Meter Against Essentialism

Recent scholarship on poetic materiality has found itself caught between celebration of the way rhythm might link language and the body, on the one hand, and critiques of the way such a link can lead and has led to various types of essentialism, on the other. Rhythm has a long history of activating essentialist tropes of primitivism and savagery, which in turn see certain groups (children, women, the “insane,” or racialized others) as fully determined by sensory language and bodily rhythm. In the face of this history and its afterlives, I argue for meter as a resource to help readers and scholars of poetry identify and critique essentializing approaches while upholding at least the possibility of claims for the affective and somatic efficacy of poetic language.