In this piece from the Poetry Foundation, Armen Davoudian explores the use of alliteration by several poets, including Ashbery in his Paradoxes and Oxymorons, and his exposure of "the Whitmanian dream of a literal lineage from poet to poem to reader as just that: a dream."
Tony Berlant, Yang Na, 1984-1986. Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.
In the previous part of this essay, I explored definitions of alliteration as the presence of one sound in multiple words (conventional alliteration); the presence of one word in another word (wordplay or paronomasia); and the presence of an earlier poem in a later poem (allusion). I argued that alliteration’s ability to function as various kinds of verbal presence is particularly important for the elegy, where alliteration becomes a compensation for the absence at the poem’s center: that of the dead, elegized subject. In a more speculative vein, I want now to look at instances of alliteration that push this compensatory strategy to its limit—into a dream of embodiment where poems do not simply mourn or wish, but appear to actually substitute for the lost or impossible presence of a person.
A word is not the thing or the person it names. Yet how much of our language pretends that the opposite is the case? Discussing paronomasia/alliteration, the linguist Roman Jakobson elaborates on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election slogan, “I like Ike”:
the second of the two rhyming words is fully included in the first one (“echo rhyme”), /layk/ – /ayk/, a paronomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops its object. Both cola alliterate with each other, and the first of the two alliterating words is included in the second: /ay/ – /ayk/, a paronomastic image of the loving subject enveloped by the beloved object.
Here, words have become like human bodies, in a slippage characteristic of alliteration. “I” the word does something only I the person is actually capable of doing: I “envelops” or hugs “Ike” via “like,” and “Ike” returns this embrace, as the presidential candidate’s nickname appears to include the individuated “I”s of the entire electorate he is campaigning to represent. I like Ike, and Ike likes me—that’s what Eisenhower’s slogan actually wants us to believe, according to Jakobson’s analysis. Alliteration, here, is made to mimic the principle of political representation, where an elected official can stand in for a plurality of individuals: Ike and I are alike.
This quality of reciprocity, or representation, or contagiousness even, where the object returns the subject’s affection, rubs off on Jakobson himself. When discussing “the loving subject enveloped by the beloved object,” Jakobson encloses the word “love”in “beloved” and “enveloped.” [1] Here, the loving subject (the critic) can’t help but mimic the beloved object (the text he is analyzing).
We call a song “catchy” when we cannot help but remember it, when we are almost unconsciously driven to repeat it, tapping our feet to its beat. The catchy song, like the contagious disease, takes over our bodies independently of (and even against) our will, just as in a representative democracy an elected official comes to somehow (by law or by magic) stand in for an entire electoral body, including those who did not vote for the elected official. So, too, alliteration. Some of the earliest definitions of this device evoke metaphors of the body, ascribing to it a kind of corporeal presence. I have already cited Philip Sidney’s claim that alliteration is a “a “running in rattling rows,” and John Hoskins’s claim that it embodies the “touch of the same letter.” George Puttenham goes further, claiming of alliterative writing:
such composition makes the meter run away smoother, and passeth from the lips with more facility by iteration of a letter than by alteration, which alteration of a letter requires an exchange of ministry and office in the lips, teeth or palate, and so doth not the iteration.
Alliteration is “iterative” in more senses than one. Itself an effect of repetition, alliteration’s effect on the reader is a compulsion to repeat. Let’s look at how one poet exploits precisely this compulsion in the service of embodiment. Outside of his specialized use of alliteration to resurrect “Lincoln” in “lilac,” Walt Whitman often uses the device in its more conventional function of linking two hemistiches into a prosodically complete line: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself;” “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable” (“Song of Myself”); “Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping;” “How solemn they look there, stretched and still” (“The Sleepers”). This is so prevalent in Whitman’s oeuvre that the absence of the device can itself become conspicuous, meaningful, and therefore, in a sense, present. For instance, in “Failing to fetch me at first | keep encouraged,” the cessation of alliteration in the second half seems to mark a desired imbalance in the line: first part given to failure, second to hope (“Song of Myself”). Ideologically, Whitman’s extensive use of alliteration to balance a line seems to be a pervasion, into the poem’s aural level, of a broader dream of poetic embodiment, of the poet’s body alliterating with the reader’s, “for every atom belonging to me as well belongs to you.” Reader and poet share not just the same constitutive “atom” but also the same origin in Adam.
Generations later, John Ashbery picks up and parodies Whitman’s alliterative ideology of presence, exposing the Whitmanian dream of a literal lineage from poet to poem to reader as just that: a dream. In Ashbery’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” alliterating sounds do not just echo one another, post hoc, but the presence of a sound in one word (“Paradoxes”) seems to generate the next word (“… and Oxymorons”). “This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level,” Ashbery begins, impishly, then goes on to explain:
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be
A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof […]
Concatenating an alliterative chain out of poem-plain-pretend-play-pattern-proof, the poem includes in its generative system missing links like pain and plaintive, cued in by “plain” and “sad,” and prayer, cued in by the language of “grace” and of existential doubt (“I think you exist […] and then you aren’t there”). John Shoptaw has called this kind of poetic encryption “lyric cryptography”; Ashbery calls it “[b]ringing a system of them into play.” Once you have a system, you can derive the particular components. Thus, words deliberately left out of the poem can still be found inside it, so that Ashbery can “consider play [or poetry, or prayer] to be / A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern” that is both a part of and distinct from reality. A second alliterative chain, deeper-dreamed-division-days, functions as another generative system: Ashbery’s insistence that poetry is play rather than work, once we reach “the division of grace these long August days / Without proof,” cues in division of labor while also playing on mathematical long division. Reading a cryptic Ashbery poem is like laboring to recover the hidden or bypassed proof of a division problem. Resounding with echoes from Whitman (“Missing me one place search another”) and from the poetry of unrequited love, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” adapts Whitman’s ideal of poetic accessibility for a more skeptical age: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.” All that missing here is kissing in a way that the word kissing itself is not: sounding out these lines, the reader’s lips close three times on the bilabial m, physically kissing each iteration of “miss” (and each iteration of “poem”?) into existence. “The poem,” Ashbery concludes, “is you.”
If, as in my examples from Whitman and Ashbery, alliteration serves to underline, and in some cases, to make sense, it is also fundamentally a species of nonsense. If it can direct attention to key words, intensifying their meaning, it can also detract from sense, thus partaking in a poetic impulse to sacrifice semantics to sonic materiality. This is an inherent risk of repetition in general: we may repeat a word to draw attention to its meaning or importance, but after a certain threshold, the repeated word becomes just a string of meaningless sounds—a phenomenon known as “semantic satiation.” Unlike in semantic satiation, however, alliteration repeats a particular sound or letter rather than an entire word or phrase, but it can have a similar effect, dislodging the meaning of language and making us actually hear it—hear it, and not just understand it. And, in fact, a lot of poetic nonsense repeats and alliterates: from the nonsense refrains of Shakespeare’s songs (“Hey nonny nonny,” “Then, heigh-ho! the holly!”) through Edward Lear and Lewis Caroll (“In a sieve they went to the sea,” “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”) to Gertrude Stein (“Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable”) and Dadaist sound poetry (“gadji beri bimba”). Here alliteration shades into poetry’s affinity with the infantile, as in children’s echolalia, but also, arguably, the sacred, as in various worship practices of glossolalia or speaking in tongues.
Alliteration, then, can be both a form of rationalism, bestowing balance and order on a line, as well as a kind of madness. Yet perhaps on an even deeper level alliteration is neither rational nor irrational, but rather pre- or supra-rational, as in the alliterative babble of children (ma-ma, da-da) or the complex, almost mathematical, yet somehow still intuitive permutations of alliterative distribution in certain poetic traditions like Welsh. This device, too easily dismissed even by poets themselves as an ornamental trinket (“Most of our English makers use it too much,” Puttenham complained), reflects some of poetry’s most fundamental paradoxes—its conflicting allegiances to both iteration and alteration, mystification and demystification, sound and meaning—and suggests a shared poetic and psychic ground for the reconciliation of these conflicts.
[1]Emphasis added here and throughout this post.
Originally Published: March 27th, 2023