Entertaining toddlers is easy. It’s the same damned thing over and over again. Within that framework of repetition, and the expectation it generates and satisfies, you can vary things how you like—but you can’t change anything structural. So the story you just told has to be the story you’re telling now; but the added grimace or frog-voice will get the added laugh. Toddlers aren’t the only ones who love repetition, though. So, apparently, do Gods: There’s not a single liturgy or religious service, to my knowledge, that demands a new text every time. In fact, there’s a Brahminical fixation (mirrored, in their respective faiths, by rabbinical and ecclesiastical fixations) on preserving the old prayers exactly as they were, lest God throw a tantrum. God does seem to savor the aesthetics of repetition: When he created his own admittedly flawed masterpiece, he laid out a couple basic sequences (day-night, birth-life-death) that vary in their details but never change their structure. It’s probably the Satanic in us that loves variety. Lucifer’s urge to interrupt heaven’s eternally replayed Bach mass is the same restlessness that drives a husband outside the marriage. (Though the sexual act itself, note, draws its pleasure from repetitive motion.) The angelic part of us loves repetition. The devil in us can’t stand it.
Poetry, like its makers and enjoyers, is somewhere in between—divinely enamored of repetition, but fallen into the love of variation. In our time, the latter aspects of poetry—the “shattering” of forms, the “break” with tradition—have all the glamor. Breaking, shattering: Note the stylish, revolutionary violence implicit in those common phrases. In theory and in practice, poetry’s profound basis in repetition has been muted—when it’s precisely this, particularly in our time, that bears repeating.
Repetition, historically, is what has distinguished poetry from prose. Today, coming after the (historically anomalous) explosion of 20th-century free verse, we don’t have any objective sense of whether what we just read was poetry or prose-with-line-breaks. The usual answer is the I know it when I see it argument. But in pre-20th century Western poetry back to Homer, and in the Eastern poetic cultures I know first-hand, the mark of the angel was consistently repetition. Sometimes we find obviously refrain-based forms, like the ghazal, ruba’i, villanelle, and triolet. Elsewhere we find poems, as early as the Vedas, in identically structured stanzas. Sonnets, traditionally, repeat internal rhyme-patterns—and then replicate themselves, resulting in sequences, crowns, and plenty of discarded attempts. (You can publish just one; but you can’t write just one.) Sonnets, like ghazals, are certifiably viral: they repeat among poets, so that you often have small cliques of poets repeating, and competing in, the same form or forms. These situations offer one of the few instances in which direct comparisons are possible (unlike today, when poets with radically divergent styles are all trying to win the Yale Younger Poets Award). Shakespeare and his contemporaries all wrote sonnets; Shakespeare just wrote them better. Racine and his contemporaries all wrote tragedies in Alexandrines; Racine just wrote them better.
You can’t run that kind of comparison between Kay Ryan and Billy Collins (though fans of each might try). These two poets are writing too differently, even though they are both writing poems. I feel obligated to point out, though, how repetitive both of these poets are in theme and style. Each has created a tradition of one and competes within it; a Collins poem’s success is best judged against other poems by Collins, a Ryan poem’s success against other Ryan poems. Their imitators are trying to write within that tradition of one; they usually fall short because the seams of that tradition have been fitted to the tailor.
The repetition within and between forms is clear, but what about the individual line? Meter, historically much more universal than rhyme, repeats a syllabic sequence within a line, then repeats that sequence in subsequent lines. This is how repetition determines things at the micro level. As soon as a stressed syllable draws one or two syllables to its side, you get a metrical foot, but it has to be repeated before you get meter. Even if you’re aiming for monometer (good luck with that), it’s not monometer until the second line establishes it. Meter, like alliteration and assonance, comes into existence through repetition, and like rhyme adds the mathematical pleasure of periodicity. Verse, let us not forget, used to be called “numbers.”
Among poets who led the shift away from regular meter, the best pursued repetition by other means. Whitman’s instincts led him to fill the void left by meter with a different, but equally overt, form of poetic repetition:
Give me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape….
This is the ancient rhetorical figure of anaphora, and it goes on for seven more lines. In the poem’s very next section, this is followed up by another short anaphoric series, beginning “Keep me.” Anaphora may well be at least as old as meter; it goes back to Taliesin, and before that to the Hebrew Psalms. Anaphora has been a special case among repetitive elements in poetry. Thanks to Whitman, even poets who fancy themselves erratic prophets and revolutionaries won’t let go of anaphora; even the Beats used it, and more recently, the many-minded Albert Goldbarth has stocked a tour-de-force “Library.”
Among the Modernists, Eliot and Pound used a less common, but equally distinctive form of repetition: pastiche. The early Eliot’s snippets of the Upanishads and Dante and Wagner substitute repetition of form with repetition of content. Eliot and Pound did not rhyme sounds; they rhymed ideas. In a well-known passage from The Wasteland, Eliot slant-rhymes the 20th century and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and antiquity, in a terza rima for the ear and the literary memory. “The Chair she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Glowed on the marble” derives from Antony and Cleopatra’s “The Barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne, / Burnt on the water,” which in turn derives from Plutarch’s “…She came sailing up the river Cydnus, in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple.” The replication of metrical feet within a work has given way to the replication of images and phrases between works.
Why do we respond so favorably to repetition? It works on the principle of the kaleidoscope. A tumble of glass shards, mirrored enough times, registers as a pattern. The eye is a sucker for repetition. So is the mind’s eye; so is the ear. Homer once wrote that “men prefer that song which is newest on their ears,” but let’s not forget how many of those songs have refrains. The brain, itself divided in roughly symmetrical halves, sees beauty in symmetry. Bilateral symmetry—that is, mammalian symmetry—involves the most basic kind of repetition, familiar to us from simpler rhyme-schemes (abab, cdcd) and the folded-and-creased inkblots of the Rorschach test. Messiness (ink, spelled or spilled), touched with the magic wand of duplication, becomes organic, biological, mammalian, human: The most common responses to all ten Rorschach inkblot cards involve people or animals in some way.
Poetry, for centuries and across languages, carried out this operation on language. Poetry was never “elevated speech”—such a definition excluded brilliantly vulgar poets like Martial and Villon, and poets as baroquely plainspoken as Robert Frost. Poetry was, far more consistently, patterned speech hybridized to speech patterns. (This is, fans of Frost will recognize, a clunkier way of expressing the Frostian idea of “sentence sounds.”) Some of the more well-known poets of our time—ones as disparate as Billy Collins and John Ashbery—work almost entirely at mimicking speech patterns. The nonrandom repetition and periodicity of pattern is missing. I would emphasize the word “nonrandom”: You can pick out “o sounds” or plosives from any old passage of prose, but it’s not the same thing as orchestration.
Repetition isn’t brought up much in discussions of poetry. When it is, it’s mentioned in reference to refrain-based forms like the villanelle. But repetition is much huger than four Do-not-go-gentles and four Rage, rages. Only its applications are aesthetic or “formal.” The thing itself is neurological, or at least cardiac: the (literally) beating heart of poetry. Poetic meters and poetic forms vary among language groups, but the principle of repetition governs pantoum, ghazal, shloka, haiku, and triolet. Rather than an element of poetry, poetry’s origin may well be repetition. Our love of it drove us to fiddle with the noises from our own throats—until something neither purely sung nor purely spoken was born.
