Caesura

We have inherited the term caesura from classical prosody; critics use it as if it were obvious what it refers to. However, like so many notions, caesura has undergone some substantial metamorphoses between classical Greek and Latin quantitative verse and English syllabo-tonic poetry. In our day, various critics use the term in different meanings. Some critics refer by “caesura” to a boundary at the middle of a line; Fussel (1965: 27), on the other hand, speaks of initial, medial and terminal caesura. He defines caesura as “a rhetorical or extrametrical pause or phrasal break within the poetic line” (ibid, also in Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics). In Shipley’s Dictionary we find a similar definition: “A perceptible break in the metric line, properly defined as expressional pause”. This conception has been challenged by Chatman (1960) and Levin (1971). Chatman argues (much in harmony with the present study) that in many cases it may be difficult to distinguish between br akas a feature of the text and as a feature of the performance. It is the potential of the break that exists in the verse line, whether realized or not, not the break itself. Although I embrace this conception of caesura, I am not sure that Chatman would agree with some details of the view propounded below (indeed, it contradicts his definition in respect to terminal juncture). Chatman amends the Shipley definition of caesura to “a perceptible break in the performance of a line, properly described as an interlinear terminal juncture” (161). “This change is necessary because not all junctures contain pauses, and there seem to be several other kinds of phonetic phenomena, like pitch change, change in intensity (fade), and lengthening of final syllables, which operate in differing combinations to signal terminal junctures” (166). Levin (1971: 184-185) goes one important step further. He regards caesura as a metrical, not a linguistic fact; it is a poetic convention. The line exerts a pressure for completion upon which the caesura obtrudes. “If caesura is regarded as the syntactic pause or break, nothing is left to explain the required sense of metrical impulsion across that break” (185). “The case is clearer in classical metrics, where caesura requires that a word end within the metrical foot. 1 Here, then, it is not only the pressure to end the line that impels a forward movement, but also the pressure to complete the foot” (192 n.). While Levin insists that for him “caesura”, defined as a metrical convention, “is not a boundary of any sort” (personal communication, January 31, 1973), Lotz