Vital Rhythms

Abstract

Abstract This chapter charts the second of the two complementary British modernist groups for whom rhythm provided a vocabulary, even a grammar, for the contemporary arts and painting. Despite shared preoccupations the two groups diverged. The chapter focuses on Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf, who in very different ways associated rhythm with the unconscious. It also explores their pre-1913 precursors: the Orientalist Lawrence Binyon and his circle. All these writers were in some form influenced by ideas of rhythmic patterning of the unconscious, dreams, the hypnogogic, and hyperaesthesia. Chanting and rhythmical speech were explored by Yeats and Pound, for whom rhythm comes before words: drawing on influences including Noh theatre, they helped create new rhythmic forms of visionary poetry and theatre. Detailed readings of Woolf’s writing show her incorporating polyrhythmic experience into the narrative texture of her work.