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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 09/02/22, SPi
Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear,

T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith
Rhythms of Feeling in
Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot,
and Stevie Smith
JA SM I N E JAG G E R
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© Jasmine Jagger 2022
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For my mother—
I carry your music with me.
Acknowledgements
My deep gratitude goes to the following people, each of whom contributed generous
ideas, suggestions, and edits in the making of this book: Steven Connor, James
Williams, Angela Leighton, Seamus Perry, and Will May. Thanks also to my dear
friend Thomas Russell for casting his eye upon countless drafts.
For funding the bulk of this research, I am most grateful to the Wolfson
Foundation. For additional funding, I am grateful to Jesus College and the Faculty
of English, Cambridge.
I am indebted to the archivists at Houghton Library (Harvard), the Berg
Collection (New York), McFarlin Library (Tulsa), Somerville College Library
(Oxford), and the Tennyson Research Centre (Lincoln), for their tireless help with
manuscript materials. My thanks also go to the patient editorial team at
OUP. The following are used by permission:
‘Edward Lear’ from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, by permission of Penguin
Random House LLC; extracts from The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse by
Edward Lear, by permission of Watson, Little Ltd; Edward Lear manuscript letter
to Emily Tennyson (9 October 1879), by permission of Lincoln Heritage Services;
drawing by Alfred Lord Tennyson from his In Memoriam manuscript notebook
(1834), by permission of The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; by
permission of Faber and Faber Ltd: extracts from The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volumes I
and II by T. S. Eliot; The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript by T. S. Eliot; Stevie
Smith, The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith; manuscript materials by
Stevie Smith, by permission of the University of Tulsa; extracts from Some Are
More Human than Others by Stevie Smith, by permission of Peter Owen and New
Directions Publishing Corporation; John Lee Hooker quote, by permission of the
John Lee Hooker Estate; Human Nervous System dissected by M.A. Schalck and
L.P. Ramsdell, by permission of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine, Kirksville,
Missouri; ‘Bynogen Brings Health’, two adverts from The Athenaeum, by permis-
sion of University Library, Cambridge; ‘Dancers’ by William Patrick Roberts, by per-
mission of The Treasury Solicitor, Mishcon de Reya LLP.
At Jesus College, University of Cambridge, I would like to thank Rod Mengham
and Christopher Burlinson for their kind mentorship. At the University of
Oxford, I would especially like to thank Matthew Bevis, Stephen Gill, and Sophie
Ratcliffe, for their long-standing support, guidance, and inspiration.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart to: my husband Douglas Maxwell, for
his love and companionship; my father Hugh, for always reminding me to believe
in myself; and my courageous mother Suzy, who provided endless support and
viii Acknowledgements
encouragement for this book while fighting for her life against motor neurone
disease. Rhythms of Feeling could not have been written without you.
Finally, this work has been animated and loved by not one, but two thinkers—
and my greatest debt is to my teacher, Anne Malone Stillman, la miglior fabbra,
who saw me through it all.
—J.J., 2020.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
I. Affect and creativity 6
II. The poets’ affects 10
III. Affect and rhythm 22
IV. Rhythm and ‘relief ’ 41
Lear’s Tears 48
I. Breaking 52
II. Private melody 62
III. Turtle, you shall carry me 71
IV. Too deep for tears 93
Eliot’s Nerves 98
I. Early jitters 103
II. Nerves in patterns 119
III. Sickly vehicle 130
IV. When words fail 140
Smith’s Scratches 148
I. Beast within 154
II. Scratching out 163
III. Too low for words 175
IV. Darker I move 188
Coda: Dancing Feeling 202
Selected Bibliography 213

Index 225
List of Illustrations
0.1. Edward Lear, ‘Herons & sweeps: drawing and verse’, Edward Lear
miscellaneous drawings, MS Typ 55.14, (53). Houghton Library, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Mass. 12
0.2. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of Whitehaven’, in A Book of Nonsense
(London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1846). 14
0.3. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man on the Border’, in More Nonsense,
Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc (London: R. J. Bush, 1872). 15
0.4. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man on some rocks’, in A Book of Nonsense
0.5. Edward Lear, Diary, 16 November 1861, Edward Lear diaries, 1858–1888.
MS Eng 797.3 (4). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Mass (seq. 172). 29
0.6 (a) and (b). Stevie Smith, ‘My Cat Major’. MS 1976.012.2.4.3, Stevie Smith
Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 35
0.7. Stevie Smith, ‘The Galloping Cat’. MS 1976.012.2.5.9, Stevie Smith Papers,
McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 36
1.1. Edward Lear, ‘Calico Pie’, in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets
(London: R. J. Bush, 1871). 55
1.2. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of Cape Horn’, in A Book of Nonsense
1.3. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Person whose tears’. CN, 120. Complete Nonsense
and Other Verse edited by Vivien Noakes with permission from Penguin. 59
1.4. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of Algiers’. CN, 462. Complete Nonsense
and Other Verse edited by Vivien Noakes with permission from Penguin. 60
1.5. Edward Lear, Letter to Emily Tennyson, 9 October 1879. MS TRC/
LETTERS/5537, Lincoln Heritage Services, Lincolnshire County Council. 64
1.6. Edward Lear, ‘Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hill’: autograph
manuscript (unsigned); [no place, undated]. Edward Lear miscellaneous
drawings, MS Typ 55.14 (138). Houghton Library, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass. 65
1.7. Edward Lear, Diary, 2 August 1877, Edward Lear diaries, 1858–1888.
MS Eng 797.3 (20). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge,
Mass (seq. 118). 68
1.8. Edward Lear, ‘The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’: autograph manuscript (unsigned);
[no place, undated], Edward Lear miscellaneous drawings. MS Typ 55.14 (162).
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 72
xii List of Illustrations
1.9. Edward Lear, frontispiece illustration for ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-
Bonghy-Bò’, in Laughable Lyrics: a fourth book of nonsense poems, songs,
botany, music & c. (London: R. J. Bush, 1877). 73
1.10. Alfred Tennyson, drawing in In Memoriam manuscript notebook (1834).
Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O.15.13, f.8v. By permission of The Master
and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. 74
1.11. Edward Lear, draft frontispiece sketch for ‘The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’. MS
Typ 55.14 (162). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 75
1.12. Edward Lear, ‘The-Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’, autograph manuscript (unsigned);
[no place, undated], Edward Lear miscellaneous drawings. MS Typ 55.14
(163). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 76
1.15. Edward Lear, published illustration for ‘The Courtship of the
Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’, in Laughable Lyrics: A fourth book of nonsense
poems, songs, botany, music & c. (London: R. J. Bush, 1877). 79
1.16. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Person of Grange’, in More Nonsense,
1.17. Edward Lear, ‘The Tumultuous Tom-tommy Tortoise’, in More Nonsense,
1.18. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Person of Bradley’, Edward Lear drawings
for More Nonsense and other drawings, 1870. MS Typ 55.1 (seq. 103),
1.19. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Person of Fife’, in More Nonsense,
1.20. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of the hills’, Edward Lear drawings
1.21. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of Carlisle’, Edward Lear drawings
1.22. Edward Lear, draft for ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. Edward Lear
miscellaneous drawings, MS Typ 55.14 (152) 2–3. Houghton Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 91
1.23. Edward Lear, draft for ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’. Edward Lear
miscellaneous drawings, MS Typ 55.14 (152), 1. Houghton Library,
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 92
List of Illustrations xiii
1.24. Edward Lear, published illustration for ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’,
in Laughable Lyrics: A fourth book of nonsense poems, songs, botany,
music & c. (London: R. J. Bush, 1877). 92
1.25. Edward Lear, ‘There was an old man of Lodore’. CN, 111. Complete Nonsense
and Other Verse by Vivien Noakes with permission from Penguin. 96
2.1. T. S. Eliot, Letter to Ralph Hodgson, 16 August 1932. L6, 407. By permission
of Faber and Faber Ltd. 103
2.2. ‘Seeing the Brain’, illustration from the St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat,
17 January 1897, in Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work
of T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 9. 111
2.3. William Patrick Roberts, ‘Dancers’, The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of
Painting, Sculpture, and Design, 1 (Spring 1921) 4. Estate of John David
Roberts. By permission of the Treasury Solicitor. 123
2.4. ‘Bynogen Brings Health’, advert from The Athenaeum, 13 June 1919
(no. 4650), 480. By permission of University Library, Cambridge. 124
2.5. ‘Bynogen Brings Health’, advert from The Athenaeum, 9 May 1919
(no. 4645), 291. By permission of University Library, Cambridge. 124
2.6. Photograph image of a human nervous system dissected by M.A. Schalck
and L.P. Ramsdell at Kirksville Osteopathic College. Displayed at the
Museum of Osteopathic Medicine (1999.08.01), Kirksville, Missouri.
By permission of the museum. 125
2.7 and 2.8. Edward Lear, More Nonsense (London: R.J. Bush, 1872) and
Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense (London: Routledge, 1846). 127
2.9. T. S. Eliot, ‘London, the swarming life’, autograph manuscript for
The Waste Land (composed November 1921). F, 36. By permission of
Faber and Faber Ltd. 134
3.1. Stevie Smith, ‘The Songster’. CP, 20. By permission of Faber
and Faber Ltd. 148
3.2. Stevie Smith, ‘Le Singe Qui Swing’. CP, 287. By permission of Faber and
Faber Ltd. 150
3.3. Stevie Smith, ‘Look, Look’. CP, 32. By permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. 152
3.4. Edward Lear, ‘There was an old person whose mirth’. CN, 114. 153
3.5. Stevie Smith, ‘I am an animal!’ SMHO. Copyright © Stevie Smith 1958.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 154
3.6. Stevie Smith, ‘From the County Lunatic Asylum’. CP, 32. By permission of
3.7. Stevie Smith, ‘Murder’. MS 1976.012.2.3.11, Stevie Smith Papers, McFarlin
Library, University of Tulsa. 165
3.8. Stevie Smith, ‘Does No Love Last?’. MS 1976.012.2.2.6, Stevie Smith
xiv List of Illustrations
3.9. Stevie Smith, ‘What shall I do with my hands?’ SMHO. Copyright © Stevie
Smith 1958. Copyright © James MacGibbon 1989. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 171
3.10. Stevie Smith, ‘I love and am loved.’ SMHO. Copyright © Stevie Smith
1958. Copyright © James MacGibbon 1989. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp. 173
3.11 and 3.12. Stevie Smith, ‘Anger’s Freeing Power’ (1) & (2). MS
1976.012.2.4.1, Stevie Smith Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 174
3.13. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. CP, 347. By permission of Faber
and Faber Ltd. 177
3.14. Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’, unpublished draft sketch
c.1957. From a typed proof of the poem. MS 1976.012.2.4.3, Stevie Smith
3.15. Stevie Smith, person being tripped on waves, unattributed drawing.
MS 1976.012.2.1.11–13, Stevie Smith Papers, McFarlin Library,
University of Tulsa. 179
3.16. Stevie Smith, sad clown, unattributed drawing. MS 1976.012.2.1.11–13,
Stevie Smith Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 179
3.17. Stevie Smith, nervous woman in bed, unattributed drawing. MS
1976.012.2.1.11, Stevie Smith Papers, 1924–1970, McFarlin Library,
3.18. Stevie Smith, unattributed typed review, with sketches scribbled over
the top. MS 1976.012.2.1.10, Stevie Smith Papers, McFarlin Library,
3.19. Stevie Smith, ‘We all have these thoughts sometimes.’ SMHO. Copyright
© Stevie Smith 1958. Copyright © James MacGibbon 1989. Reprinted by
3.20. Stevie Smith, ‘Think! Think! Think twice!’ (tableau) SMHO. Copyright
© Stevie Smith 1958. Copyright © James MacGibbon 1989. Reprinted by
3.21. Stevie Smith, ‘I sometimes thought my mind would give way.’ SMHO.
Copyright © Stevie Smith 1958. Copyright © James MacGibbon 1989.
3.22. Edward Lear, ‘There was a Young Lady in white’, autograph manuscript
for More Nonsense (1872). MS Typ 55.1, Houghton Library, Harvard College. 190
3.23. Stevie Smith, postcard with ‘Scorpion’ handwritten by Smith, dated
5 October 1970. Photographed by James MacGibbon in 1990. SMHO, 17.
Copyright © Stevie Smith 1958. Copyright © James MacGibbon 1989.
3.24 and 3.25. Stevie Smith, ‘The Stroke’ (1) & (2). MS 1976.012.2.5.12, Stevie
Smith Papers, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 194
List of Illustrations xv
3.26. Stevie Smith, ‘The Word’. MS 1976.012.2.5.12, Stevie Smith Papers,

McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 196
3.27. Stevie Smith, unpublished typed draft for ‘Come Death’ with handwritten
revisions, found in an envelope marked by James MacGibbon: ‘Poem
Stevie handed to me when I visited her at Torquay Hospital. She had
encircled “Death”.’ MS 1976.012.2.6.15, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. 200
3.28 (a) and (b). Stevie Smith, two unpublished handwritten drafts and
revisions for ‘Come Death’. MS 1976.012.2.6.15, McFarlin Library, Tulsa. 200
C.1. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of Carlisle’, Edward Lear drawings for
More Nonsense and other drawings, 1870. MS Typ 55.1 (104), Houghton
Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 205
C.2. Stevie Smith, ‘The Dedicated Dancing Bull’. CP, 537. By permission of
List of Abbreviations
ATW Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Works of Tennyson: The Eversley Edition, ed. by
Hallam Tennyson, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1908–1910).
CC Stevie Smith, Cats in Colour (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1959).
CN Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, ed. by Vivien Noakes
(London: Penguin, 2001).
CP Stevie Smith, The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith, ed. by Will May
(London: Faber & Faber, 2015).
D Edward Lear, Diaries, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 797.3.
ECP T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. by Ronald
Schuchard and others, 6 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014–2017).
F T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts,
Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. by Valerie Eliot (London: Faber &
Faber, 2010).
FS Frances Spalding, Stevie Smith: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1989).
L T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton,
7 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 2009–2017).
MA Stevie Smith, Me Again: The Uncollected Writings, ed. by Jack Barbera and
William McBrien (London: Virago Press Ltd, 1981).
NOYP Stevie Smith, Novel On Yellow Paper (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980).
OPP T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
P T. S. Eliot, The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue,
2 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 2015).
SE T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (London: Faber & Faber, first pub. 1932,
this edn 1999).
SL Edward Lear, Selected Letters, ed. by Vivien Noakes (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988).
SMHO Stevie Smith, Some Are More Human than Others: A Sketchbook, ed. by James
MacGibbon (London: New Directions, 1989).
UPUC T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of
Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), accessed in The
Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, 6 vols., vol. 4: English Lion,
1930–1933, ed. by Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard, pp. 574–694.
YE Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: from St Louis to The Waste Land (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2015).
Below the thunders of the upper deep,

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘The Kraken’, ‘Poems, Chiefly Lyrical’
(London: Effingham Wilson, 1830)1
There was an old man on the Border,

Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
Edward Lear, ‘More Nonsense’
(London: Robert Bush, 1872)
1 With thanks to Lucy Newlyn.

Introduction
This book explores the place of affect in the work of three poets: Edward Lear,
T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. More specifically, it examines their poetic compos
ition in relation to three individual affects to which they were self-consciously
prone—Lear’s ‘morbids’, Eliot’s ‘nerves’, and Smith’s ‘angry spells’.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘affect’ in two ways: 1. of the mind,
‘A feeling or subjective experience accompanying a thought or action or occur
ring in response to a stimulus; an emotion, a mood, [or its] outward display [. . .]
as manifested by facial expression, posture, gestures, tone of voice, etc.’; and 2. of
the body, ‘An abnormal state of the body; a disease or disorder’ or ‘The manner in
which something is physically affected or disposed; spec. the actual state or dis
position of the body’.1 In this book, the terms ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, and ‘affect’ are
used interchangeably, primarily because there is still no consensus about how—or
indeed whether—we can or should try to make clean distinctions between them.
What we do know, to borrow Alex Houen’s phrasing, is that affect ‘comprise[s]
[. . .] emotional compounds of bodily feeling and cognition, where cognition can
include imagination no less than reasoning’.2
As ‘affect’ brings together feeling and its manifestation, inside and outside,
mind and body, poetry brings these aspects together too. Silvan Tomkins claims
that individuals shape and sustain affects through cognitive ‘scripts’: ‘sets of order
ing rules for the interpretation, evaluation, prediction, production, or control’ of
affective situations.3 ‘Poetry’ is, according to the OED, ‘the expression or embodi
ment of thought and feeling’ as well as a ‘patterned arrangement of language in
which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinct
ive style and rhythm.’4 Indeed, one way of thinking about what sets poetry apart
from prose is to think about poetry as possessing this ‘distinctive style and
rhythm’—its incarnation as metrical language. As Derek Attridge writes, ‘the notion
of metre as a means of increasing the affective force of language has survived
without pejorative overtones to become one of the most prevalent conceptions of
1 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘affect’ (n), I. 5b and II. 6.

2 Alex Houen, ‘Introduction: Affecting Words’, in Affects, Text, and Performativity, a special issue of
Textual Practice 25:2 (2011): 215–32, 218.
3 Silvan Tomkins, ‘Script Theory and Nuclear Scripts (1979)’, quoted by Alex Houen, Ibid. 219.
4 OED, ‘poetry’ (n), 2d. and 2a.
Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Jasmine Jagger, Oxford University Press.
© Jasmine Jagger 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868804.003.0001
2 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith
it.’5 Discussing how metrical composition has long been perceived and valued for
its ability to communicate internal states more ‘forcefully’ than prose, Attridge
defines the ‘affective’ as: ‘the emotions, attitudes and modes of thought that consti
tute mental experience [. . .] and the bodily experience that feeds and realises it.’6
Using C. S. Peirce’s categorization of signs, Attridge argues that ‘one might regard
a rhythmic feature that functions affectively as signifying something other than
itself not because it resembles that other thing, but because it is a direct product
of it.’.7 By ‘affects’, then, I refer to feelings and subjective experiences as well as their
outward display and physical reproduction within bodies of poetry. This book
seeks to explore a correspondence between the notions of affect in a person, and
the notions of affect in a poem, investigating how affect finds voice within poets
and their poetry, and rhythm’s specific role in articulating that voice.
In his essay, ‘Once More with Feeling: Art, Affect, and Performance’, Attridge
argues that literary writing functions to present possibilities of thinking,
feeling, and experience that are socially ‘other’.8 Literary form, he suggests, per
forms ‘affective events’ that are otherwise marginalized or silenced. As part of
this exploration, I incorporate Lear, Eliot and Smith’s common perceptions of
their own affects as other, ill-fitting, and disorderly: affects are imagined by
each of these poets as things that they possess, but that also come to possess
them. I am, of course, wary of the potentially pejorative implications of words
like ‘disorder’. As Ian Hacking observes in Rewriting the Soul, ‘[i]t is a good
choice but it cannot help being loaded with values.’
The word is code for a vision of the world that ought to be orderly. Order is
desirable, it is healthy, it is a goal. Truth, the true person, is disrupted by dis
order. I am cautious about that picture of pathology.9
It is precisely because I am troubled by the categorizations between ‘orderly’ and

‘disorderly’ that this book seeks to explore them. My use of this term is not subjective,
therefore, but in keeping with the poets’ own impressions of themselves. The
way in which the poets define their affects—as ‘morbids’, ‘nerves’, or ‘spells’—often
personifies or spiritualizes them as visitations that are not quite part of the self
but nevertheless taking over it. On the one hand, these feelings are felt as a painful
curse; on the other, they are felt to be a gift which feeds creativity. In The Divided
Self (1959), R. D. Laing suggests that language is ‘an expression of the way [a
5 Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (first pub. 1982; this edn Abingdon: Routledge,
2014), p. 295.
6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.
8 See Derek Attridge, ‘Once More with Feeling: Art, Affect, and Performance’ in Affects, Text, and
Performativity, a special issue of Textual Practice 25:2 (2011): 329–43.
9 Ian Hacking, ‘Is it Real’, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 17.
introduction 3
person] experience[s] being-in-[their]-world’ and that it can be decoded to unveil

profound truths.10 Discussing this expression in terms of artistic creativity in The
Politics of Experience (1967), he writes:
Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture

personal meaning in personal time and space from out of the sights and sounds
of a depersonalized, dehumanized world. They are bridge-heads into alien
territory. [. . .]
The creative breath ‘comes from a zone of man where man cannot descend,
even if Virgil were to lead him, for Virgil would not go down there’.11
Laing describes the ‘pattern[s]’ that emerge from this deep ‘zone’ as ‘[t]hese
arabesques that mysteriously embody mathematical truths only glimpsed by a very
few—how beautiful, how exquisite—no matter that they were the threshing and
thrashing of a drowning man.’12 I do not wish to romanticize the poet’s pain or to
suggest that poems equal people; I wish to suggest that looking deeply at a poet’s
affective life can, in a number of complex ways, illuminate aspects of their work. By
employing the specific terms of the poets themselves, I wish to escape the common
confines of pathology and diagnosis by which people are categorized as, for instance,
‘bipolar’ or ‘depressive’. Though these diagnoses are useful and often essential for
medical treatment, my readings argue (as Laing argues) that feelings, and the artistic
representation of feelings, are far too complicated to categorize in this way.
Despite affect’s quality as something that, in the words of Gregory Seigworth
and Melissa Gregg, ‘arises in the midst of in-between-ness’ and ‘transpires within
and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities’,13 there has been a noticeably hesi
tant concern with the study of poetic form in affect theory and vice versa, and a
full-length literary critical study on affect and poetic rhythm has been slow to
appear.14 What is especially lacking in theoretical readings of literary affect is the
10 R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London: Penguin
Books, 1990), p. 17.
11 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise (London: Penguin Books, 1990),
pp. 37–8.
12 Ibid., p. 38.
13 Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–2.
14 In Seigworth and Gregg’s authoritative compilation, The Affect Theory Reader (2010), the terms
‘poetic form’ and ‘poetic rhythm’ are not used once. A number of excellent essay series on literature
and affect are appearing. See, for example, Alex Houen (ed.), Affect and Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Affects, Text, and Performativity, a special issue of Textual
Practice 25:2 (2011); William Baker et al. (eds.), Form and Feeling in Modern Literature: Essays in
Honour of Barbara Hardy (Leeds: Legenda, 2013). The best voice on the topic of rhythm remains
Attridge, but he has yet to publish a text solely on rhythm and affect in poetry. Julie Taylor has recently
produced an interdisciplinary study about literary narrative: see Modernism and Affect (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Joshua King has published a critical essay on ‘Hopkins’
Affective Rhythm: Grace and Intention in Tension’, Victorian Poetry 45:3 (2007): 209–37.
value of concrete example. This is perhaps because reading affect through a technique
such as rhythm is by no means formulaic. A poet’s full expressive use of rhythm,
writes Attridge, involves not just ‘the imitation of speech’ but the selection of
linguistic forms which, as we read, ‘engage directly with the fundamental modes
of energy expenditure that characterise emotional and attitudinal conditions’.15
As I will discuss, this psychosomatic conceptualization of poetry gained consider
able force throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century theoretical discussions
of rhythm. Yet, as human beings, we are ever conscious of affect as lying somehow
beyond, or deeper than, our grasp. Even Attridge cannot quite affirm his coinage
of ‘affective rhythms’ since the characteristic patterns and dispositions of energy
in poetry are ever elusive when it comes to specific and defined categories of feel
ing. ‘Rhythmic forms’, he acknowledges, ‘are, so to speak, overdetermined, and it
is perhaps part of their function in poetry to broaden the scope of purely lexical
meanings by relating them to a less specific substratum of affective energy.’16 This
concept of a ‘substratum’ is one which recurs in thinking about affect. As implied
in the famously baffling exchange between Alice and the inhabitants of the Mad
Tea-Party in Alice’s Adventures (1864), what we say, even in poetry, is never quite
‘the same thing’ as what we mean:
‘Then you should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.
‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same
thing, you know.’
‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘You might just as well say that “I see
what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’17
As to ‘see’ is not to ‘eat’, to ‘mean’ is not to ‘say’. However genuinely Alice means what
she says, we cannot really articulate what we mean because feelings do not fit
definitions in this way. In a manner loyal to nonsense and lyric, this book does not
wish to resolve or diagnose the written word, but rather to acknowledge and
appreciate what we mean as lying beyond and beneath the definition of what we say.
Poetic form is useful for thinking about limitations because of how much it
plays with edges, borders, and fringes as well as surfaces and depths. These attri
butes can dramatize, in the difference between metre and rhythm for example, not
only the inevitable limits of critical language but the condition of being on the
edge or verge of certain modes or states without necessarily having fully suc
cumbed to them. As Angela Leighton writes while paraphrasing Coleridge on
form, ‘Form by itself has to be modified by a verb, as if to stop it hardening into a
15 Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry, p. 296. 16 Ibid., p. 298.

17 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (first pub. 1865; this edn London: Penguin
Books, 1998), p. 61.
introduction 5
mere object. Form is not a body but an agent. It forms.’18 Coleridge’s reading sug
gests that form lives by being held continuously in the present: it should be always
composing, but never composed. My engagement with lyric and nonsense
through the works of these poets is attentive to the need to invest this curious
activity—a forma efformans—in the affective imagination. Exploring the duality
of rhythm as a poetic technique and a recurrence of physiological processes, this
book asks what it can tell us about affect which time-worn and often deadening
medical and theoretical vernaculars and narratives cannot. As each of these chap
ters explores the activity of affect, it also asks questions about the possible func
tions of composition: is writing from a place of feeling, for example, a form of
self-harm, a therapeutic balm, or perhaps both, in the hands of the poet?
To argue that poetry embodies affective states might seem, on the face of it, like
a restatement of the naïve belief that a poem is written to express a poet’s feelings
and that criticism can reconstruct and give access to those feelings. This is not
what my close readings argue. There is a strange paradox at work in any critical
practice that explores affect; but, in general, this book seeks to avoid theory-
saturated assertions while complicating any neat understanding of ‘The
Intentional Fallacy’ (1949) or ‘The Affective Fallacy’ (1949). As Alex Houen notes
in his Introduction to Affect in Literature (2020),
recent experiments with cognitive psychologists have shown that fiction stimu
lates part of the brain associated with emotion in a similar fashion to non-
fictional stimuli. The psychologists have thereby made advances in an approach
to affect that W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley commented on disparagingly
some seventy years ago [. . .].19
Houen adds that ‘in conceiving the emotionality of fiction as interpersonal

(character or narrator to reader), [Wimsatt and Beardsley] tend to ignore the
role that genre, form and language can play in imaginatively figuring or trans
forming affect.’20 The fact that a poem is, in various ways, ‘performative’ does not
remove its affective potential because creativity is bound up with feeling and vice
versa. As William Empson writes, ‘Life involves maintaining oneself between
contradictions which can’t be solved by analysis.’21 If we are dealing with affect,
we are dealing with the uncategorizable and unnameable: fringes and edges,
shifts and contradictions. As Christopher Ricks argues:
Theory is hostile to contradictions; proverbs admit contradictions, and leave us

only (only!) to decide which of two contradictory proverbs applies on any
18 Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 7.
19 Houen, ‘Introduction’, Affect and Literature, p. 15. 20 Ibid.
21 William Empson, Complete Poems of William Empson, ed. by John Haffenden (London: Allen
Lane, 2000), p. 290.
particular occasion. Principles, like proverbs, suppose that difficulties are more
worth our attention than are problems [. . .].22
Though I believe, with Eliot, that ‘the meaning of a poem may be something larger
than its author’s conscious purpose, and something remote from its origins’,23 I do
not believe (with some theorists) in divorcing poets’ writing from their lives. As is
shown in the following chapters, biographical insight can often deepen the mystery.
Keats’s conception of ‘negative capability’—‘when a [person] is capable of being
in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason’—24 is as essential a quality in the critic of poetry as it is in the maker of poetry.
I. Affect and creativity
In ‘Is Mood a Language’, Julia Kristeva writes that ‘literary creation is that adventure
of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect’ and ‘transpose[s affect] into
rhythms, signs, forms’: ‘[t]he “semiotic” and the “symbolic” therefore become the
communicable marks of an affective reality, present, palpable to the reader.’25 Perhaps
part of the reason why literary critics have shied away from exploring affect in
poetic composition is due to the mysterious nature of both phenomena. Affect is
invisible—inner, unprinted, and sublime in its ongoing challenge to our understand
ing. Composition and creative process is also invisible and internal, though striving
for the visible and external. In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth figures
feelings as moving like water or blood through mind and body in continued ‘influxes’
which our thoughts then ‘modif[y]’ and ‘[direct]’.26 In ‘modification’, however, our
feelings quickly become ‘ghosts’ of themselves—tranquil rather than passionate. If we
apply this reading to form, composed affect is already dead and relegated to the past;
it is, then, the process of composing that the poet might more hungrily seek to
capture in their illustration of affect. The questionable ability of ‘tranquil’ recollec
tions to catch this ‘spontaneous overflow’ is one of poetry’s essential challenges.
As the definition and representation of affect has shape-shifted over time, science
has struggled to comprehend it. However, this very indefinability is what makes
affect such a fertile subject for the creative mind. ‘The fact that a certain type of
mental illness appears only in specific historical or geographical contexts’, observes
22 Christopher Ricks, ‘In Theory’, London Review of Books 3:7 (16 April 1981). Accessed at <https://
www-lrb-co-uk>.
23 Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’ (1942), in OPP, p. 22.
24 John Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. by H. E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1958), v. 1, pp. 193–4.
25 Julia Kristeva, ‘On the Melancholic Imaginary’, New Formations, 3 (Winter 1897), 5–18: 8. Kristeva
argues that affect, like mood, is situated at the crossroads between the body and language, ‘on the frontier
between animality and symbol formation’: ‘irreducible to verbal or semiological expression’, she writes,
‘affect corresponds to bodily encrypted energy that seeks to translate or transmute into something else’.
26 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth:
21st-Century Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 60. ‘[O]ur continued influxes of feeling
are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed representatives of all our past feelings.’
introduction 7
Ian Hacking, ‘does not imply that it is manufactured, artificial, or in any other way
not real’.27 Creativity plays a crucial role in the interpretation and comprehension of
affective experience, and this is reflected by the linguistic acrobatics with which
theorists and critics also seek to respond to affect. In her theoretical essay ‘Thinking
Affect’, Isobel Armstrong notes that ‘the constitutive nature of affect has been ignored
or bracketed in contemporary theory because of its seeming resistance to analysis’,
before stating her wish to consider what an ‘analytical poetics of emotion’ might look
like.28 Her essay opens with a string of synonyms for affect:
Emotions, feelings, passions, moods, anxiety, discharge of psychic energy, motor

innervation, pleasure, pain, joy and sorrow, rapture, depression. For the moment
I shall include all these under the general rubric of affect, even though it will
become apparent in the course of this discussion that they are differentiated, and
rightly, delicately distinguished in discussions of affective experience by philo
sophers and psychologists.29
Armstrong acknowledges that affects belong ‘to mind and soma’ and that they
‘straddle mind and physiology’, while arguing that the terms used to describe
them ‘are differentiated, and rightly, delicately distinguished’ by philosophers and
psychologists. How far is it ‘right’ to distinguish these terms? It is practical, neces
sary even, but is it ‘right’? Armstrong presupposes that ‘life is fed by emotions, the
cluster of experiences, both obvious and mysterious, that are summoned by the
semantic fields of [these] words.’30 Yet to whose life does she refer exactly—to
what extent is this fact true of every person at every point in time? Armstrong’s
critical writing demonstrates the allure of thinking about affect, but also the ways
in which this thinking can become all-inclusive without the value of example and
precise relation to an artistic practice. As her title (‘Thinking Affect’) suggests,
affect does not have an answer, and so her essay ranges over its theoretical history
while acknowledging the striking poverty of modernity’s accounts of emotion.
She quotes from Sigmund Freud’s lecture on ‘Anxiety’ (1916–17):
what is an affect in the dynamic sense? It is in any case something highly com
posite. An affect includes in the first place particular motor innervations or dis
charges, and secondly certain feelings; the latter are of two kinds—perception of
the feelings that have occurred and the direct feelings of pleasure and unpleasure
which, as we say, give the affect its keynote.31
27 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, p. 13.

28 Isobel Armstrong, ‘Thinking Affect’, in The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
2000), p. 13.
29 Ibid., p. 108. 30 Ibid.
31 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–17), trans. by James Strachey
(1963), Penguin Freud Library, v. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 443.
As Freud’s questioning separates feelings about affect into both feeling itself and
feeling about feeling, poetry can be at the same time expressing the instance of
feeling and reflecting on that instance. Armstrong points out that ‘only a musical
term, “keynote”, will do’ here, because affect has no ideational significance. ‘Where is
feeling, or affect, when it comes to language, or representation, then?’ she persists.32
This book reads affect through the lens of individual poetic composition—
through verse-making as a verbalized enterprise in ‘making’ and putting things
together, as opposed to the ‘made’ object hardened into past experience. In so
doing, it hopes to assess both the whereabouts of affect within linguistic represen
tation as well as its possible functions.
Paraphrasing André Green, Armstrong suggests that, while affect ‘makes us feel
alive’ and is ‘forever seeking representation’, it is primarily an unruly impulse that we
cannot control: ‘Affect rises, erupts from the interior of the body without the help of
representation. Representation is always secondary, always follows upon the blank,
the astonishment of affect.’33 Thinking of affect as a kind of volcanic lava rising and
erupting from an ‘interior’, before following as secondary representation ‘upon the
blank’, Armstrong’s analogy is not far from Tennyson’s description of the mysterious
‘Kraken’ which, once heated by the fires of the deep ‘In roaring shall he rise and on
the surface die.’ Regarding the representation of affect, Armstrong continues that:
‘Pauses, a choking voice, physical movement, panting, all these are part of the pros
ody of affect, the return of primal bodily material to language from the unsayable.’34
To speak of the ‘prosody of affect’ is tantalizing: can we trace something like this
working its way through the bodies of poems? As the poet Denise Riley suggests,
‘language does not so much “express feeling” but [. . .] in itself it “does” feeling’:
To think of the unconscious as incarnate in language stakes no territorial claim to

exclusivity and by no means obliterates the affect which is not in language, or is in
‘the body’. But feeling, articulated, is words and is also in the words. To distinguish
here between language as carrier of emotion and language as emotion is impos
sible, and pointless. [. . .] affect is not only conveyed ‘by means of’ the word as a
vehicle; to some extent, the forms of language immediately enact it in themselves.35
While, as Riley admits, there are a myriad of emotions ‘never verbally shaped,
stubbornly resistant to being voiced, or comical if translated’, feeling both ‘is’
words and is also ‘in’ words.
The poets I discuss each engage with the unsayable in different ways: while
Lear felt his morbids to be unmentionable both morally and physically, Eliot’s
suggestive phrase at the start of The Waste Land drafts—‘I could not/ Speak’
32 Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, p. 110.

33 André Green, Le discourse vivant (1973), paraphrased in The Radical Aesthetic, p. 117.
35 Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p. 36.
introduction 9
(underlined by Pound)—could serve as an abstract for the poem as a whole.36

Smith’s verse also concerns itself with the unscannable character of feeling.
Attempting to define why affect spurs on creativity, Armstrong proffers that:
it is the space between thought and word, the gap in which thought and lan
guage do not fit, which enables a process of translation for communication. This
translation can register the counterpart of thought in words, but because this is
not exact the subject is forced into linguistic creativity, as it attempts to seek a
unique equivalent for unique inner speech.37
The ‘unique equivalent’ for this inner speech is, in this case, poetic representation.
Leighton’s critical appreciation of form suggests that ‘although it looks like a fixed
shape, a permanent configuration or ideal, whether in eternity, in the mind, or on
the page, in fact form is mobile, versatile. It remains open to distant senses, dis
tortions, to the push-and-pull of opposites or cognates.’38 This sense of form’s
versatility and mobility is appropriate to the nature of affect as always on the
move, striving for communication: a verbal state rather than a fixed noun, and a
mode that cannot really have a ‘form’ in the possessive sense.
This book aims to explore affect in the poetries of Lear, Eliot, and Smith, and in
doing so form a triumvirate of three poets writing in different periods who never
theless share similar drives when it comes to composition. Of course, these writers
are not all ‘vires’, and gendered assumptions about emotion, reason, and the body
have coloured the way in which critics have historically approached their work.
My readings seek to buck this trend while contributing to existing criticism on
these writers.39 In response to, and as part of, a surge of literary critical interest in
the deep suggestions inherent in poetic form,40 this book seeks to understand
36 Thomas Docherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London: Edinburgh University

Press, 1990), pp. 150–7.
37 Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, p. 141. 38 Leighton, On Form, p. 3.
39 As shown by the recent increased attention to the body in Lear criticism, a more comprehensive
attention to affect will help us to appreciate his writing and person more deeply (especially in terms of
its, and his, hypersensitivity). See, for example, Jasmine Jagger and Matthew Bevis, ‘Edward Lear’s
Feelings’ (Oxford Apple Podcasts); Sara Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2019), and Matthew Bevis, ‘Falling for Edward Lear’, in Edward Lear and the
Play of Poetry, ed. by James Williams and Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
While critics have explored Eliot’s treatment for neurasthenia while he was writing The Waste Land, a
sustained reading of nervousness in his early work has not been attempted until now. See YE, and
Anthony Cuda, ‘T. S. Eliot’s Etherized Patient’, Twentieth Century Literature 50:4 (Winter, 2004):
394–420. The three existing critical monographs on Smith appreciate her primarily as a master crafts
man or feminist: see, respectively, Will May, Stevie Smith and Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010); Laura Severin, Stevie Smith’s Resistant Antics (Madison, Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1997); and Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005). Despite Frances Spalding’s detailed descriptions of the poet’s mental suffering in FS,
criticism has until now neglected to consider the role played by affect in her work.
40 Kirstie Blair argues that an intense focus on the heart in major Victorian poems highlights ‘a
more general nineteenth-century poetic anxiety about affect, the power to convey feeling and
emotion from poet to reader through the medium of the text’. See Kirstie Blair, Victorian Poetry and
the Culture of the Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 12. Jason Rudy explores how
Victorian poetry links the rhythms of the human body to what Tennyson called ‘an indefinable
poets as deeply conscious of the ways in which their feelings feed and influence
their creative process.
II. The poets’ affects
Lear
Lear was given to tears, as all of his biographers confirm. In Vivien Noakes’s
introduction to The Complete Nonsense, she describes how ‘When [Lear] was about
seven, the strange turbulence of his childhood began to show itself in swings of
mood and bouts of acute depression which he called “the Morbids”.’41 The first of
these, she says, arose after ‘a rare happy evening with his father’, which he recollects in
his diary many decades later while feeling ‘sad & depressed hideously’:
the heart ache of many phases of life breaks one to pieces

The earliest of all the morbidnesses I can recollect must have been somewhere
about 1819—when my Father took me to a field near Highgate, where was a
rural performance of gymnastic clowns &c.,—& a band. The music was good,—
at least it attracted me:—& the sunset & twilight I remember as if yesterday.
And I can recollect crying half the night after all the small gaiety broke up—&
also suffering for days at the memory of the past scene.42
‘[E]very profound experience’, writes Walter Benjamin, ‘longs to be insatiable,

longs for return and repetition until the end of time, and for the reinstatement of
an original condition from which it sprang. The transformation of a shattering
experience into habit—that is the essence of play.’43 In the days following the
ulsation/ Inaudible to outward sense’, and makes connections between this and the Victorian
p
response to electricity. See Jason Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 2009), p. 63. Matthew Campbell describes the tension between Victorian writing’s
anxious sense of powerlessness and ‘the centrality of individual agency in the unfolding of the self ’—
the need for ‘vital and active willing’ to overcome one’s ‘weakness’ and avoid giving in to merely being
‘a bundle of sensations’. Looking at ‘prosodic practice’, he argues, ‘enables us to listen for the rhythms
of will which emerge from the representation of experiences of self through the bodily experience of a
poetry which is conscious of itself as voiced sound.’ See Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 3–8. Shelley Trower’s Senses of Vibration: A
History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012) explores how twentieth-century
vibrations provided a means of bridging science and art. Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015) charts the behaviour, illustration, and theory of ‘weeping Britons’ from
medieval to present times. Tom Lutz’s Crying chronicles how weeping has been understood from the
fourteenth century BC to today. Lutz’s earlier work American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History
(London: Cornell University Press, 1991) records the widespread occurrence of neurasthenia or ‘the blues’
and therefore ‘neurasthenic language’ among American literature and culture in and around 1903.
41 Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (London: Fontana, 1979), p. 15.
42 D, 24 March 1877.
43 Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play: Marginal Notes on a Monumental Work’, review of Karl Grober,
Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit: Eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs [Children’s Toys from Olden Times: A
History of Toys] (Berlin 1928), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, v. 2, pt. 1: 1927–1930, ed. by
introduction 11
happy ‘scene’, the seven-year-old replays it in his memory; but each time the
gaiety ‘breaks up’, the ‘shattering’ recurs, and he breaks into tears. The young Lear’s
painful disappointment that such happiness must come to an end transforms
into his ‘habit’ of repeating it in the manner of a broken record to temporarily
ward off morbidness.44 Lear refers to his heart ache as ‘the’ heartache, and him
self breaking to pieces as ‘one’ breaking to pieces, as though distancing himself
from his own morbidity. At the same time, his prose performs the curious
tension involved in composing discomposure: ‘—& the sunset & twilight

I remember [. . .]. And I can recollect crying [. . .]—& also suffering for days [. . .]’.
As it recollects a broken self, Lear’s language breaks into dashes rebuilt by
ampersands attempting to prolong the recollection. The first time Lear perceives
himself as being conquered by his emotion, then, is the first time he defines
himself as ‘morbid’.
In W. H. Auden’s poem, ‘Edward Lear’, he illustrates Lear as someone who was
‘guided by’ his ‘tears’ to write:
Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white

Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night.
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.
The legions of cruel inquisitive They

Were so many and big like dogs: he was upset
By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:
But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.45
Auden draws on Angus Davidson’s 1938 biography of Lear to suggest him as

someone who was frequently ‘upset’ by things, but pushed by this emotional dis
comfort into playful composition. Appropriately, Auden’s lines take on a subtly
tearful character. Dactylic rhythms slump or fall just as we feel they should kick
up in word choices: ‘cruel’ (5) and ‘miles’ (7), for example, are extended to the sad
der ‘cru-el’ (/x) and ‘mi-les’ (/x); ‘wept’ (3) and ‘tears’ (8) are given stress; and the
stress of ‘lone’ in ‘breakfast alone on’ (1) is immediately followed by the unstressed
‘on’ (/x x/x) so that the sadness of being alone sounds more resigned than exclama
tory—more of a sigh than a cry. According to the metre, ‘away’ and ‘Regret’ should
both end on rising rhythms, but their sad meanings encourage the voice to fall
down at the ends of both lines. Auden’s melancholic tone moves through his poem
about Lear as Lear’s own nonsensical rhythms moved through the course of his
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press,
2005), p. 120.
44 This reading has been published in Jasmine Jagger, ‘The Endlessness of Alice’, The Cambridge
Quarterly 45:1 (March 2016): 92.
45 W. H. Auden, ‘Edward Lear’ (1938, pub. 1940). See CN, p. xviii.
weepy life. As well as drawing on the nonsense poet’s life, Auden draws on Lear’s
autobiographical poem ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’ (also featuring dactyls and
falling rhythms) whose penultimate stanza characterizes him as a weeper:
He weeps by the side of the ocean,

He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
(CN, 428)
Here, Lear’s weeping is not necessarily for anything in particular—true, he hated

his big nose and struggled with his exhausting profession as a landscape painter,
but he was also upset by ‘big dogs’ and ‘Germans’, reflecting how, for Lear, tears
were about both everything and nothing. As he himself well knew, especially as
someone who suffered from depression, there is not always a clear rhyme and
reason for our tears. One of Lear’s unpublished rhymes from 1849 in ‘Ribands
and pigs’, for example, demonstrates how a weeper might be set off by the slightest
and strangest of things: two herons keeping each other company; the silhouettes
of chimney sweeps; affectionate pairs of turbans or sheep (Fig. 0.1):
Herons & Sweeps

Turbans & Sheeps
Set him a weeping
& see how he weeps
(CN, 137)
Fig. 0.1. Edward Lear, ‘Herons & sweeps: drawing and verse’, Edward Lear
miscellaneous drawings, MS Typ 55.14, (53). Houghton Library, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Mass.
introduction 13
The sheer sensitivity of this lonely weeper recalls what Chichester Fortescue
called Lear’s ‘great and self-tormenting sensitiveness’.46 Lear could quite easily
and violently be moved by a landscape, for example, or a vivid memory from
the past.
Lear also secretly suffered from epilepsy, and he felt this condition to be some
how linked to his morbids. Like his epilepsy, Lear’s bouts of depression often
returned to him in fits: ‘unsought morbid feelings—(certainly unsought—for
I knew not what even the meaning of morbid was in those days)’ that would ‘crop
up’ out of nowhere.47 In her recent biography, Jenny Uglow investigates the nature
of Lear’s epilepsy. These were not grand mal seizures, she suggests, but ‘complex
partial seizures’: focal epilepsy affecting the temporal lobe, involved in processing
memory, smell, taste, music and language’:
Sufferers experience a powerful ‘aura’, a wave of overwhelming dread, or a

surging thrill of ecstatic joy, or a tremor of physical excitement. As this
spreads, it can bring a rush of strange sensations, hallucinations of smell
or taste, distortions of memory such as déjà vu or jamais vu, a sense of
shrinking and expanding like Alice [. . .], of spinning through space, watching
the self from above or dissolving in a storm of images. This state can be
linked, too, to violent emotions, and—as for Lear—it can bring confusion,
twitching and strange, jerky movements. Lear almost always felt the fits com
ing and could hide himself away.48
As potentially linked to ‘violent emotions’, Lear’s epilepsy sits closely beside his
weeping, forming a bridge between emotional and sensory experience. As Sara
Lodge observes, ‘Around a third of epileptics suffer from depression. Lear was one
of them. [. . . He understood] that his physical, mental and emotional life were all
one. [. . .] This made self-regulation necessary’.49 The sensation of watching the
self from above also relates to Lear’s tearful self-portraits, anticipating Freud’s
definition of the double perspective of affect. Helmuth Plessner calls genuine
episodes of crying ‘uncontrolled and unformed eruptions of the body, which act,
as it were, autonomously. Man falls into their power; [. . .] and lets himself
break—into tears.’50 For Plessner, crying is the embodiment of man’s existential
‘shattering’: a ‘break’ of composure in which man responds to ‘unanswerable’
46 Chichester Fortescue, quoted in Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (London:
Fontana, 1979), p. 129.
47 D, 1 June 1870.
48 Jenny Uglow, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), p. 17.
49 Sara Lodge, Inventing Edward Lear (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2019), p. 7.
50 Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 31.
situations ‘with his body as body, as if from the impossibility of being able to find
an answer himself ’:
in the loss of control over himself and his body, he reveals himself at the same
time as a more than bodily being who lives in a state of tension with regard to
his physical existence [,] yet is wholly and completely bound to it.51
This tense relationship between mind and body is frequently staged by Lear’s
writing, which dramatizes emotions as taking over the body in unpredictable and
uncomfortable ways. However, while Lear’s morbids were ‘unsought’, he also felt
them to be part of his creative make-up (see chapter one, ‘Lear’s Tears’), and this
could relate, medically, to their place within the temporal lobe too.
Exploring Lear’s poetry, drafts, diaries, and correspondence, I examine within
his composition a dramatic tension between affective life and its suppression in
form. From the private dramatizations of tears in Lear’s letters and diaries, to the
public performances of emotion within his limericks, Lear’s morbids find their
way out of his writing in unusual and revealing ways. Within this writing is fig
ured Lear’s paradoxical feeling towards his morbids. Take the word ‘smash’, used
below, to describe the suppression of a winged figure dancing with its own dark
shadow (Fig. 0.2):
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

Who danced a quadrille with a raven;
But they said, ‘It’s absurd to encourage this bird!’
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
(CN, 172)
Fig. 0.2. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man of Whitehaven’, in A Book of Nonsense
(London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1846).
51 Ibid.
introduction 15
A cruel inquisitive ‘they’ takes pains to ‘smash’ a bursting, disorderly life. It

would be ‘absurd’, the limerick confirms, to encourage our morbid energies
to dance out in public. Elsewhere, however, the dancing gifts that come with
disorder are appreciated as a triumph, however ‘vex[ing]’ they may appear to their
audience (Fig. 0.3):
There was an old man on the Border,

Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
(CN, 353)
Fig. 0.3. Edward Lear, ‘There was an Old Man on the Border’, in More Nonsense,
Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, etc (London: R. J. Bush, 1872).
To be ‘on the Border’, here, is to be living ‘in’ a place of ‘utmost disorder’. Lear’s
poetic forms, I argue, represent this intense space, by flirting with the confines of
metre and rhythm.
Eliot
In Robert Crawford’s biography, Young Eliot, he suggests that Eliot’s bouts of poor
health in early life may have inspired some of his greatest works. Eliot’s experi
ence of ‘cerebral anaemia’ (then seen as a ‘nervous’ illness) in 1911, writes
Crawford, ‘coincided with a poetic breakthrough’, and ‘Later in life he came to sus
pect that sickness and poetic creativity could be linked.’52 Despite dangling infer
ences that Prufrock ‘dealt with weakness’, Crawford ultimately shies away from a
52 YE, p. 159.
sustained reading of physical vulnerability in the poem, turning instead to focus

on its collective inspirations.53 Later in this biography, Crawford acknowledges
that Eliot wrote ‘Gerontion’ shortly after having what he called ‘a sort of collapse
[. . .] I feel very weak and easily exhausted.’54 ‘As had happened before,’ writes the
biographer, ‘illness helped him release poetry on which he had been brooding.’55
While composing The Waste Land, Crawford later remarks, ‘Once again, Tom’s
creative endeavour and illness operated eerily in tandem.’56 This poem’s first two
parts were written in May 1921 in the lead-up to Eliot’s nervous breakdown in
late September while living with Vivien in London.57 ‘Tom has had a rather ser
ious breakdown’, Vivien wrote to Schofield Thayer on 13 October.58 After seeing a
‘nerve man’ in London, Eliot was sent, on doctor’s orders, to Margate for three
months of strict rest and recuperation: ‘I really feel very shaky, and seem to have
gone down rapidly’, he wrote to Aldington that October.59 On 12 November, Eliot
travelled to Lausanne to be treated for psychological troubles by a recommended
specialist for neurasthenia, Dr Roger Vittoz. The poet wrote the majority of The
Waste Land while living in isolation and undergoing Vittoz’s treatment through
out November and December, and added a number of fragments upon returning
to London in January 1922 with a bad case of influenza.60
Crawford’s informative narrative highlights the difficulty of knowing how to
write about emotional and sensory experience as a wellspring of creativity. Calling
the poem ‘a lasting cry, giving voice to a darkness deep in the human psyche’, the
biographer insightfully alludes to its rhythms as ‘Shifting, spiky, flowing, weird,
haunting’ but does not demonstrate how or why this may be so.61 Aided by the
pithiness of retrospect, Crawford’s excellent material risks constructing an over-
simple plot about composition. Valerie Eliot’s introduction to The Waste Land
Facsimile and Drafts suggestively frames the poem’s manuscripts through
moments in the Eliots’ correspondence where they account for their illness. Eric
Griffiths pursues this aspect of the work in a review of the second volume of
Eliot’s letters (from 1923 to 1925), concluding that:
Eliot’s writing is in its element when it represents the verge of being worn out,
from [. . .] the ‘voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells’ of The
Waste Land to the ‘Rose’ which ‘Ash-Wednesday’ calls in one breath ‘Exhausted and
life-giving’. His was in this respect grim writing, and the story of the attritional
processes, verbal and nervous, which produced it, makes grim reading.62
53 Ibid., p. 160. 54 Ibid., p. 314. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 424.

57 See Lawrence Rainey, The Annotated Waste Land, with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 17–24.
58 L1, p. 592. 59 Ibid., p. 586.
60 Eliot, letter to Scofield Thayer, 20 January 1922: ‘am in bed with influenza’. See L1, p. 623.
61 YE, p. 423.
62 Eric Griffiths, ‘Experimental Highs: Chloral Hydrate, Bertrand Russell and Little Poetry: Married
Life for the Author of The Waste Land’, Times Literary Supplement (14 May 2010): 3–5: 3.
introduction 17
There is an important distinction between a language that represents being ‘worn

out’ (as Crawford describes) and a language that represents ‘the verge of being
worn out’. The first is shaped; the second is actively shaping. This is how affect
might be said to ‘live’ inside of the temporality of a poem. In Eliot’s definition of
the ‘auditory imagination’, he persistently makes use of present participles to
describe the poet’s ‘feeling’ for sound:
the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of
thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and
forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the
beginning and the end.63
‘Penetrating’; ‘invigorating’; ‘sinking’; ‘returning’; ‘seeking’—as a poet concerned

with the living qualities of feeling, this is Eliot’s signature tune. One thinks of the
opening pages of The Waste Land groping for a half-buried life beneath ‘forgetful
snow’: ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony
rubbish?’ The imaginative process is active and acting within language, always
‘seeking’ as it feels for syllable and rhythm, like a hand palping for green roots in
grey soil. Eliot’s repeated ‘the’ before words referring to affect (‘the feeling’, ‘the
conscious levels of thought and feeling’, ‘the most primitive and forgotten’) makes
this process sound both oddly specific and abstractly universal, almost undoing
the certainty of the description in the very act of its being penned. Such prose
suggests an evasive mystery at the heart of composition.
After Conrad Aiken wrote to Eliot praising Poems 1909–1925, the poet
responded with a printed page torn out of The Midwives Gazette on which he had
underlined in ink the words: ‘Blood’, ‘mucous’, ‘shreds of mucous’, and ‘purulent
offensive discharge’.64 Eliot’s gruesome act points to his own composition as
strangely visceral matter, alive and festering, in the act of being coughed up.
Reading about this incident later in life, Eliot wrote a belated apology to Aiken in
which he confessed to being ‘somewhat shocked to find myself described as having
a streak of sadism in my nature’.65 Here, Eliot both accepts and shirks responsibility
for the very ‘streak’ that gave his writing its edge. Indeed, Eliot’s interest in poetry
resides in its ability to bring this wriggling, lively condition to life in language, and
his writing often deliberately teeters on the edge between the serious and the sav
age, as in the dictum:
Critics sometimes tell us to ‘look into our hearts and write’. But that is not look
ing deep enough; Racine and Donne looked into a good deal more than the
63 Eliot, UPUC, p. 663.

64 Eliot, letter to Conrad Aiken, c.January 1926. See L3, p. 43n. With thanks to Allen Jenkins.
65 Ibid., p. 44n.
heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the
digestive tracts.66
This pronouncement is both formal and funny; offhand and put-on. As Eliot
describes the poet’s need to look into his brain, body, and bowels to write, he
almost takes on the dramatic voice of a ghost or horror story narrator. The per
formance is partly genuine, and Eliot repeatedly apprehended the similarities
between mystical experience and composition. In the Conclusion to The Use of
Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1932–33), for example, he writes that ‘I know, for
instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility, or anaemia [. . .] produce an efflux
of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing.’67 How far
might Eliot be subtextually negotiating on this subject with W. B. Yeats and his
‘automatic script’?68 Angela Leighton close reads how ‘Yeats, as a poet, works
within fairly regular metres, but his rhythms, surprising and counterpointing,
carry the sound of his own poetic voice.’69 Eliot’s gesture towards the writer’s
potential spirit-medium also appears not long after he had converted to Anglo-
Catholicism (in 1927), and it is curious to consider how far how the poet’s reli
gious commitment to the doctrine of the Incarnation may bear on his convictions
about literary embodiment. Eliot continues in The Use of Poetry that:
What one writes in this way may succeed in standing the examination of a more
normal state of mind; it gives me the impression, as I have just said, of having
undergone a long incubation, though we do not know until the shell breaks
what kind of egg we have been sitting on.70
This efflux ‘may’ stand the ‘examination’ of ‘a more normal state of mind’, or it
may, on the other hand, be deemed intolerable or incomprehensible. Similarly,
Eliot’s prose here fluctuates between a ‘normal’ critically sombre tone and a
more absurdly clownish one (picturing humans sitting on eggs), demonstrating
how difficult it is to construct analogies about affect and composition, while
performing the tussle between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ states of mind within a
single sentence.
Eliot’s metaphor for poetry as conception—‘a painful and unpleasant busi
ness’71—feels in tune with Armstrong’s remark that ‘We should be thinking
of the reproductions of affective life within the text itself.’72 Conception and
66 Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) in Rainey (ed.), The Annotated Waste Land, p. 200.
67 Eliot, UPUC, p. 686.
68 This was composed between October 1917 and March 1920. See Yeats’s Vision Papers, ed. by
Steve L. Adams et al, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1992).
69 Leighton, On Form, p. 152. 70 Eliot, UPUC, p. 686. 71 Eliot, UPUC, pp. 144–5.
introduction 19
creation, like affect, straddle the corporeal and cerebral. As Armstrong claims,
affect should be investigated as having ‘devious evidences’ and ‘cheating itself into
language’ rather than being represented formulaically:
If affect is untranslatable, and cannot be in language, cannot have a content, we

might seek for devious evidences of its inscription and consider the way it cheats
itself into language or inhibits symbol-making, but in the last analysis the idea of
substitution has to be abandoned and replaced by a dynamic understanding of
the text as generating new affect patterns and thought structures.73
Similarly, Eliot describes composition as at once ‘an incantation, an outburst of

words which we hardly recognise as our own’74 and a motion ‘terminating in an
arrangement of words on paper’.75 From this double-perspective, verse-making
involves overflow as well as control:76 in the act of breaking down under the
weight of feeling, the man that suffers becomes the mind that creates what
Armstrong might call ‘new affect patterns and thought structures’, which must be
understood dynamically.77
Smith
In her biography of Smith, Frances Spalding refers to the poet’s ‘Anger and refusal
to turn aside from pain’; her ‘humour that keeps despair at bay;’ and the ways in
which her ‘breezy common-sense, shrewdness and stoicism combat melancholy’.78
Spalding re-employs Pompey’s self-portrait in Novel on Yellow Paper as a ‘tiger on
padded paw’ for the title of one of her chapters, which frequently observes Smith’s
anarchic temperament.79 Spalding also provides details on Smith’s suicide attempt,
which was rumoured as an attempt at murder as well as self-murder: in 1953, she
lunged at her employer with a pair of scissors before turning them on herself and
slashing her wrist. More recently, Hermione Lee has described Smith as ‘a nipper
and a snapper, not a roarer and a render’ tapping into Smith’s aggression as more
playful than malicious.80
While Smith was arch in remodelling her voice in relation to those who had
gone before, she was also direct about the biographical nature of her poems—
when asked which ones were about herself, she replied: ‘all of the ones about being
73 Ibid. 74 Eliot, UPUC, p. 686. 75 Ibid.

76 This brings us back to Wordsworth’s description of ‘all good poetry’ as ‘the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings’.
77 Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, p. 124. 78 FS, pp. xvii, 14. 79 Ibid., p. 167.
80 Hermione Lee, speaking at ‘ “We All Have These Thoughts Sometimes”: A Conference on the
Work of Stevie Smith’, 11 March 2016, Jesus College, Oxford.
dead or dotty.’ In a 1963 interview with Jonathan Williams, the poet explains: ‘In a
poem you can turn the emotions and feelings onto someone else, onto different
characters. You can invent stories. [. . .] The poem can claim to be about a cat but it
is really about you yourself.’81 To John Hayward in 1942, she admits to being
driven to write by negative feelings:
How I wish my muse would not only respond to the disagreeable and sad,
because I nearly always feel agreeable and happy, and then—never a word, Muse
velly dumb, but as soon as anything goes wrong, the old girl gets going. It is
sickening.82
This tiptoes between self-confession and self-parody—the Muse is an ‘old girl’

speaking through the writer: separate from, but also part of, her.
Smith’s ‘disagreeable’ feelings in the lead-up to her suicide attempt are drama
tized in poetry which figuratively scratches out as though to abate a returning
urge to scratch out in real life. After 1953, however, there is a sharp turning point
in the journey of Smith’s poetry, which moves from primarily aggressive to primar
ily estranged and off-kilter in tone. Rather than scratching out, I argue, her verses
scratch around for expression, moving closer to nonsense as her disorder begins
to dominate her writing. Smith takes on increased suspicion about her own ‘hand’,
and her poetic lines might be more fittingly described as rich and strange rather
than ‘headlong and panting’.83 The relation between self and disorder dramatized
in these works culminates in a literal struggle with language in the last two years
of Smith’s life, during which she suffered from increasing intracranial pressure
caused by a tumour on her left cerebral hemisphere. Using Smith’s final letters and
verses alongside surviving anecdotes about her time in hospital, I explore how the
mental ‘pressure’ Smith had earlier figured as inspiring her verse becomes a literal
pressure that disorders her language, leaving her to rely, increasingly, on rhythm
to communicate. These observations suggest disorder to be a source for Smith’s
composition both psychologically and physiologically, as well as something her
writing is by turns seduced and assailed by.
Reviewing Noakes’s biography of Lear in a 1968 article titled ‘Pleasant to Know’
(for The Sunday Times), Smith cannot help but align herself with Lear’s comedic
illustrations of uncomfortable experience. Ill feeling, she recounts, ‘bit upon poor
Lear’s nerves when they were aging’ and ‘bites upon ours as we read of them [. . .].
How ghastly Lear makes it sound sometimes, and how funny!’84 How ‘awfully
81 Smith, interviewed by Jonathan Williams, ‘Much Further Out Than You Thought’ (1963), Sanford
Sternlicht (ed.), In Search of Stevie Smith (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 46.
82 Smith, letter to John Hayward, 24 April 1942, MA, p. 283.
83 Calvin Bedient refers to Smith’s lines as ‘Headlong and painting’ in Eight Contemporary Poets
(Oxford University Press: London, 1974), p. 154.
84 Smith, ‘Pleasant to Know’, 13 October 1968, The Sunday Times, p. 61. Accessed at the British
Library.
introduction 21
funny’, perhaps, to know Mr Lear. When speaking of the comedy of Lear’s art,
Smith veers close to prior explanations of her own: ‘The fun and laughter he left
behind [. . .] and all beneath it that twists and disturbs, ate its great strength out of
him leaving him half dead long before he died.’85 Disorder is felt by Smith to be
something lurking and twisting ‘beneath’ Lear’s ‘fun and laughter’, which ‘eats’ and
‘bites’ away at him and, in turn, ‘bites’ away at us as we read him. Such peculiar
consumptive terms also crop up in Smith’s review of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.
Attracted to the disturbed utterance of Eliot’s female chorus, Smith writes:
They are a curious lot. They are really saying all the time ‘I am afraid,’ and with
colour and with variety they say it, ‘I have eaten the living lobster, the crab, the
oyster, and they live and spawn in my bowels.’86
Smith speaks of these ‘living’ creatures in a present tense (and using a present
participle) that looks forward to a continued future in which they ‘live and spawn’.
Both Lear and the chorus are presented by Smith as nibbled and scratched away
at by disorderly feeling, which takes on a curious life of its own within the speaker.
Writing this review, Smith looks back with one eye on the republication of The
Waste Land in 1940 and perhaps also Eliot’s strange declaration about writing
from ‘the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’.87 As though
aware of how poetic utterance could bubble up from these dark sites, Smith peers
into the ‘bowels’ of Eliot’s nervous chorus members as he felt poets should look
‘into’ their own. Her review continues that ‘Eliot is peculiar’ for ‘these dreams of
corruption entering the body like a pattern of living worms in the guts of the
women of Canterbury’, again placing emphasis on ‘living’ energies:
it is a private horror (and it is communicated) [. . .] which makes that book such

painful reading—a living body entering a living body to feed and live within it
and upon it. So to fear must be added disgust. The sense of disgust in the chorus
is the most living thing out of all the play. It is splendidly alive, this sense [. . .].88
Disorderly feeling is imagined as a ‘living body’ or ‘living thing’ entering another

‘living body’ to feed ‘upon’ it but also ‘to feed’ it. This relationship is not parasitical
but symbiotic and reproductive: the host feeds off its parasite for life to repro
duce a ‘living thing’. Eliot, she writes, ‘makes us sure that he feels, and especially
that he feels disgust and enjoys feeling disgust and indulges this feeling with the
85 Ibid.
86 Smith, ‘History or Poetic Drama?’ (T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday, 1958),
MA, pp. 148–52 (p. 149).
87 Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) in The Annotated Waste Land, p. 200.
88 Smith, ‘History or Poetic Drama?’, MA, p. 150.
best of his poetry.’89 Eliot’s ‘indulg[ing]’ in this sickened ‘feeling’ is, for Smith, what
brings his writing twistingly and affectively alive. Recalling this ‘poetry’, she observes
how it ‘mounts’, ‘sinks’, and feeds off the disagreeable: ‘The weather and landscapes
are most alive when they are ugly.’ Confessing to being ‘draw[n] after’ this condition
of writing as ‘strong in its feelings’ and ‘abominable’ in its thought, Smith both
reveres and toys with Eliot’s affective style of writing.90
III. Affect and rhythm
For nineteenth-century poets, perhaps the most acclaimed theories of metrical

composition were those of Wordsworth and Coleridge. In his Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth writes about metre’s function to restrain pas
sionate feeling since ‘excitement is an unusual and irregular state of mind’ and if
‘the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected with them,
there is some danger that the excitement may be carried beyond its proper
bounds’:
Now the co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has
been accustomed when in an unexcited or a less excited state, cannot but have
great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an intertexture of
ordinary feeling.91
Wordsworth suggests that metre should be affective, but that it should also pre
vent feeling from overspilling into passion. ‘[M]ore pathetic situations and senti
ments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with
them,’ he adds, ‘may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme,
than in prose.’92 ‘Endured’ is an important word here, meaning ‘To harden,
strengthen’: ‘to make sturdy or robust’, or ‘support’, but also ‘To last’, ‘persist, “hold
out” ’, and ‘To undergo, bear, sustain’.93 If metre is something that we lean on in
critical situations, what might it represent to break with metre? Coleridge furthers
Wordsworth’s theory in Biographia Literaria (1817), tracing the origin of rhythm
to ‘the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to
hold in check the workings of passion’.94 However, in a well-known 1802 letter to
William Southeby, Coleridge partly contradicts this statement, writing that ‘metre
itself implies a passion, i.e. a state of excitement, both in the Poet’s mind, & is
expected in that of the Reader—and tho’ I stated this to Wordsworth [. . .] yet he
89 Ibid. 90 Ibid., p. 152. 91 Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, p. 72.

92 Ibid. 93 OED, ‘endure’ (v), 1, 3b, 2a, 3a.
94 S. T. Coleridge, Collected Works, v. 7: Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson
Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), v. 2, p. 64.
introduction 23
has [not] done justice to it’.95 Although ‘implies’ could be read in an older sense to
suggest that metre ‘folds in the passion, enwraps and entangles’ passion,96 it seems
as though Coleridge envisages two roles for metre as he envisaged two roles for
the imagination: to manifest, as well as to bind, disorderly affect. By the middle of
the nineteenth century, poetry was being compared to music in both its affective
and its functional nature. As Herbert Spencer declared in 1857:
Like music, poetry has its root in those natural modes of expression which
accompany deep feeling. Its rhythm, its strong and numerous metaphors, its
hyperboles, its violent inversions, are simply exaggerations of the traits of excited
speech. To be good, therefore, poetry must pay attention to those laws of ner
vous action which excited speech obeys. In intensifying and combining the traits
of excited speech, it must have due regard to proportion—must not use its appli
ances without restriction; but, where the ideas are least emotional, must use the
forms of poetical expression sparingly; must use them more freely as the emo
tion rises; and must carry them to their greatest extent, only where the emotion
reaches a climax.97
Spencer acknowledges that poetry’s affective power lies in its ‘rhythm’ and ‘violent
inversions’, which act like exaggerations of feeling incited in the voice by the ‘laws
of nervous action’. Yet he also prescribes a specific function for affect in poetry,
which, as it intensifies feeling, must also have ‘due regard to proportion’ and
restriction. Without these restrictions, the emotional excitements of speech are
carried beyond proper bounds resulting in varieties of ‘bombast’ or ‘doggerel’ that
are, he adds, ‘inartistic’.98 Spencer’s was an influential voice in shaping Victorian
perceptions not only about the physiology of feeling but also about the place of
lyric poetry within the science of the emotions.99
Derek Attridge refers directly to the ‘affective functions’ of poetic rhythm
across all periods of literature.100 More specifically, Kirstie Blair notes that ‘Hints
that rhythm could have an affective function [. . .] were increasingly taken up by
writers from the 1830s onward, and the focus gradually shifts from discussing
95 S. T. Coleridge, letter to William Sotheby, 13 July 1802, Collected Letters of S. T. Coleridge, ed. by
Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), v. 2, p. 812.
96 This is proposed by J. R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 40. Quoted by Blair in Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart, p. 78.
97 Herbert Spencer, Essays on Education (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911), p. 34. 98 Ibid.
99 Describing the rhythm of human ‘consciousness’ as well as of bodily processes, Spencer remarks
in ‘The Rhythm of Motion’ that ‘a much more conspicuous rhythm, having longer waves, is seen during
the outflow of emotion into dancing, poetry, and music’. Of rhythm’s place in relation to feeling and
art, he concludes that the ‘several kinds of rhythm characterising aesthetic expression are not [. . .] arti
ficial, but are intenser forms of an undulatory movement habitually generated by feeling in its bodily
discharge.’ See Herbert Spencer, First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1862), p. 265.
100 See Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry, pp. 295–300, p. 304, p. 331, p. 350.
metre primarily as an agent of control to considering rhythm as expressive in

itself.’101 Blair’s unconscious shift of synonym from ‘metre’ as ‘control’ to ‘rhythm’
as ‘expressive’ reflects the common characteristics that have long been attached to
these two terms. By 1912, Ezra Pound had declared:
I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm,’ a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds

exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm
must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeit
ing, uncounterfeitable.102
Pound’s words, arriving at the midpoint between the works spanned by this book
(between 1846 and 1971) distil a central aspect of my argument about rhythm as
re-envisaging the affective sources and functions of poetic practice. Suggesting
that a poet’s rhythm is unique to their individuality and particular ‘shade of emo
tion’ (a person’s ‘rhythm’ will be their ‘own’), Pound states that it is therefore
impossible to fake or feign. However, Pound’s argument that rhythm ‘corresponds
exactly’ to a person’s emotion is troubling, since there are just as many limitations
as possibilities opened up by this technique.
Relatively recent considerations of the affective role of rhythm such as Amittai
Aviram’s Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994) discuss how ‘poetic
meaning can be understood as an interpretation or representation—an allegory—
of the bodily rhythmic energy of poetic form.’103 As such, ‘poetic form itself, as
rhythm, is beyond meaning and is therefore, when taken by itself, uninterpretable
and sublime.’104 Aviram’s argument engages with psychoanalytic accounts of our
attraction to rhythm by Nicolas Abraham, Julia Kristeva, and others, reflecting a
common conceptualization among many nineteenth- and twentieth- century
poets themselves of rhythm as an innate, physical representation of motions
within the body.105 Prosodic theorists today still gesture towards a sense of poetic
measure as ‘the feeling of thought’ (Harvey Gross), a ‘shape of cognitive and
physiological energy’ (Richard Cureton), and an engagement with ‘neural and
muscular periodicities’ (Derek Attridge).106 This approach has proved fruitful in
literary critical studies such as Leighton’s ‘Yeats’s Feet’, where she concludes that:
rhythm can change the stress of the beat without necessarily changing the metre.
Unlike metre, it is internal, variable, affected by subject matter and feeling.
101 Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart, p. 79.
102 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1976), p. 9.
103 Amittai Aviram’, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994), p. 19.
104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., p. 21.
106 See, respectively, Harvey Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 8–21; Richard D. Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse
(London: Longman, 1992), p. 426; and Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London:
Longman, 1982), p. 300. Quoted by Matthew Bevis, ‘Byron’s Feet’, in Meter Matters, p. 79.
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“There is Umi in his canoe with leho, e hoemi ka waa o kaua i
the shells. Let us get our canoe hope a nalowale o Umi.” A
to the rear and out of sight of kaawale laua nei mai ia Umi mai,
Umi.” When they were some olelo aku o Iwa: “E Keaau,
distance from Umi, Iwa said: maanei oe e lana ai a loaa mai
“Say, Keaau, you must float right ia’u.” Lana o Keaau, luu o Iwa, a
at this spot until I return with your hiki i ka honua o lalo, hele a hiki
shells.” Keaau therefore kept his malalo o kahi a Umi e lana nei,
canoe floating on the same spot pii keia mai lalo ae a kokoke ia
while Iwa dove down and swam Umi. E iho ana na leho mawaho
until he had reached the bottom o ka waa o Umi. E apo ae ana o
of the ocean, then walked under Iwa, lilo ia ia nei i lalo, a ke koa
water to the place where the hawele o Iwa i ke aho a paa. Luu
canoe of Umi was floating, then aku la a loaa o Keaau e lana
swam up until he was almost up ana, ea ae la me na leho. Ia wa,
to the surface; and as the shells hoi laua a pae ma Leleiwi i Hilo,
were being let down on the side noho o Keaau me Iwa ma laila.
of the canoe, Iwa grabbed them O ka Keaau hana ka holo e luu
and took them down with him to hee me ua mau leho nei, me
a large coral, there he fastened Kalokuna. Ka ka hee hana ka pii
the fish-line, then he took the a e komo ka waa, hoi i uka.
shells and swam under water
until he reached their canoe and
got into it. The two then returned
and landed at Leleiwi, in Hilo,
where they made their home.
Upon the recovery of his shells
Keaau again took up his favorite
occupation, that of squid fishing,
taking along his shells,
Kalokuna. The squids at sight of
the shells climbed and entered
the canoe until it was loaded
down when they returned to
shore.
(We will here leave Keaau and (Ma keia wahi e waiho ka olelo
let us return to Umi.) ana, a e hoi hou mahope ia
Umi.)
After the shells were taken by A lilo mai na leho ia Iwa, noho o
Iwa and the line fastened to a Umi me ka minamina, e manao
coral, Umi after a time pulled up ana he mau maoli ko na leho i
on his line, but to his surprise it lalo i ke koa. Nolaila, ku moe o
would not yield and thinking that Umi i ke kai me na waa, a me na
the line was entangled to the kanaka, noho a ai, a ia, hookahi
coral he did not wish to pull very hana he luu i na leho. Kii ia aku
strong, thinking the line would la na kanaka aho loa i ka luu. I
break and he would lose the ka luu ana ekolu kaau anana e
shells. Fearing he would lose pau, aole e hiki aku i lalo i ke
them he remained in his canoe koa i paa ai ke kaula, pela ka
all day, and that night he slept hana ana a hala he hepekoma
out at sea with his men, and for okoa. Hoouna o Umi i na kukini,
some days he lived there, while e kaapuni ia Hawaii i loaa ke
his men dove down to untangle kanaka aho loa, e pau ai ke koa i
the fish-line and thus recover the ka luu a loaa na leho. Ia kaapuni
much valued shells. Men noted ana, loaa o Iwa ma Leleiwi e pili
for being able to stay under la me Kumukahi, i waena o Puna
water a long time were sent for, a me Hilo. A lohe o Iwa i ka olelo
and these men were told to go a ka elele kukini, hai mai o Iwa,
down, but the best they could do aohe leho, he aho wale no ia e
was to go down three times forty paa ala i ke koa. Ua lilo mai na
fathoms, seven hundred and leho ia Keaau. Ma keia olelo a
twenty feet, 6 not deep enough to Iwa i ka elele, lawe ia aku la a
reach the bottom where the line mua o Umi. Ninau mai o Umi ia
was tangled. This was kept up Iwa, no na leho. Hai aku o Iwa e
for a week. Umi then sent out his like me na olelo i ka elele, a pau
runners to make a circuit of ia olelo mai o Umi. Loaa no ia oe
Hawaii to look for a man who ke kii, ae aku o Iwa. “Ae.” Hele
could stay under water long aku la o Iwa a hiki i o Keaau la,
enough to recover the shells. In ma Leleiwi.
this trip around the island of
Hawaii, Iwa was found at Leleiwi,
the point of land adjoining
Kumukahi, between Puna and
Hilo. When Iwa heard the king’s
wish through his runner, Iwa said
to him: “There are no shells at
the end of the line. The line only
is fastened to some coral in the
bottom of the ocean. The shells
have been recovered by Keaau.”
When the runner heard this he
returned to Umi taking Iwa with
him and told Umi of what he had
heard from Iwa. Umi then asked
Iwa regarding the shells and Iwa
told Umi just what the runner had
told him. At the close of the
report Umi asked Iwa: “Can you
get these shells for me if you
should go for them?” Iwa replied:
“Yes,” 7 Iwa then journeyed back
to the home of Keaau in Leleiwi.
It was Keaau’s custom to hide He mea mau ia Keaau, ka huna i

these shells on the end of the na leho ai, oia o Kalokuna ma.
house, up next to the [290]curve Ma ka loha o [291]ka hale o
of the rafters; and the other waho, e pili ana i ka hio kala, a o
shells, the ones that he did not na leho ai ole, i loko pono lakou
care so much for, he kept them o ka hale e kau ai.
in the house hung up on a cord.
About dusk Iwa made his A poeleele, hoopuka loa aku la o

appearance near the house and Iwa i ka hale, lalau aku la i na
knowing where the shells were leho a loaa, hoi aku la i o Umi la
secreted he went up and i Kona. Haawi aku la o Iwa i na
removed them from the place leho ia Umi, a ike o Umi, olioli ia,
they were hidden and he then a olelo mai ia Iwa: “Akamai oe i
returned to Kona, and handed ka aihue.” Alia nae au e mahalo
them over to Umi. When Umi ia oe, a loaa kuu wahi koi, aia i
saw the shells he was made very lalo i Waipio, i ka heiau o
happy and he then said to Iwa: Pakaalana, o Waipu ka inoa.
“You are a smart thief, but I am Olelo aku o Iwa: “Loaa paha ia’u,
not going to praise you just yet, aole paha? aka, e hoao wau.”
not until you can produce my
axe, which is being kept in
Waipio in the temple of
Pakaalana. The name of the axe
is Waipu.” Iwa then made reply:
“I don’t know whether I will be
able to steal it or not, but I shall
try.”
(We will here speak a few words (Maanei kakou e luaana iki iho ai
relating to the axe and how it no na olelo e pili ana i ke koi, a
was kept by its guards.) me na hana a na kiai.)
This axe, Waipu, was kept by O ua wahi koi nei o Waipu, he

two old women. It was fastened mau luahine elua na kiai, ua
to the middle of a piece of rope hana ia he kaula, paa he poo i
and the ends of the rope were ka ai o kekahi luahine, a o
fastened around the necks of the kekahi poo hoi i kekahi luahine,
two old women allowing the axe ma waena ke koi e lewalewa ai.
to dangle between the two. 8
There was a very strict kapu 9 He kapu hoi, aohe kanaka

placed on this axe; no person maalo, aohe puaa holo, aohe ilio
was allowed to pass near the aoa, aohe moa kani, mai Waipio
place, and during the period of ke kapu a Puuepa, ma waena o
time when the kapu was in force, Waimea a me Kawaihae, alaila
the pigs were not allowed to run pau. Aia a noenoe poeleele o ke
about, the dogs were not allowed ahiahi, holo ka luna kala, mai
to bark, and even the roosters Puuepa a ka pali o Puaahuku i
were kept from crowing. The Waipio, he oloa ma ka lima
kapu was extended from Waipio akau, ma waena o ka iwi kano a
to Puuepa, a hill between me ka peahi, o ia ka Lepa. Penei
Waimea and Kawaihae. At dusk, e kala ai: “E moe e! E moe i ke
just before it gets real dark in the koi o Umi e! Kapu ke kanaka a o
evening the crier 10 would run e hele, kapu ka ilio a o e aoa,
from Puuepa to the cliff of kapu ka moa a o e kani, kapu ka
Puaahuku overlooking Waipio, puaa aole e holo, e moe e!”
carrying oloa kapa in his right Elima hele ana a keia luna ao ka
hand, held between the palm of po.
the hand and the wrist as a flag
and would cry out: “Sleep ye,
sleep ye because of the axe of
Umi. Persons are kapued from
walking about, the dogs are
kapued from barking, the
roosters are kapued from
crowing, the pigs are kapued
from running about. Sleep ye.”
The crier was required to make
five trips back and forth before
daylight.
After Umi had told Iwa what he A pau ka olelo ana a Umi me
wanted, the sun was past the Iwa, aui ka la. Hele mai la o Iwa,
meridian. Iwa did not, however, a ahiahi poeleele, hiki i Puuepa,
wait for further directions but holo o Iwa me ke kahea ana e
started out on his way to Waipio. like me ka luna holo mau
Just before dusk he arrived at mamua aku, me ka oloa i ka
Puuepa and immediately started lima. A hiki i Puaahuku, he pali
running and crying out like the ia e kiei ana ia Waipio. Ma keia
king’s crier with a flag in his kahea ana a Iwa, moe na
hand. He continued running until kanaka a me ka luna mua, ala
he reached the cliff of Puaahuku, no make, hele no make. Nolaila,
looking down into Waipio. In oia nei wale no ke kanaka hele.
calling out the way he did, the O na kanaka a pau, ke manao
crier, whose duty it was to make nei no o ka luna mua. No ka
the cry, was forced to go to sleep mea, aohe wahi lilo, oia okoa no,
like the rest of the people, for to na kino, na oloa, na leo, na
get up and go about meant mama.
death. Because of this Iwa was
the only one about, all the
people believed it was the usual
crier and the crier himself
believed that the king had
appointed some one else to take
his place. Furthermore the
people could not recognize any
difference; the build was the
same, the flag looked the same,
the voice sounded the same and
the speed in running was the
same.
Iwa continued running from the Holo aku la o Iwa mai luna o ka
top of the cliff down to the temple pali a ka heiau o Pakaalana,
of Pakaalana 11 and then he kahea aku la: “Ke moe nei no
called out: “Are you two still olua?” “O,” pela mai na luahine,
asleep?” The old women replied: “aole maua i moe, ke ala aku nei
“No, we [292]are not asleep, we no.” [293]Olelo malie aku o Iwa:
are still awake.” Iwa then asked “Auhea kahi koi e haha aku
quietly: “Where is the axe? Let wau?” “Eia no,” wahi a na
me feel of it.” “Here it is,” luahine. “E neenee mai olua a
answered the old women. “You kokoke i launa aku kuu lima, o
must come nearer so that I can ka haha wale aku ka!” Ia nee
touch it with my hand. I just want ana mai a na luahine a kokoke
to feel of it.” When the old loaa pono aku la ke koi i ko ianei
women drew nearer to Iwa, he mau lima, e huki mai ana keia
reached out and pulled at the lilo. Kahea na luahine: “He aihue
axe, getting it away from them. ka keia e! Ua lilo ke koi a ke ’lii
The old women then called out: e! Make maua e! Kai no he
“Here is a thief! The king’s axe is kanaka pono keia e!” Lohe na
gone! We are killed! We had mea a pau, ala mai la alualu.
thought this was a good man!” Kahea na luahine, kau o Iwa i
When the people heard this, they luna o Puaahuku me ke koi. Hiki
all got up and gave chase. When ka hahai i laila, hele ana o Iwa i
the old women made the first Mahiki, pela no ka holo ana a
outcry, Iwa had reached the top hiki o Iwa i Puuepa. Hiki ka
of Puaahuku with the axe in hahai i laila, hele ana o Iwa i
hand. When the pursuers Puako. Alaila, pau ka hahai, pau
reached there he had reached mai la ke kapu, hoi aku la o Iwa
Mahiki. This chase was kept up a hiki i Kona, moe a ao, a hiki i
until Iwa reached Puuepa. When ka wa ai o Umi, noho ana o Iwa,
those in pursuit reached this a ike o Umi ia Iwa. Hoomaoe
place, he was at Puako. They mai la: “Aole no paha e loaa ia
therefore gave up the chase as oe kuu wahi koi?” I aku o Iwa:
the country beyond that place “Pela, aka, e nana mai oe, oia
was outside of the kapued area, paha nei, aole paha?” A ike o
while Iwa continued on until he Umi, olelo mai la: “Ka!
arrived in Kona. He then slept Kupanaha, e kuhi ana au aole e
until daylight the next day. When loaa ia oe, eia ka e loaa ana,
it was about time for Umi to have akamai oe.” Olelo hou mai o Umi
his morning meal, Iwa went up to ia Iwa: “Eia ko’u manao ia oe, e
him. When Umi saw Iwa he aho e hoao oe me ka’u poe
asked jokingly: “I don’t think you aihue eono. Elua hale, aia i ka
have been able to get my axe.” piha i ka po hookahi; hookahi ou,
Iwa then replied: “Perhaps not, hookahi o lakou. Ina i piha ole
but I want you to look at this axe kou hale, make oe, a pela hoi
and see if it is not yours.” When lakou.” “Ae,” aku o Iwa, “heaha
Umi saw it, he said: “How la hoi, o ko lakou hale no ke
strange! I thought you never piha, he nui lakou, a o e piha
would be able to get it; but here ko’u, he hookahi.”
you have gotten it. You are
smart.” After this Umi said to
Iwa: “Here is my thought
regarding you. I want you to try
with my six best thieves. There
are two houses to be filled in one
night, one for you and one for
them. If you will not be able to fill
yours first, you will be killed; so
shall it be with the others.” Iwa
then replied: “Yes, no doubt the
others will fill theirs first for there
are six of them. Mine will not be
filled because I am alone.”
There are six districts in the Eono moku o Hawaii, eono

island of Hawaii and Umi had six aihue akamai. I ka la okoa hele
expert thieves. 12 While it was still lakou, a ahiahi poeleele hiki.
daylight the six thieves went out Lawe mai la i ka waiwai a ko
to see what things they could lakou hale waiho, pela ka lakou
steal; and when it became dark hana ana a hiki i ka moa mua o
they began to steal and to carry ke kani ana. Koe iki ka hale. Ia
everything they could lay their wa ala o Iwa, e aihue aku kela i
hands on into their house. This ka waiwai a kela poe aihue, ko
was kept up until the first cock Umi, na kanaka, na wahine, na
crow, when there was very little keiki, na waa, na holoholona,
room left in the house. At about aole i pau na mea piha ko ianei
this same time Iwa woke up and hale. Ao ae la, aole i piha ka
as soon as the six men went to hale o ka Umi poe aihue, ia wa
sleep he proceeded to steal the pau lakou i ka make, koe o Iwa.
things stolen by them of Umi’s [294]
men, men, women, children,
canoes, animals and various
other things. Before he could
remove all the things into his
house there was no space left,
so he had to leave some of
them. When it was daylight the
next day they found that the
house belonging to the six men
was almost empty, while Iwa’s
house was filled with the
different things. The six men
were therefore declared beaten
and were killed 13 in place of Iwa.
[285]
1 The cowrie shells of greatest value

to Hawaiians in squid fishing were
those of dark reddish hue, containing
the attractive fire, as they called it,
necessary for baiting the octopus. ↑
2 Old time Hawaiians had nothing they
could hold as their own; everything
they possessed was liable to seizure by
one or another of rank above them. ↑
3 The frequent mention in tradition of
these kapas of Olaa indicate them
as treasurable products of high value.
The Ouholowai kapa was made from
the bark of the mamaki (Pipturus
albidus), dyed differently on its two
sides. The eleuli is described as a
perfumed kapa, rarely met with. ↑
4 Even in ancient Hawaii the principle
of setting a thief to catch a thief was
understood and observed. ↑
5 Lying evidently came easy to this
noted thief. ↑
6 This is considerably over twice the
record depth by expert divers of the
present day. ↑
7 The alleged “honor among thieves”
was not a governing principle in this
boy’s character. ↑
8 An ingenious way of guarding a
sacred article, one safeguarding the
other and both insuring protection. ↑
9 The reason of this strict kapu upon
the axe of Umi is not shown, and is
difficult to understand in connection
with its limitations, whether as a
weapon or a utensil. ↑
10 The crier of old time was called
kuhaua; another term was kukala,
which, by the former custom of auctions
being announced by aid of a red flag
and hand bell, became identified
therewith. ↑
11 Pakaalana was one of the temples
made famous in island history as a
place of refuge for windward Hawaii. It
was built before the time of Umi’s
grandfather Kiha, and was destroyed
by Kaeokulani, king of Kauai, in 1791. ↑
12 When it was a recognized right of
the king to take whatever he desired
of his subjects’ possessions, there
would seem to be little need for expert
thieves in his service, yet even
Kamehameha, with all his good
qualities, is said to have had one
Kaikioewa as superintendent of this
particular work, at the formation of his
government. ↑
13 Rough treatment for napping after a
successful raid. ↑
[Contents]
Legend of Punia. Kaao no Punia.
Punia at the Lobster Cave Finds Ike Punia oiai ma ka Lua Ula i ka
the Sharks Asleep.—Cunningly Moe o na Mano.—Me ke Akamai
He Causes the Death of Ten.— Make Umi Iaia.—Koe o Kaialeale
Kaialeale the King Shark Alone ke ’Lii Mano.—Olelo Maalea
Left.—Punia Traps It to Enter Punia i wahi e Komo ai i ka Opu.
Its Stomach.—Propping Its —I ka Hamama ana, Hoa Oia ia
Jaws Open He Fires Its Inwards. Loko me ke Ahi.—Oweli ka Mano
—The Shark Gets Weak and a Ohule o Punia.—Hui Punia me
Punia Bald-headed.—Stranded na Uhane Lapu.—Alakai Ia i ko
on a Sand Shore, the Shark is Lakou Make iloko O ka Wai, koe
Cut Open.—Punia Meets a Hookahi.
Number of Ghosts.—He Traps
Them to Their Death in the
Water, Till One Only Is Left.
The land in which Punia lived O ka aina i noho ai o Punia, o

was Kohala, Hawaii. After the Kohala i Hawaii, make ka
death of his father there was left makuakane, ola o Punia me ka
Punia and his mother, Hina. makuahine me Hina, o ka laua
Their occupation consisted in the hana ka mahi i uala, a loaa ka ai,
cultivation of sweet potatoes, aohe ia.
and in this way they were
supplied with food; but they had
no fish or meat.
the lobster cave. ka lua ula.
One day Punia said to [his I aku o Punia ia Hina: “E iho au i

mother] Hina: “Let me go down ka luu ula na kaua i ka lua ula a
to the lobster cave where father kuu makuakane.” Olelo mai o
used to go and get us some Hina: “Aole, o na lua ula, aohe
lobsters.” Hina replied: “No, that kanaka ola. Iho aku no ke
cave of lobsters is a dangerous kanaka e luu pau no i ka mano.”
place; no man can escape alive
from that place. When a person
goes down he will never come
up again, the sharks will eat him
up.”
Kaialeale. This was the name No Kaialeale. He mano ia, oia ke

given to a very large shark which ’lii o na mano e ae, e noho ana i
lived in that neighborhood and ka lua ula. He umi mano malalo
he was king of all the sharks 1 ona, oia ka umikumamakahi.
which lived near this cave of
lobsters. There were ten sharks
under him; he was the eleventh.
At the second request made by I ka lua o ka olelo ana a Punia i

Punia of his mother, he went on ka makuahine, iho keia a maluna
down until he arrived directly pono o ka lua ula, e moe ana o
over the lobster cave; there he Kaialeale a me na mano e ae.
saw Kaialeale 2 and the other Kahea iho la keia: “Ke moe nei
sharks asleep. Punia then called: no paha ua mano nui nei, o
“I wonder if that great shark Kaialeale ka inoa. Kuu luu aku
called Kaialeale is still asleep. If no auanei ia a ma kela lae la, ea
he is I can dive down and come ae, loaa no na ula elua, ola no
up at that point over yonder wau me kuu makuahine, hoi aku
where I will get two lobsters, and no me na uala ola no ka noho
my mother and I will have ana o uka.” Ia Punia e olelo ana,
something to eat with our ala na mano a pau loa a me
potatoes in the uplands.” While Kaialeale. I aku o Kaialeale i ka
Punia was talking to Kaialeale nui mano: “E nana pono kakou i
the rest of the sharks woke up. kahi a Punia e luu ai, alaila, luu
Kaialeale then said to the other aku kakou.” Aia ma ko Punia
sharks: “Let us watch and see lima he pohaku. Nou aku la ia
where Punia dives, then we will ma ka lae ana i olelo mua ai i na
dive in after him.” Punia had a mano, a haule ka pohaku i lalo o
stone in his hand while he was ke kai. Popoi aku la na mano ma
talking which he threw out ia wahi, hakahaka ka lua ula.
beyond the point where he Luu iho la o Punia a loaa elua
spoke about diving to get the ula, ea ae la a kau i luna, olelo
lobsters. When the stone struck aku i na mano. “A-ha-ha! luu iho
the water the sharks made a nei no o Punia loaa na ula elua,
dive for the place leaving the ola.” “Ola no maua me kuu
cave of lobsters unguarded. makuahine, na ke kahi o ka
Punia then dove down and mano, na ka lua, na ke kolu, na
secured two lobsters and then ka ha, na ka lima, na ke ono, na
addressed the sharks: “Here ka hiku, na ka walu, na ka iwa,
there, Punia has gone down and na ka umi, na ka
he has two lobsters, giving him umikumamakahi o ka mano au i
something to live on. This will hai mai nei. Na ka mano hiu
keep my mother and myself wiwi, nana au i hai mai nei.”
alive. It was the first shark, the Lohe o Kaialeale i keia olelo a
second, the third, the fourth, the Punia, [297]kahea i na mano a
fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the pau e moe pono. Helu keia a
eighth, the ninth, the tenth, it was pau he umi. Nana ma ka hiu a
the eleventh shark that told me loaa hookahi mano hiu wiwi. I
what to do, the one with the thin aku o Kaialeale: “Nau ka i hai
tail. He was the one that told me aku nei o Punia, make oe.” A
what to do.” When Kaialeale make ia mano, kahea mai o
heard this from Punia, he
ordered all the sharks to come Punia. “A-ha-ha! make no ia
together and get in a row. He oukou hoa ia!”
then proceeded to count them,
and sure [296]enough there were
ten of them, then he looked for
the one with the thin tail. When
he found the one he said: “So it
was you that told Punia what to
do. You shall die.” After this
shark was killed, Punia called
out: “So you have killed one of
your own kind.” After this Punia
returned home to his mother.
After they had eaten the two Hoi o Punia ai me ka makuahine

lobsters they were again without a pau keia mau ula, make hou i
any fish, so Punia again asked ka ia, olelo aku no o Punia: “E
his mother: “Let me go down and iho hou e luu ula na laua i ka lua
get us some more lobsters from ula.” I mai ka makuahine: “O ko
that cave.” The mother replied: iho ana paha ia i ola ai oe. Keia
“Your last trip probably was the iho ana paha make oe. Mai iho
one in which you came home oe.” Ku ae la o Punia a iho, a
safe. This trip may be your last. hiki i ka lua ula, kahea iho. Ala o
Don’t go down.” Punia, however, Kaialeale a me na mano a pau:
rose and went down to the cave Nou keia i ka pohaku ma kekahi
of lobsters. When he came to the aoao, lilo na mano i laila. Luu iho
place, he called out as he did at la keia loaa elua ula. Ea ae la i
the first time. Then when luna a kahea aku i na mano, e
Kaialeale and the other sharks like me na olelo mua, hai aku
woke up he threw a stone toward keia, na kekahi o ka mano, na ka
the other side away from the lua o ka mano, pela a hiki i ka
cave. When the stone struck the umi o ka mano, nana au i hai
water the sharks went after it. mai nei. Na ka mano opunui.
Punia then dove down and again Helu hou o Kaialeale i na mano,
got two lobsters. After he got a loaa ka mano opunui, pepehi
ashore he called out to the ia iho la make ia mano. Olelo
sharks as he did at the other hou aku no o Punia e like me na
time and then counted out the olelo mua i hala.
sharks from the first to the tenth,
and then named the tenth one as Pela no ka Punia hoopunipuni
the one which told him what to ana a pau na mano i ka make, a
do. “The one with the large koe o Kaialeale hookahi. Kalai o
stomach,” said Punia. Kaialeale Punia, elua ku laau, he iwilei ka
then proceeded to count the loa, he aunaki me ka aulima, he
sharks and when he found the nanahu me ka pulupulu, he ai,
one with the large stomach, he he paakai, he opihi, he pahoa, a
was killed by the others. Punia loko o ke eke.
then followed out the same line
of conversation as used by him
at the former time.
Punia thus continued deceiving Iho o Punia a maluna pono o ka

the sharks until all were killed lua a Kaialeale e moe nei, kahea
except Kaialeale. After this Punia iho o Punia: “Ke moe nei no
hewed out two sticks each a paha ua mano nui nei o
yard long; he next procured the Kaialeale! Ina i luu au, a i nahu o
two necessary sticks, 3 a hard Kaialeale ia’u, a make au, puai i
and a soft one, to make fire; then kuu koko i luna, ike kuu
he procured some charcoal and makuahine, ola hou wau. Aka, i
kindling wood; then he prepared luu au a hamama o Kaialeale a
some food, salt, an opihi 4 shell hele ku au i loko, make au, aole
and put all these things into a au e ola.”
bag. With this [bag] Punia
proceeded to the beach and Ia Punia e olelo ana, ke hoolohe
when he got directly over the nei o Kaialeale. I iho o Kaialeale:
cave, where Kaialeale was “Aole au e nahu ia oe, e ola oe,
sleeping, he called out: “If when I e hamama ana au a akea kuu
dive down Kaialeale should bite waha, a hele oe i loko, eia ka ko
me and I die and my blood mea e make ai oe ia’u. Make oe,
should come to the surface, then aole ou wahi e ola ai.” Luu aku la
my mother will see it and I shall o Punia me ke eke ana,
come to life again. But if when I hamama mai ana ka waha o
dive, Kaialeale should open wide Kaialeale.
his mouth so that I am
swallowed whole, I shall die and Hele ku keia i loko, popoi ka
will never be able to come to life waha, kukulu keia i na koo laau
again.” While Punia was talking, ana elua, akea o loko a
Kaialeale was listening, and he hakahaka, hia ke ahi a a, hoa ka
said to himself: “I will not bite you nanahu, wa’u keia i ka io o ka
for you might come to life again. mano me ka opihi, pulehu, o ka
I shall open my mouth wide ai, noho no keia ai, ka ka mano
enough for you to walk in. So ahai no i ka moana. Ua nui loa
this is the time when I shall kill ka eha o ka mano i keia mau
you. Yes, you shall die; nothing hana a Punia i loko o ka opu.
will save you.” Punia then dove Nolaila, ahai ka mano ia ia nei a
down with his bag, when anahulu i ka moana, nawaliwali
Kaialeale opened his mouth and ka mano, hoi a pae i Alula, aia i
Punia walked in. As soon as Kona ia wahi e kupono la i
Punia got into the mouth it tried [299]Hiiakanoholae. O Punia hoi,
to close up, but Punia took the ua helelei ka lauoho i ka noho i

two sticks he had hewed out and loko o ka opu, ka hana a ka eu.
stood them up which kept the
mouth open. He then rubbed the
two sticks and when the fire was
started he placed on the coals;
he next took out his opihi shell
and began to scrape the inside
of the shark and after he had a
ball of meat he proceeded to
cook it and when cooked he sat
down and with his potatoes he
made his meal, while the shark
was swimming here and there
through the ocean. This scraping
hurt the shark so much that he
could not keep still; he was
forced to go here and there.
Punia was carried around in the
shark for about ten days, when
at last the shark began to grow
weak and it made its way back
toward [298]land, arriving outside
of Kona, at a place called Alula,
directly out of Hiiakanoholae.
Punia on the other hand became
bald, from being in its belly; the
work of the rascal.
When Punia heard the breakers A lohe o Punia i ka owe o ka

on the shoals, he said: “If this is nalu i ke kohola, olelo ae: “Ina
near the line of breakers I will be he kunanalu keia, ola au, aka,
saved, but if I am to be taken to ina e lawe ia au a ke poi ana o
the edge of the deep sea, I will ke kai make au.”
die.” When Kaialeale heard this
he said: “I shall take you there Lohe o Kaialeale, olelo iho: “E
then, where you will die by me. lawe ana au ia oe a hiki i laila,
You shall die; nothing will save aia ka kou wahi e make ai ia’u.
you.” When they reached there, Make oe, aole ou wahi e ola ai.”
Punia again said: “If this is where A hiki laua nei i laila, olelo hou
the surf breaks I shall be saved, iho o Punia: “Ina o ke poi ana
but if I am to be taken to the dry keia o ka nalu, ola no wau, aka,
sand near where the grass ina e lawe ia au a ke one maloo,
grows by the seashore, I will die e pili ana me ka nahelehele,
and will not be saved.” Kaialeale make au, aole e ola.” Lawe hou
upon hearing this took Punia o Kaialeale a hiki i laila, i hoi mai
until he reached the shrubs. ka hana paa i ke one maloo.
When the shark attempted to
return he was caught in the dry
sand and there he laid.
When the people saw this great Ike mai la na kanaka i keia mea
thing they came to look at it, and nui, hele mai la e nana, a lohe o
as they gathered around the Punia, kahea ae: “E akahele iho
shark, Punia heard the people i ke kanaka o pepehi iho.” Hele
talking, so he called out: “Be mai la na kanaka me ka pahoa,
careful or you will kill me.” The kakaha i ka opu o ka mano.
people then took out their Puka ae la o Punia aohe lauoho,
wooden knives 5 and cut the ua hulu ole.
shark open. Punia then came
out. He was without any hair,
being completely bald.
This was the only place where No ku ’kua. O kahi kanaka iho la
there were any people, all the no ia, he ’kua wale mai no ma
rest of the place round about Keaukaha a me uka ae.
Keaukaha was inhabited by
ghosts.
After Punia got out of the shark Hele mai la o Punia ma ia wahi
he proceeded on his way and mai, a ike mai la i keia poe akua
saw several ghosts with nets all e hikii pohaku upena kuu ana i
busy tying on stones for sinkers ka lae kahakai. Pea ae la na
to the bottom of the nets; this lima o Punia i ke kua, a uwe helu
place was near the beach. At mai la i kahi a laua e lawaia ai
sight of the ghosts he placed his me ka makuakane. He
hands at his back and began hoopunipuni keia hana a Punia i
wailing and recounting in a chant ke ’kua, i pakele ia i ka make.
the different places where he
used to go fishing with his father.
In this Punia was trying to
deceive the ghosts in order to
save himself.
Alas, O my father of these Auwe no hoi kuu makuakane o

coasts! keia kaha e!
We were the only two fishermen Elua wale no maua lawaia o keia
of this place, wahi.
Myself and my father, Owau no o ko’u makuakane,
Where we used to twist the fish E hoowili aku ai maua i ka ia o
up in the nets, ianei.
The kala, 6 the uhu, 7 the palani, 8 O kala, o ka uhu, o ka palani,
The transient fish of this place. O ka ia ku o ua wahi nei la,
We have traveled over all these Ua hele wale ia no e maua keia
seas, kai la!
All the different places, the Pau na kuuna, na lua, na puka
holes, the runs. ia.
Since you are dead, father, I am Make ko’u makuakane, koe au.
the only one left.
At the sound of the wailing one I loko o keia hana a Punia, lohe
of the ghosts heard it and so kekahi mau akua, a olelo aku i
spoke to some of the others: “I ka nui o ke ’kua: “He leo hoi keia
hear a voice as though wailing. e uwe nei, eia la ke helu mai nei
There it is recounting the places i kahi a laua e noho ai me ka
where he used to live with his makuakane.” Olelo aku kekahi
father.” One of the ghosts akua: “He wi makani paha, a i
replied: “It must be the sound of ole ia, he keu pueo.” Olelo mai
the wind or else it is the hooting kekahi: “E hoolohe hou kakou i

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Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T.

S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith Jasmine

Conn’s Current Therapy 2017 Edward T. Bope

Jagger Octavia Jensen

Rites, rights and rhythms: a genealogy of musical

An Invitation Jasmine Hill

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Policies and Politics Under Prime Minister Edward Heath

Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear,

Selected Bibliography 213

List of Illustrations xiii

3.26. Stevie Smith, ‘The Word’. MS 1976.012.2.5.12, Stevie Smith Papers,

Below the thunders of the upper deep,

There was an old man on the Border,

1 With thanks to Lucy Newlyn.

1 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘affect’ (n), I. 5b and II. 6.

2 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

It is precisely because I am troubled by the categorizations between ‘orderly’ and

person] experience[s] being-­in-­[their]-­world’ and that it can be decoded to unveil

Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture

4 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

15 Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry, p. 296. 16 Ibid., p. 298.

Houen adds that ‘in conceiving the emotionality of fiction as interpersonal

Theory is hostile to contradictions; proverbs admit contradictions, and leave us

6 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

I. Affect and creativity

Emotions, feelings, passions, moods, anxiety, discharge of psychic energy, motor

27 Hacking, Rewriting the Soul, p. 13.

8 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

To think of the unconscious as incarnate in language stakes no territorial claim to

32 Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic, p. 110.

(underlined by Pound)—could serve as an abstract for the poem as a whole.36

36 Thomas Docherty, After Theory: Postmodernism/Postmarxism (London: Edinburgh University

10 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

II. The poets’ affects

the heart ache of many phases of life breaks one to pieces

‘[E]very profound experience’, writes Walter Benjamin, ‘longs to be insatiable,

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white

The legions of cruel inquisitive They

Auden draws on Angus Davidson’s 1938 biography of Lear to suggest him as

12 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

He weeps by the side of the ocean,

Here, Lear’s weeping is not necessarily for anything in particular—true, he hated

Herons & Sweeps

Sufferers experience a powerful ‘aura’, a wave of overwhelming dread, or a

14 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

A cruel inquisitive ‘they’ takes pains to ‘smash’ a bursting, disorderly life. It

There was an old man on the Border,

16 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

sustained reading of physical vulnerability in the poem, turning instead to focus

53 Ibid., p. 160. 54 Ibid., p. 314. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., p. 424.

There is an important distinction between a language that represents being ‘worn

‘Penetrating’; ‘invigorating’; ‘sinking’; ‘returning’; ‘seeking’—as a poet concerned

63 Eliot, UPUC, p. 663.

18 Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, Eliot, and Smith

If affect is untranslatable, and cannot be in language, cannot have a content, we

person] experience[s] being-in-[their]-world’ and that it can be decoded to unveil

This tiptoes between self-confession and self-parody—the Muse is an ‘old girl’

For nineteenth-century poets, perhaps the most acclaimed theories of metrical