Recent years have witnessed a spark of renewed interest in the nature of rhythm and its role in poetic expression. This is not, however, to say that questions of meter and accent have ever been denied a place in poetics as it was and is still practiced and theorized. Any primer on the subject of poetry will pro forma include a section on versification in which the concepts of iambs and trochees, feet and quantity are demonstrated, and this holds no less true for the most advanced treatises. In the early eighteenth century, a time perhaps unequaled in its ardor for the rules of prosody, versification provided the grounds for a political and moral battle waged between conservative and progressive elements in England. One spoke in that era of the ethics of meter, and Johnson, no small admirer of Milton, nevetheless found it necessary to deprecate his verse as unenlightened because of its lack of metrical smoothness and regularity. Even if the latter part of that century saw radical new forms of prosody coincide with its political changes, the fact remains that theories of rhythm were interested almost exclusively in periodicity, that is to say, in meter and the patterns one could objectively quantify. Once these treatises lost their prescriptive authority by the time of the nineteenth century, considerations of rhythm likewise lost their bite--a fact which perhaps explains the lack of serious interest in rhythm up to the present day.

Yet there are some writers who have begun to consider rhythm in a different [End Page 1037] way. They have moved beyond matters of measure and periodicity in order to examine the philosophical and psychological significance of meter. Nicolas Abraham's work, along with that of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Walter Benjamin, stands at the gateway to this field of investigation. Trained first as a philosopher in the school of Husserlian phenomenology, Abraham later became a practicing psychoanalyst, and he brings both disciplines to bear in this book. Although the book's language is the technical and sometimes rather dense language of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, its difficulty should present no insurmountable impediment to the non-specialist in these fields--especially given the translator's notes which do a good job of clarifying many of the basic terms employed in phenomenology such as "intention" or "sighting." Indeed the book has more to offer the literary critic than it does the phenomenologist or the psychoanalyst.

Included in this volume are translations of two unpublished essays written by Abraham between the years 1948 and 1952, and the text of one previously published lecture given in 1962. Originally these essays were collected and published in 1985 as Rythmes: De l'oeuvre, de la traduction, et de la psychanalyse. The editors, Nicholas T. Rand and Maria Torok, have also written a brief introductory essay, appended at the end of the collection, containing snippets of Abraham's other writings, both published and unpublished, that relate to the subject of this book. Here are to be found a few selections from 150 pages of unpublished notes for a study called A Glossary of Paradigmatics begun in 1950, in which Abraham grapples formatively with many of the concepts that appear in the present volume. The editors make known their intention not to publish these notes in their entirety because of their inchoate state, but at the same time they assure us of their propaedeutic value, while giving us one proviso: we must be aware of the limits put on the earlier thought of the author by his close adherence to Husserlian phenomenology. The editors' reticence to publish these notes, despite their purported value, is rather telling when we begin to consider that the author's reflections on rhythm given to us in the three essays coincide with an attempt to move beyond the limits of phenomenology. The distinction they themselves draw between the methodological approaches employed in the Glossary and in this book echoes a theme recurrent in each of the three essays.

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from the book review by paul mayers.