So do we think in pentametric lines?

I've often heard, and repeated, the assertion that Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter--indeed any poet's use of iambic pentameter--somehow captures, and elevates, the normal rhythms of English speech. So I'm fascinated by a posting this week by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars.

Rosenbaum quotes one of his readers, an Allan Henderson, who notes that the three seconds taken by a typical spoken iambic pentameter line may be related to the approximately three-second duration of our experience of the present. He credits Stephen Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought, for pointing our that "the human experience of the present moment is not a continuous flow,  but a roughly 3-second interval."

Henderson, citing Pinker (and I'm sorry that my attributions get so many layers deep here), writes:

Steven Pinker’s observation about the 3-second present comes from Ernst Poppel, a brain researcher at the University of Munich. Dubbed Poppel’s Law it says that “We take life three seconds at a time.” Poppel illustrates his law by pointing out that a handshake lasts about three seconds. So does the preparation for a golf swing, short-term memory, a phrase in spontaneous speech, the pause when channel surfing for a television program to watch, and  line of poetry. Pinker talks about this on page 189 of his new book THE STUFF OF THOUGHT, where he says “our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an instantaneous instant. Instead, it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous ‘now’ but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future.”

Rosenbaum and his commentators also continue a discussion, begun in The Shakespeare Wars, on the wisdom of including a slight break at the end of each spoken iambic pentameter line.

(Thanks to ShakespeareGeek for the reference.)

Comments

[Matt Charron]

Great post! I've also been intrigued by this idea, as well as the idea that haiku ended up at 17 syllables because this is about the length of one human breath when speaking.