New Literary History, 2015, 46: 549–568 Rhythm as Coping Alexander Freer M aking a rhythm is making sense, in a minimal way. Rhythms suppose rules, even if those rules are themselves subject to modulation and transgression. The perception of rhythm is a creative act: it asserts the coherence of beat and off-beat, of presence and absence. In verse prosody the claim is relatively uncontentious: rhythm is what we make through our sounded or mental reading of metrical verse; the rhythms we hear are interpretations of the meter that we read. But if this suggests that rhythm is an epiphenomenon of meter, it doesn’t go far enough. When we produce rhythm, we rec- ognize regularity within irregularity. The relative stability produced in rhythmic relations is central to the possibility of relations in general; rhythm-making is what we do to cope with the world. Recent critical writing on verse rhythm has tended to be understood as broadly formalist or historicist. 1 By considering rhythm as experience, and in proposing rhythm-making as an activity of sense-making and cop- ing, I aim firstly to advocate a broadly phenomenological approach to verse rhythm, and secondly to reconsider the division between poetics and hermeneutics that underlies the formalist/historicist distinction. It is from this starting point that I consider the experience of rhythm in a general sense, and in terms of rhythmic verse. Both will be nec- essary in order to discuss poetic rhythm as a special kind of reading experience, rather than a technical feature of verse. Since my interest here is in critical reading and writing about poetry, I limit my scope to work that exists primarily in textual form, in contrast to improvisational composition. I first aim to rethink the nature of rhythm itself, in order to introduce some psychoanalytical and phenomenological concerns alongside existing formal and historical accounts of verse rhythm. 2 My second aim is to suggest an account of the general relation between verse form and content that might overcome some present limitations in verse criticism, recently figured as a debate between ostensibly for- malist and historicist work. Rhythm in the abstract is a difficult topic. In their introduction to a special issue of Paragraph, Peter Dayan and David Evans ask, “What