Unparalleled Poetry

Introduction

Emmylou Grosser, Unparalleled Poetry: A Cognitive Approach to the Free-Rhythm Verse of the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming"forthcoming" contains an extrinsic dash or other characters that are invalid for a date interpretation.).

Emmylou Grosser began this book as a revision of her dissertation, in which she advocated a method for lineating biblical poems. Over time, however, "my driving dissertation question of how to lineate was... replaced by 'How should we conceive of the line-unit in biblical poetry?' (4). Pursuing this question and finding answers in the field of Cognitive Poetics has led her to propose a new paradigm for understanding biblical Hebrew poetry.

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Summary

Lines as "linear", straight or parallel.

Lines as "figural," forming shapes

The modern study of biblical Hebrew poetry has been dominated by the notions of parallelism and meter. In metrical poetry, poetic lines emerge in "linear" fashion; each line begins and comes to end, and its end-point is clearly marked according to the metrical template and/or other linguistic features. This process can be graphically represented as a series of straight, parallel lines on a page. However, Grosser argues that biblical Hebrew poetry is not metrical and that poetic "lines" are not "linear." Instead of emerging one after another in relation to an external template, biblical poetic lines "emerge in relation to each other" (29, 52, 53, 55, 88, 279, 315, 395). For this reason, it is helpful to think of

"biblical 'lines' not as straight or parallel, but as diverse segments that form shapes or figures, the line-groupings of biblical poetry" (72)

"This book is not concerned with salvaging parallelism or supplementing parallelism to make the concept work. This book is about disentangling biblical poetry from parallelism... We need a different lens through which to view line-relationships, one that allows us to see (or more accurately, hear) all kinds of shapes and patterns of language, as well as how these shapes and patterns are integrated into lines" (19).

Outline

Part I – Introductory Matters

1. Unparalleling Biblical Poetry

2. A Preliminary Description of Biblical Verse

3. Nonlinear Emergence of Biblical Hebrew Poetic Lines

Part II – Gestalt Principles: Mental Shortcuts of Part-Whole Processing

4. Part-Whole Perceptual Organization, the Law of Simplicity, Proximity, and Similarity

5. Symmetry, Balance and Imbalance

6. Good Continuation, Closure, Requiredness, and Principled Lineations

Part III – Further Issues in Biblical Poetry

7. Integration and Unintegrated Lines, Rhythm in Lamentations, and Line Length Constraints

8. Biblical Poetry and Prose

9. Conclusion: Unparalleled Poetry

Key Concepts

The Gestalt principle of proximity: "stimuli near to each other tend to be grouped together" (104).

The Gestalt principle of similarity: "stimuli that are similar to each other tend to be grouped together" (110).

"Symmetry is a specific kind of similarity: a similarity not just of components but also of their position or arrangement within a whole" (137).

"Good continuation is the tendency for patterns to perpetuate themselves in the mental process of the perceiver" (226). The figure on the left is likely to be perceived as continuous lines that intersect. For this reason, the figure on the right is jarring.

Closure: "visual stimuli tend to be grouped together if they form a closed figure" (247).

The Poetic Line

Poetic lines are the fundamental "building blocks of biblical poetry" (70). The term "line" generally refers to "the basic structural and rhythmic unit of verse-poetry across diverse cultures and languages, a unit that is the differentiating factor between prose and verse" (73). The line, despite its name, is not fundamentally a graphic unit (a line of text written on a page). Neither is it a linguistic unit; it cannot be defined in terms of an element of the language (e.g., syntax). The line is, rather, "a cognitive 'non-linguistic' unit that somehow organizes different and various aspects of language" (70). As a cognitive 'non-linguistic' unit, "the poetic line is realized in the subjective cognitive experience of a listener/reader during a particular poetry performance" (72). Hearing the lines and their effects requires the active participation of the listener/reader. Thus, it is possible for someone to hear a poem without actually hearing the poetic lines. "If the mind fails to grasp the contextual shapes or contours of lines, or fails to hear the lines according to their organizing principles, the line as structural or rhythmic unit may not be heard at all, and effects of the poetry may be underexperienced or even unexperienced" (82).

If biblical Hebrew poetry is not patterned according to a meter, and if the lines are not end-fixed, then how are the lines perceived? The answer to this fundamental question is that "line-perception in biblical poetry is dependent upon the part-whole processing of the line in relation to the line-grouping, and that the mind has at its disposal, from everyday perceptual processing, a number of mental shortcuts that it can use to efficiently make this part-whole integration work" (93).

Gestalt Principles

These "mental shortcuts" are known technically as "Gestalt principles" (Gestalt being the German word for "shape" or "figure"). Grosser discusses five of these principles:

1. proximity

2. similarity

3. symmetry

4. good continuation

5. closure

The fundamental law underlying all of these principles is the law of simplicity: the mind tends to impose order and organization on stimuli, reducing stimuli to the 'simplest' forms possible" (101). "This law and these principles account for how different human minds can organize complex stimuli in common ways, and by extension, they account for how a free-rhythm, unlineated biblical poetic text can arguably have a particular (perceivable) poetic structure" (91).

When it comes to the practice of lineating biblical poems, "the Gestalt principles give us tools for lineation, even though they do not give us rules. A perceptual approach to lineation must include the following three components:

1. legitimate expectations [for part-whole patterned organization instead of meter or parallelism],
2. active contextual listening, and
3. a cognitive account of proposed structure" (292)

Key Arguments

Grosser argues that the perception of biblical poetic lines is best accounted for by Gestalt principles. This conclusion is based on (1) a particular conception of the poetic line, and (2) numerous examples from biblical Hebrew poems, in which the ability of Gestalt principles to account for the perception of lines is demonstrated.

[Line perception]: Gestalt principles account for the perception of the poetic line in biblical Hebrew poetry.
 + <Argument from figural concept of line>:Biblical poetic lines are best viewed figurally, and Gestalt principles account for the perception of figures and the parts that compose them.
  + [Gestalt principles]: Gestalt principles account for the perception of figures/shapes and the parts that compose them.
  + [Lines as figural]: Biblical poetic lines are best viewed figurally (as segments that come together to form figures/shapes).
   - [Lines as linear]: Lines emerge in linear fashion, the ending of each line clearly marked (graphically or otherwise). #no
    - [No text-internal end-marking]: Biblical poetic lines are not cued by text-internal end-marking (e.g. meter or rhyme).
    - [Oral/Aural]: Biblical poetry is an oral/aural (vs visual) phenomenon.
 + <Argument from biblical data>:The best explanation for the perception of biblical poetic lines in a wide variety of cases are the application of Gestalt principles.

Key Evidence

• Biblical Hebrew poems from a number of different books
• The Cognitive Poetics work of Reuven Tsur

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Impact

Important ideas

• Biblical poetic lines emerge in relation to each other.
• Gestalt principles account for the ability to perceive lines in biblical Hebrew poetry.