Contagious Rhythm: Verse as a Technique of the Body

Abstract

Nineteenth-century origin stories about culture and poetry assume a pattern of development and diversification from a single starting point—be that a primitive language or a single ethnic community. But according to twentieth-century models, the development of culture depends on the clash of different patterns of activity that disrupt the forward movement of simple rhythms. Marcel Mauss’s account of the techniques of the body and Ezra Pound’s practices of translation supply two examples of the breaking of rhythm and the creation of new cultural patterns, sometimes in response to the destruction of European ideals in the Great War.