Ellen Bryant Voigt: On and Off the Grid: Syntax Part II (July 2002)

Meter organizes music on a small scale, the music theorist Robert Jordain has argued, while phrasing organizes it on a large scale. In this lecture, Ellen Bryant Voigt draws on Jordain’s terms to consider how poems by Philip Larkin, Donald Justice, and D.H. Lawrence are structured through pattern and variation; she examines how “meter” and “phrasing” are produced syntactically, and how conflict between these two kinds of rhythm gives these poems their “energetic formal tension.”