Tocqueville
is a writer of immense emotional power, and the secret of that power lies in the poetic rhythms of his prose; and, in the whole of
Democracy in America, no chapter offers a clearer or more vivid demonstration of those rhythms and their effect than “The Jury in the United States Considered as Political Institution.” The editors of
Dissent have selected their sundry quotations for commentary from that one chapter; but, with the readers’ indulgence, I would like to restore the quotations to Tocqueville’s original setting in order to lay out, in the imagination, the entire chapter in free verse. “The Jury in the United States,” set in verse, begins with an extended strophe of five lines or paragraphs, in this form:
Paragraph one: a single sentence, fairly short, broken in the middle by a comma, roughly the way the “caesura” or traditional pause breaks up a classic French verse line or alexandrine. The one-sentence paragraph conveys, as alexandrines so e...
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