Douglas Oliver, Poetry and Narrative in Performance (1989)

Abstract

Oliver’s book is a study in poetics by a distinguished contemporary poet which offers a closely argued theory of how the sound frequencies of a poem can be shown to produce its emotional significance in interplay with its meaning. The book analyses what happens when poems are performed, including in its concept of ‘performance’ the act of silent reading as well as reading aloud, and develops an account of what a literary performance is. Mechanically recorded traces of different readings of texts are used in the analysis, not to argue for some supposed ‘objectivity’ but to illustrate Oliver’s theory that stress is in practice broadly agreed on and can be productively redefined so as to include its congruence with emotional signification. The possibility of a neutral reading is defended as embodying the idea of a natural and generally intuited music of a line. Restoring the importance of voicing and of pitch is claimed to be essential for understanding the weight of the line as a melodic unit, with a passage of Milton analysed as a case in point. Spatiotemporal paradoxes in the nature of the poetic form are discussed by means of a concentration on the paradoxical ‘instant’ of poetic time, and on how the ‘instant’ of a poem relates to its overall form. The effects of poetry and narrative fiction are compared through consideration of Chaucer and Rabelais. Paul Ricoeur’s analyses of the relationship between author and reader are extended; with Oliver insisting that a theory of metrics cannot overlook either the meaning or the emotional weight of the poem and that these are not idiosyncratic and ‘purely subjective’ factors: significance and emotionality can be shown to be performed through the stresses, syllables, voicing patterns, and melody of the poem.