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Erik Gray, Ewan Jones. The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a New Concept, The Review of English Studies, Volume 76, Issue 323, February 2025, Pages 111–113, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgae082
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Ewan Jones’s challenging, wonderfully suggestive book begins with two major claims about the nature of rhythm. First, a rhythmic pattern is one that not only accommodates but absolutely requires variation and tension. This may seem obvious—the very definition of ‘rhythm’, as opposed to metre, for instance—but Jones points out that such a definition would not have seemed intuitive to English speakers before about 1800. Up to that point, the word was used infrequently in English and other European vernaculars; when it did appear, it carried connotations of harmony and regularity traceable to its roots in ancient Greek. Jones’s second claim is that when rhythm as a word and a concept began fully to emerge in the late eighteenth century, it helped draw together three apparently disparate phenomena. In Jones’s words, ‘Rhythm names a process or relation that exists in the world’, notably in non-human creatures and natural phenomena; ‘But rhythm also names something in the head’, a human faculty for rhythmic perception, whether innate or acquired; ‘But rhythm also names something between heads (and bodies)’, since humans respond, often as a group, to perceived rhythms (p. 4; emphases in original). The Turn of Rhythm traces how sciences and fields of thought that arose over the course of the nineteenth century both shaped this complex conception of rhythm and depended on it to draw into relation the non-human, the individual human, and human communities.
