Andrei Bely - Research On Rhythm in Poems

Research On Rhythm in Poems

Bely's essay Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman is cited in Nabokov's novel The Gift, where it is mentioned as "monumental research on rhythm". Fyodor, poet and main character, praises the system Bely created for graphically marking off and calculating the 'half-stresses' in the iambs. Bely found that the diagrams plotted over the compositions of the great poets frequently had the shapes of rectangles and trapeziums. Fyodor, after discovering Bely's work, re-read all his old iambic tetrameters from the new point of view, and was terribly pained to find out that the diagrams for his poems were instead plain and gappy. Nabokov's essay Notes on Prosody follows for the large part Bely's essay Description of the Russian iambic tetrameter (published in the collection of essays Symbolism, Moscow, 1910).

Read more about this topic:  Andrei Bely

Famous quotes containing the words research on, research, rhythm and/or poems:

    Feeling that you have to be the perfect parent places a tremendous and completely unnecessary burden on you. If we’ve learned anything from the past half-century’s research on child development, it’s that children are remarkably resilient. You can make lots of mistakes and still wind up with great kids.
    Lawrence Kutner (20th century)

    ... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse to explore, a document to verify.
    Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)

    My brain sang
    a rhythm I never dreamt to sing,
    “I will be gay and laugh and sing,
    he is going away.”
    Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)

    Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
    Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)