiece "Rain in the Battlefield." In an instrumental analysis of a recorded reading, I demonstrate the vocal strategies by which the performer indicates the conflict between verse and clause boundaries in this poem. Readers perceive here subtler irony than in a version in which verse and clause boundaries coincide.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85016515412&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.5325/style.49.1.0035
DO - 10.5325/style.49.1.0035
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AN - SCOPUS:85016515412
SN - 0039-4238
VL - 49
SP - 35
EP - 45
JO - Style
JF - Style
IS - 1
ER -