“Rhythm is an original and masterfully researched intervention in the study of rhythm and, more broadly, literature. Starting from the ancient Greeks and ending with Emmanuel Levinas, Barletta brings together an impressive number of authors and texts from over two millennia, offering a fresh reading of what we mean when we say ‘rhythm.’ He breaks apart narrow definitions of this idea, opening new pathways by which to think about rhythm ethically. This book testifies to Barletta’s astounding command of languages, literatures, poetics, and philology and yields an entirely new vision of what rhythm is and can be."

Katharina N. Piechocki, author of Cartographic Humanism: The Making of Early Modern Europe

"Barletta offers a well-written, thoughtful, and original contribution to thinking on rhythm and poetic form. With its broad and speculative approach to the very concept of rhythm, this is a singular contribution to the field. Barletta asks us to reconsider our existing paradigms of rhythm by turning away from time-based models and toward a notion that emerges in pre-Socratic atomist thought, a fundamental sense of rhythm, ruthmós, as a force ‘that holds us all.’”

Susan Stewart, author of The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making