Sterling Brown and the 'vestiges' of the blues: the role of race in English verse structure

I would like to thank Timothy Spurgin, Kathryn M. Tomasek, Gilbert Gigliotti, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and the anonymous reader for MELUS for their assistance with previous drafts of this essay.

Notes

(1.) I will use the traditional rhetorical distinction between "scheme" and "trope" rather than the more common and misleading distinction between "form" and "content." Recent literary criticism has been far more concerned with trope--such figures of meaning as metaphor, metonymy, or representations of race or gender--than with scheme--such surface patterns of words as anaphora, sonnet, iambic pentameter, or call-and-response. I find the scheme/trope distinction useful for its ambiguity: while the form/content distinction implies that verse conveniently contains particular meanings, scheme/trope suggests an ambiguous interrelation. (2.) Easthope refers here to what Otto Jespersen calls the "principle of relative stress." For prosodists like Paul Fussell iambic pentameter is an abstract pattern which is not necessarily realized in every line. Fussell would find six stresses and an initial spondee in the first line and four stresses and a medial pyrrhic in the second (both lines are from Robert Frost's "The Vantage Point"):

/ / . / . / . / . /

Far off the homes of men, and farther still,

. / . / . . . / . /

The graves of men on an opposing hill,