Everyone agrees: it is difficult to talk about rhythm in music, or, for that matter, the temporal experience in general. Compared with spatial relations, which appear to us as fixed and graspable, temporal ones seem fleeting and intangible. As a result, the language of time and rhythm is complex, contentious, and highly metaphorical. Considering that theorists today continue to have difficulty dealing with the metrical and durational organization of music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – our most familiar music – it should come as no surprise that theoretical writings from those centuries often present themselves as perplexing and in need of explication. Though their manner of formulation may at times seem odd or convoluted, these theorists nonetheless ask many of the same questions about musical rhythm that underlie current concerns: What is a metrical accent? How do the profusion of time signatures relate to each other? Do the groupings of measures create a sense of larger-scale rhythm? Can various durational patterns be organized according to some scheme or another? How does our understanding of musical rhythm affect performance, especially tempo, phrasing, and articulation?

Like many other domains of music theory, rhythmic theories are largely formulated in relation to a distinct compositional practice. Thus when compositional styles change, theorists respond by modifying their conceptions and formulating new ones in order better to reflect such transformations in practice. The high Baroque style, with its motoric pulses, regularized accentuations, and dance-derived rhythms, induced early eighteenth-century theorists to focus in detail on the classification of various metrical and durational patterns and to begin accounting for that most elusive concept – metrical accent.

Edgar Allan Poe is commonly regarded as the father of detective fiction. In the three stories that feature his amateur investigator C. Auguste Dupin - “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”(1842-43), and “The Purloined Letter”(1844) - Poe invented the detective story, a narrative whose “primary interest,”as A. E. Murch writes, “lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.” Chronicling a search for explanation and solution, such fiction typically unfolds as a kind of puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader. The popularity of the stories of Poe and his successors partly derives from this intense engagement with the text where, in the scrutinizing of evidence and the interpreting of clues, the reader becomes a detective and the detective a reader. Moreover, a detective like Dupin also becomes an author, who figuratively writes the hidden story of the crime. As a story that dramatizes the construction of a story, replacing the unintelligibility of mystery with explanation, detective fiction emphasizes the potential comforts of narrative: the apparent provision of order, of meaning, of a metaphoric map in time (with beginning, middle, and end) that seems to tell us where we are.

For 250 years, the Gradus ad Parnassum of Johann Joseph Fox (1660–1741) has been a tabula by-no-means rasa on which theorists and pedagogues have written. The remarkable process of accretion and rewriting began within seventeen years of its initial publication, with its first translation – ironically into Fux’s own language, German – in 1742. There is no denying that Fux himself had drawn on theorists’ writings going back 200 years, indeed back to the Greeks; but the result was no derivative hodgepodge. For all its borrowing and recasting – mostly unacknowledged, in the twentieth-century, positivistic sense – it possesses a sharpness of focus and a singleness of purpose that remain perhaps unrivaled.

“Manuductio ad”…: Virgilian footsteps

The work’s title begins:

This title plays in complex ways with the reader’s expectations. According to the subtitle, it is a manuductio – a “leading by the hand.” Like many other treatises before it – for example, Samber’s Manuductio organica (Manuductio to the Organ; that is, Thorough and Sure Guide) (1704), and Niedt’s Musicalische Handleitung (1700–17) – it offers a certain reassurance that the reader will not be left unaided. As a -ductio, the Gradus distinguishes itself from theoretical works with such appellations as “Treatise,” “Method,” “System,” “Summa,” and “Compendium,” all of which offer a formalized statement of a theory or collection of theories. Moreover, it is not merely an intro-duction, but a manu-duction, recalling Virgil’s guidance of Dante through the Inferno and Purgatory (“He laid his hand on mine, and with a face / So joyous that it comforted my quailing, / Into the hidden things he led my ways”).

Poe's vision of the feminine ideal appears throughout his work, in his poetry and short stories, and his critical essays, most notably “The Philosophy of Composition.” Especially in his poetry, he idealizes the vulnerability of woman, a portrayal that extends into his fiction in stories such as “Eleonora” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In these tales, and even moreso in “Morella” and “Ligeia,” the heroines' unexpected capacities for life beyond the grave indicate that females may have more strength and initiative than the delicate models of his verse. The most significant trait of his ideal, however, is her role as emotional catalyst for her partner. The romanticized woman is much more significant in her impact on Poe's narrators than in her own right.

Speaking at the University of Virginia's 1909 commemoration of the centenary of Poe's birth, University of North Carolina Professor C. Alphonso Smith described Poe's work habits in terms that might seem out of place with Poe's current popular reputation: “a patience and persistence worthy of Washington . . . a husbandry of details that suggest the thriftiness of Franklin . . . a native insight and inventiveness that proclaim him of the line of Edison.” Like these other notable Americans, the practical-minded Poe excelled at putting things together. Indeed, according to Smith, Poe's contribution to world literature was his “constructiveness,” his “structural art.” Although Smith put an unusually patriotic spin on his description, critics through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century had characterized Poe in similar, if less flattering, terms. Evert Duyckinck, in an 1850 review of Poe's collected works, compared him to a mechanical Swiss bell ringer, an “excellent machine,” a writer who “lived apart from the solidities and realities of life: was an abstraction; thought, wrote, and dealt solely in abstractions”;and was “indifferent to flesh and blood subjects” (CH, 337).

When one speaks of Newton's “metaphysics,”it should be noted that the word itself was rarely used by Newton; further, that in point of general philosophical usage, that word has not had in our own time a fixed and well-established acceptation. For the purposes of the present study, a rather broad view will be adopted - suggested on the one hand by Newton's most influential near predecessor, the previous author of a book called Principia Philosophiae, Descartes, according to whom metaphysics treats of the principles of [all] knowledge, and serves as the root of the “tree of philosophy” (whose “trunk” is physics, and whose “branches” are what we should call the “applied sciences”);and on the other by the author of the article “Metaphysics” in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Thomas Case, who summarizes the concern of this discipline in the two questions: “ What is the world of things we know?How do we know it?”Thus metaphysics will here be understood to be the discussion of the most general features, both of the constitution of the world, and of the principles of human inquiry into the nature of the world.

It will be useful for our discussion to put Newton’s position in comparison with that of Descartes; for the work of the latter was both enormously influential in general – in the seventeenth century, and also, so far as metaphysics (in contrast to natural philosophy) is concerned, right down to the present day – and of great moment for Newton in particular.

To those who are unfamiliar with the history of alchemy, the image of Isaac Newton poring over manuscripts illuminated strangely with dragons, sceptered gods, and couples copulating within flasks cannot fail to educe a strikingly discordant tone. How could such a great mathematical mind, the father of modern physics, concern himself with such seemingly unintelligible gibberish? Must we simply throw up our hands at the “superstitious” Zeitgeist of the age, as Newton's nineteenth-century biographers did, and conclude that he was deluded by the work of “a fool and a knave”? Should we conclude, with more recent scholars of Newton's alchemy, that he was engaged in a fundamentally religious quest in which alchemy would provide the key by which God's immaterial activity could be linked to the phenomenal world of matter? Or is there yet another answer - that Newton's alchemical research was primarily an investigation of the microstructure of matter, the forces of chemical affinity, and the ability of material substances to undergo radical transformation in the laboratory? Needless to say, the matter is not easy to decide, given that Newton copied, abstracted, commented upon, and composed about a million words of manuscript material on the subject of alchemy, over a period spanning more than thirty years. One thing, however, is sure: in order to understand Newton's fascination with alchemy, we must not consider the enterprise from an anachronistic viewpoint that equates alchemy with the irrational, the mystical, or the anti-mechanical. If we wish to comprehend Newton's deep involvement in this subject, we must have a firm grounding in the subject of alchemy as it existed in the seventeenth century.

Ovid’s Fasti, his elegiac poem on the Roman calendar, begins where his Metamorphoses leaves off, in present, imperial time. The Fasti has sometimes simply been plumbed as a random source of historical or anthropological knowledge. But as a poem about Rome and its complex imperial present as well as its past, the Fasti offers important insights into the mentality of Roman society at a crucial juncture of cultural development in the late Augustan age. Indeed, it raises questions that remain important today, for the poem explores the authority of the sources by which national myths are constructed and time and speech are controlled.

The Fasti has often been read as a work of national celebration, the product of some thirty years of Augustan peace. Yet the latter part of Augustus’ éegime was hardly the ‘golden age’ projected by Virgil in the Aeneid. Beset by dynastic troubles, military failures abroad and discontent at home, Augustus had begun to place restrictions on freedom of speech. As Denis Feeney has argued, the very title of the poem, Fasti, advertises its concern with the conditions for lawful (fas) speech. The Fasti demonstrates its acute awareness of the political pressures that beset investigation into national history and custom in the late Augustan period; it provocatively foregrounds the ideological management of ‘truth.’ The Fasti invites us to ask not only how we read, but why, perhaps, it matters.

The task of mapping Ovid’s presence in the twentieth century, let alone a theoretical consideration of what might constitute that presence, has hardly begun. The Metamorphoses holds pride of place in the recent reception of Ovid, it may be granted; but in what ways is its presence to be defined? In a thematics of corporeal transformation, such as we see in Kafka’s Metamorphosis or David Garnett’s Lady into Fox? In explicit acknowledgement of the poet and his work? Extravagant (and sometimes perplexing) claims are made by, and on behalf of, writers and artists of the twentieth century for the influence of Ovid on their work. Notoriously in his note on line 218 of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot invokes the figure of Tiresias, quotes 19 lines from the story told of him in Book 3 of the Metamorphoses, and suggests that 'although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character”, [Tiresias] is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest … What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.' James Joyce prefaced his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a quotation from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and he makes the reading of Ovid’s poem one of the formative factors in the education of its protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, but if we broaden our terms of reference to include a more general discourse of metamorphosis – manifested, for example, in the capacity of language through metaphor to ‘create as well as describe metamorphosis’ in its objects of reference – Joyce’s work (and not only his) can be seen to take on a more pervasive Ovidian character.

Poets are fascinated by literary history, above all by their own place in it. In that respect Ovid is like his Roman predecessors and contemporaries, only more so: his references to other writers, and to his work in relation to theirs, are more numerous than those of any other Roman poet. To a degree this might be expected given the length of Ovid’s poetic career - more than forty years, from roughly the mid-20s bc to the late teens of the first century ad - and the variety of poetic forms he cultivated, forms as diverse as love elegy and tragedy, mock-didactic and epic-scale narrative, epistles of mythological heroines and letters from exile.

But Ovid’s literary-historical references do more than track the stages of his literary career, as is arguably the case with Horace, his nearest rival in longevity and generic versatility. By comparison Ovid’s outlook is both more wide-ranging and more fluid. Whatever the form with which Ovid is engaged, his eye takes in the full sweep of Greco-Roman poetry, and the story he tells about his work is always being rewritten. If ‘literary history’ connotes a stable record of writers’ careers and of their relations to one another, Ovid is an anti-historian, who delights in reshuffling the data and producing constantly new accounts. For Ovid literary history is a species of rhetoric, a way of showing how a thing can be made to look depending on the perspective adopted or the effect desired.

All poets speak in quotations. In the decades immediately before Ovid wrote his love poetry, Propertius and Tibullus (and Gallus and Catullus before them) developed an elegiac genre in which the speaker is enslaved to a mistress, and chooses a life of decadence and devotion rather than civic and military success. The poems beseech and reproach the beloved, show her off to friends, and occasionally celebrate her and the relationship, rhetorically laying out in public the life of a young man in Augustan Rome: all this through a poetics which is clever, difficult, artistic, and stylized. Then Ovid did it again - differently. Much of Ovid’s amatory work is infused with an aesthetics of repetition: of material, of style, of himself, and in his characters.

All lovers speak in quotations. This precept of the modern erotodidact Roland Barthes was implicitly foreshadowed by Ovid when he outrageously reminds us that militat omnis amans (‘every lover is a soldier’, Am. 1.9.1): that is, every lover enters into a discourse of erotic imagery in dialogue and in conflict with his society, literary, social, and political. Ovid’s amatory works put private life on display – or rather, show us how private life is always already on display, a fiction played out for real, a reality fantasized. The discourses of love, the erotic as discourse, discourse as erotic – these things are at issue throughout the Ovidian corpus: in this chapter, I shall confine the discussion to the Amores, the Ars amatoria, and the Remedia amoris.

In Ovid’s Cave of Sleep, three shape-shifting spirits (pre-eminent among the thousand sons of Somnus) fashion and enact dreams for kings and leaders: one has the power to assume human forms, one the forms of beasts, and a third, of diverse art (diuersae artis), the forms of 'earth, rocks, water, trees, all lifeless things' (Met. 11.642-3). As in Somnus' subterranean dreamworks, so in the epic Metamorphoses at large one of the privileged ingredients of Ovidian myth-making is the deployment of elements of natural setting: the poem constitutes a significant intervention in the history of landscape. Briefly put, Ovid’s contribution to this history is to appropriate and renew the highly rhetorical and idealized tradition of landscape description as he inherits it, to enhance its self-consciousness, to mythologize its origins and accumulated generic associations, to extend the kinds of action which it stages, to exploit its potential for interplay between verbal and visual imagination, and to add a specifically cosmological accent by describing a metamorphic world in which the setting may always be more than just a setting. Partly because of the potency of his own appropriations, and partly because of the circumstances of transmission and survival which give him such prestige as a bearer of the classical tradition to medieval and early modern Europe, Ovid becomes a key collaborator in shaping aesthetics of landscape in later literature, as also in later visual art.

As the twentieth century drew to its close Ovid’s star shone brightly in the sky, at least of the Anglo-Saxon world. Two volumes of adaptations of stories from the Metamorphoses, published by Faber & Faber, turned out to be bestsellers. One of these, Tales from Ovid (1997), was the last but one collection published before his death by the Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, to be followed by Birthday letters (1998), poems written to his wife Sylvia Plath over the decades following her suicide. The juxtaposition has a certain irony. Birthday letters, addressed to one of the heroines of modern poetry, is written in a confessional mode that caters to a continuing post-Romantic craving for a literature of sincerity and truth to life. Tales from Ovid reworks the most self-consciously fictive poem of a white male poet, dead for almost two millennia. His works were to become a byword for a playful detachment from the serious business of life, and as a result went into a critical eclipse during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.

Life, it might be said, caught up with the poet when Ovid was sent into exile on the shore of the Black Sea in ad 8. Thereupon he did turn to a plangent self-expression in the verse letters from exile. But even so Ovid could not win, for these confessional works in the first-person singular were for long dismissed as inferior; their repetitive self-obsession was not read sympathetically as the history of a soul in pain, but taken as an index of Ovid’s expulsion from the fertile garden of poetic feigning.

Ovid has been called sympathetic to women. While many modern feminists would be unhappy about this chivalric designation, there is no doubt that the Ovidian corpus provides a particularly rich site for gendered study. More than any other non-dramatic ancient poetry, male-authored as it overwhelmingly is, Ovid’s work gives space to a female voice, in however problematic a manner, and to both male and female voices which reflect explicitly on their own gendered identity. It is also driven by a troubled relationship with the purveyors of Roman masculinity - the army, politics, Augustus, epic, and so on. Moreover, the poet - par excellence - of the fluidity of identity clearly provokes a gendered reading.

Unstable categories

Although sexual identity, in its modern form of a choice between homosexuality and heterosexuality, is not the driving force of ancient constructions of personality, the development and maintenance of Gender was a major preoccupation. Engendering the self is as crucial as it is unstable in Ovid, poet of fluidity. The tidiest story of growing up to gendered identity is that of Iphis (Met. 9.666–797). Before her birth, her father instructed that the child should be killed if it were a girl, but her mother saved her, and brought her up as a boy. On reaching adolescence, she was due to be properly and respectably married to someone with whom she herself was in love.