ABSTRACT
Poetry is formal. Rhythm and form are closely related. Rhythm is componential. Form is paradigmatic. The qualities of the rhythmic components are the source of formal paradigms. Poetic paradigms are quadratic, organizing linguistic, rhetorical, and symbolic forms into four temporalities (cyclical time, centroidal time, linear time, and relative time) following the four components of rhythm (meter, grouping, prolongation, and theme). Each poem is a complex mixture of these four temporalities. It is this complex mixture of temporalities that gives a poem its unique “inner” form, its distinct sensibility/subjectivity/psychology. Cyclical time is physical/perceptual/ecstatic. Centroidal time is emotional. Linear time is actional/volitional. Relative time is memorial/imaginative. For instance, Emily Dickinson's “I taste a liquor never brewed” is strongly cyclical. In the poem, the speaker identifies with a hummingbird so completely that she merges subject and object, perceiver and perceived, ecstatically overcoming the usual divorce between conscious and unconscious, outer and inner. In the poem, heights of experience follow a psychological regression from volition to emotion to sensation, and by this means, to imagination, rather than the other way around (i.e., from sensation, to emotion, to volition, to imagination), as in the more natural course of human growth, maturity, and self-realization.
