the poem meter: pp. 141-192

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Chapter Six

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METER

Meter is so much the principal component of verse-structure that the part and thewhole are routinely conflated and the terms for their study commonly interchanged. Thus,Halle and Keyser's "Study of Prosody" is nothing more than a theory of meter, and theGerman "Metrik" has given the English term "metric" the sense "comprehensive verse-technique," as may be seen in Jack Lindsay's burnished discussion of Blake. To say that theterms are used loosely is to characterize critical usage with unreasonable generosity. Meteritself is, in Chatman's admirable phrase, "a systematic literary convention whereby certainaspects of the phonology are organized for aesthetic purposes." The relevant phonologicalaspect for English meter is stress, and hence the axiom of all English metrical theory is thatthe linguistic stresses in the words of a verse line are the elements of its metrical structure.

Historically, English metrical theory has taken three lines (see chart). A few theoristshave believed that English verse either could or should be written according to the classicalrules of quantity. But the majority recognized the primacy of stress, a view which has beentransmitted intact from 1575 to the present. In the eighteenth century, however, several menrecognized that the timing of verse had not been adequately explained, and in fact the his-tory of all English metrical theory from 1775 to the present can be characterized as a struggle


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to establish the correct position of timing within the theory. The proponents of temporalmetrics (all three branches) admit that stress demarcates verse-pattern; the proponents ofstress metrics (two ) admit that timing is one feature of verse. I give below a neutral accountof the three principal theories that have been proposed for English meter, even though manymodern theorists would say that syllabic length, timing, pitch, and pausing are not aspects ofmeter but of rhythm, a view in which, as it happens, I myself concur. But the quantivistsand temporalists have believed implicitly that they were addressing the level of meter, andour modern insistence on a distinction between rhythm and meter would, I suspect, havestruck many of them as a superfluity if not a redundancy. Too, the last word is not yet in: itis quite possible to imagine a "unified field theory" for metrics, along the lines pursued bycontinental metrists and sketched out by Crystal (E20). We want to be clear and pragmatic,and preserve all the necessary distinctions, without being needlessly exclusionary

Reading metrical treatises is an exercise in double-reading. The issues they treat--thenature of phonetic patterning in language, for example--are exceedingly subtle, and theirconceptual apparatus is usually primitive at best. Linguistics has not codified its concepts un-til this century; consequently, the earlier treatises force us to read and hypothesize, read andguess, read and translate, as we search for the modern correlates for linguistic phenomonaconfusedly felt, dimly understood, or vaguely articulated by a writer. In the study of metrics,the philosophers' dictum, "Not Meaning But Use," formulates succinctly the most salubriouspraxis. One must attend not to what a metrist says but to what he does, particularly in casesof discrepancy. Go to the scansions last, if not first--that is where the real principles appear.This procedure is particularly necessary for the eighteenth century, and it will make shortwork of such mumblers and autodidacts as Saintsbury.

The first section of General Studies below includes several of the principal period-histories for the development of, respectively, English meter and English metrical theory;these are:

Period Metrical Prac-tice

Metrical Theory

for the early Tudor period Bernard (E6),Ramsay (E73)

Ramsay (E73)

for the high Renaissance Ing (E47)Thompson (E91)

see Attridge (E112)

for the Augustan Age see Piper (E1404) Fussell (E34)for the nineteenth century none; see Saints-

bury (A8)none; see Omond (A5)

for the moderns Gross (E38) Barkas (E5)for American verse Eaton (E25) see Allen (A2)

No comprehensive history of English metrical theory yet exists (it would be a desic-cated tome, a history of error and ignorance), Omond (A5) and Schipper (A9) offer the nec-essary scope, but there is no model of a satisfactory treatment presently available. For meter,however, the exemplary study is the recent analysis by Tarlinskaja (E673).


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GENERAL STUDIES

E1 Abercrombie, Lascelles. "The Function of Poetry in the Drama." Poetry Review 1(1912): 107-18; rpt in English Critical Essays: Twentieth Century. Ed. Phyllis M.Jones. London: Oxford University Press, 1933; rpt 1947. pp. 252-72."It is here that . . . metre gives to the poet's words a form which is itself a directexpression of the emotion which the words enclose."

E2 Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovitch, 1971.For discussion of meter in the iconic texts of criticism, primarily English, s.v."Meter" in the Index. Also s.v."Rhyme."

E3 Aiken, Conrad. "The Function of Rhythm." The Dial 65 (1918): 417-18.A review which digresses largely to Wordsworth's views on meter in poetry.

E4 Ammons, A. R. "A Note on Prosody." Poetry 102 (1963): 202-3.A suggestion that both ends of a verse line, being "weighted," tend to becounterbalanced by a medial caesura and other devices, so that the weight mayshift from one end to the other, creating an effectual "pull" or motion down-ward--i.e., down the page.

E5 Barkas, Pallister. A Critique of Modern English Prosody (1880-1930). Studien zurenglischen Philologie, vol. 82. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1934; rpt Walluf,Germany: Sandig, 1973. 100 pp.Rev: in TLS, 13 September 1934, p. 622; in JEGP 34 (1935): 461; in AngliaBeiblatt 46 (1935): 263-65; in English Studies 18 (1936): 95-96.

A correlate study to Fussell (E34), less urbane but more orderly and us-able and absolutely impartial. Barkas gives a history of what was surely the mostcontentious and confusing--and probably the most important--period in thehistory of versification by explicating separately the theory advanced by everymajor worker in the field from 1880-1930--i.e., Mayor, Bridges, Young, Aber-crombie, Hamer, Lanier, Alden, Omond, Saintsbury, Smith, Andersen, Stew-art, Sonnenschein, Bayfield, Thomson, Wilson, and Scott. Each short review,generally three to four pages, is succinct yet informative. Throughout the book,Barkas distinguishes carefully between Prosody [i.e. Meter] and Rhythmic[Rhythm], though the remainder of his terminology is still much too elaborate,imprecise, and cumbrous even after his best efforts to codify (see pp. 12-17).The same can be said for the more important typology of metrical theoriessketched on pp. 7-11 and extended in the last chapter (pp. 86-100); it wantsOccam's razor. Barkas distinguishes six types of theory, two of the them havingsubtypes (the non-Temporal, three, and the Temporal, five). He also distin-guishes, elaborately (see p. 90) between metrical pattern and actualization,which he calls respectively Rule Verse and Base Verse: "In Rule Verse what-ever the Metrical Rule prescribes is objectively present in the verse-pattern, butin Base Verse the elementary unit of the base need not always be objectivelypresent."

In sum, though his classifications multiply distinctions needlessly,Barkas's synopses of the theories of the eighteen metrists are full, fair, and use-ful.


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E6 Bernard, Jules Eugene, Jr. The Prosody of the Tudor Interlude. Yale Studies in English,vol. 90. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939; rpt Hamden, Conn.: ArchonBooks, 1969. 225 pp.Rev: in TLS, 24 June 1939, p. 378; in MLN 55 (1940): 455-62; in Review ofEnglish Studies 16 (1940): 207-8.Not a synthetic study but nonetheless a highly useful reference work whichanalyzes separately 72 of the folk-drama interludes written between 1497 and1593 (up to Nashe). Each analysis includes tabular information on meter andrhymes and two to three pages of discussion. Conclusions (pp. 193-211 andPreface): the various meters of the interludes were indigenous, not Continen-tally derived, not "doggerel" but in fact quite complex at times, and could dis-play variation for purposes of characterization and structure. Appendices ofmetrical information. Sound scholarship. Note that Bernard uses the terms"heavy" for iambic rhythm and "light" for anapestic. Cf. E73 and K307.

E7 Blackmur, R. P. "Lord Tennyson's Scissors: 1912-1950." Kenyon Review 14 (1952):1-20; rpt in his Form & Value in Modern Poetry. New York: Doubleday, 1957.pp. 369-88.The scissors symbolize the instrumentality of versification, which Blackmur ex-amines in the work of some twentieth-century poets, especially Eliot, Yeats,and Pound. Note also p. 211 ff on prosaic syntax in poetry.

E8 Bradley, A. C. "Monosyllabic Lines and Words." In his A Miscellany. London:Macmillan, 1929. pp. 245-67; rpt in Literary English Since Shakespeare. Ed.George Watson. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. pp. 50-64.Statistical tallies of lines containing only monosyllables in non-dramatic verse,the Shakespearean canon, and dramatic verse; percentages of monosyllabicwords in selected prose passages also studied. Note that only five-stressed lineswere tallied.

E9 Breen, A. T. "A Survey of the Development of Poetry Written in Trisyllic Metres to1830, Approximately." Diss., National University of Ireland, 1965.

E10 Brown, Calvin S. "Monosyllables in English Verse." Studies in English Literature1500-1900 3 (1963): 473-91.Confutes the received opinion in English metrics that the great bane of Englishverse is its surfeit of monosyllables by showing (1) that English poets--evenPope--have successfully used sequences of monosyllables often, and (2) that theobjections historically given to using monosyllables have no weight. In fact, thenumber of monosyllables in the language has not appreciably changed sinceMiddle English, while the rise of science has added a great many polysyllabicwords to the lexicon.

E11 Brown, Stephen J. "Versification: The Music of Speech." The Realm of Poetry: AnIntroduction. London: Harrap, 1921. pp. 26-45.Nontechnical and nonessential.

E12 Buchanan, Victor. "Versification." English Journal 22 (1933): 460-65.Should be useful in elementary schools.

E13 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. 2 vols. London, 1817. Rpt London:J. M. Dent (Everyman Editions) and New York: E. P Dutton, 1906; ed.George Watson, 1965, 1971.

Coleridge's reply to Wordsworth's Preface (E100) begins at chapter 14,discussing the "superadded charm of metre" passim; chapter 18 is the crucialdiscussion, however. I hazard lengthy quotation, given the importance and


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breadth of the subjects Coleridge raises.Since "a poem contains the same elements as a prose composition, the

difference therefore must consist in a different combination of them, in conse-quence of a different object proposed. . . . it is possible that the object may bemerely to facilitate the recollection of any given facts or observations by artifi-cial arrangement, and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is dis-tinguished by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly." But these constitutemere "superficial form," and of course many works achieve their objects oftruth or pleasure which are not in meter, e.g. novels. "Would then the meresuperaddition of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name ofpoems? The answer is that nothing can permanently please which does notcontain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be super-added, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such as tojustify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part which an exact corre-spondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to excite." This is thefamiliar argument of "organic form." Yet Coleridge allows that "poetry of thehighest kind can exist without metre" (the argument runs on a distinction be-tween verse and poetry that is operative without being consciously articulated).Denying absolutely that "between the language of prose and that of metricalcomposition there neither is, nor can be any essential difference," Coleridge ar-gues that things not controvertible are not identical. "The true question mustbe whether there are not modes of expression, a construction and an order ofsentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a serious prose compositionbut would be disproportionate and heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and viceversa, whether in the language of a serious poem there may not be an arrange-ment both of words and of sentences and a use and selection of. . . figures ofspeech . . . which would be vicious and alien in correct and manly prose. Icontend that in both cases the unfitness of each for the place of the other fre-quently will and ought to exist."

Five arguments for this position are adduced. First, the psychological ba-sis of meter lies in "the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effortwhich strives to hold in check the workings of passion." That is, "the elementsof metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement," but these ele-ments are also "formed into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the de-sign and for the purpose of blending a delight with emotion, so the traces ofpresent volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionally dis-cernible." The result is "an interpenetration of passion and of will." Theseemotions will naturally dictate forms not otherwise procurable.

Second, the effect of meter is "to increase the vivacity and susceptibilityboth of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by thecontinued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiositystill gratified and still re-excited." This is the same effect "as a medicated atmos-phere, or as wine during animated conversation," or, better yet, "as that ofyeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself but giving vivacity and spirit to the liq-uor with which it is proportionately conbined." "Metre in itself is simply astimulant to the attention, and therefore excites the question: Why is the atten-tion thus to be stimulated? . . . . Neither can I conceive any other answer thatcan be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre because I am about to usea language different from that of prose." Both these arguments amount to thesame thing: meter is indicative, or adumbrative, of a special use of language inpoetry, both lexically and syntactically (it is this latter especially which seems tobe in the center of Coleridge's attention).

Third, meter functions also as a catalyst or fixative. Meter having beenassociated, time out of mind, with poetry as its proper form, without whichpoetry will commonly be considered deficient, any other material which might


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be combined with meter "must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, havenevertheless some property in common with poetry as an intermedium of af-finity, a sort . . . of mordaunt between it and the superadded metre" (mordauntbeing a chemical applied to fabrics to fix their color during dyeing).

Fourth (obscure), there is a human instinct for "unity by harmoniousadjustment." And fifth, the practice of all the best poets confirms: the excite-ment and passions aroused by poetry "demand a correspondent difference oflanguage."

It will be seen through all this that the problem is the insufficiently clari-fied term language. Later in the chapter Coleridge rejects the idea that rulescould be given for analysis or differentiation of, say, the languages of rage andjealousy; necessarily it must all be a matter of intuition. (By this point his reac-tion to Wordsworth's claim that meter is the sole differentia of prose and poetryhas reached the level of near-ferocity.) It is evident that in his remarks on me-ter he is concerned as much or more with syntax as with meter strictly speak-ing, but his position is important historically for its clear psychological basis(one thinks at once of I. A. Richards in the twentieth century): for Coleridge,meter both arouses and regulates passionate response.

E14 The reader may also wish to consult C. M. Wallace's "Teaching the Preface-Biographia Dispute" in Wordsworth Circle 9 (1978): 378-79 and

E15 D. H. Bialostosky's "Coleridge's Interpretation of Wordsworth's Preface toLyrical Ballads" in PMLA 93 (1978): 912-24.See also E71 and E75, E262.

E16 Collins, Mortimer. "The Art and Accomplishment of Verse." London Society 20(1871): 445-52.Exhorts gentlemen with leisure to cultivate versification "for pleasure andprofit" but to eschew "trite meters." Critical of Sylvester (E402).

E17 Comfort. A. "It Goes Like This." Life and Letters To-day 31 (1941): 36-40.In praise of metered verse, in search of a compelling narrative poem.

E18 Creek, Herbert L. "Rising and Falling Rhythms in English Verse." PMLA 35(1920): 76-90.Regardless of what we may choose to call the meter of a line, whether we viewit as in either "rising" or "falling" rhythm seems to depend on seven factors: thereader's expectations, syllable-structure at the beginning of the line, and at theend, and around the caesura, weak endings, phrasal structure, and vocabulary.Creek is groping toward a recognition that the "rhythm" of a line is a functionof its syntactic and, more importantly, morphological structure. Useful statisticshere on the proportion of "imabic" to "trochaic" disyllables in iambic verse. Cf.Crapsey (E516), Stewart (E331), Atkins (E467), Hascall (E783), and Newton(E799).

E19 Croll, Morris W., et al. "Report of the Committee on Metrical Notation appointedat Philadelphia 1922." PMLA 39 (1924): lxxxvii-xciv.The Committee here furnishes the two schools of metrists--those favoring a"syllabic scansion" (meter based on accent) and those favoring "musical scan-sion" (rhythm based on time)--with a uniform set of symbols, the first denot-ing, in syllabic scansion, stress, and in musical scansion, quarter-note, the seconddenoting, in syllabic scansion, unstress, and in musical scansion, eighth-note, andso on. These symbols expedite printing and may eventually result in theoreticalrapprochement, the Committee hopes.

E20 Crystal, David. "Intonation and Metrical Theory." Transactions of the PhilologicalSociety, 1971, pp. 1-33.


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In this very salient reappraisal and prospectus Crystal shows how metrical the-ory over the past century moved from confusion (quantity or stress?) to doc-trine (stress) without inquiring much further. But "on what grounds, other thanTradition, has stress been singled out from the other phonological features ofverse [i.e. intonation] and been identified with the metre? What experimentalevidence is there to justify the priority of stress in this way? None has beenprovided." Yet the arguments supporting stress in meter apply equally well tointonation. The recent literature shows that many Continental metrists havealready accepted an intonational metrics, while Anglo-American metrists seemcontent with stress metrics. Their contentedness is partially a reaction to theolder confusions and skirmishes, which lasted far too long, but it is also a trib-ute to the enormous influence of the Trager-Smith phonology. An intonationalmetrics will have to reject this analysis, yet it would still retain the virtue of se-lectivity (not all intonational features are equally important), and it should givegreater explanatory adequacy, as in describing free verse. In Crystal's view the"fundamental criterion" of such a metric is the line, "the identifying experience[of which] is non-segmental, a prosodic contour" [original italics]. Two experi-ments comparing a text set as verse and as prose showed that the line is coter-minous with the "tone-unit," that the prominences are contrastive by pitch notby loudness, and that more degrees of gradation are required in poetry than inprose. The synchronic view of English metrical theory ca. 1971 given here isvaluable, but more valuable still is the glimpse provided of the course of thetheory over the next several decades. Cf. D322, D337, E608, L1323, andL1341.

E21 Cunningham, J. V. "How Shall the Poem be Written?" University of Denver Quarterly2 (1967): 45-62. Rpt in the Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham. Chicago:Swallow Press, 1976. pp. 256-71.Answer: in meter. Cunningham examines the available "metrical languages" inEnglish: free verse ("grammatical meter" or "parsing meter"), accentual verse,syllabic, quantitative, and "traditional and . . . parasitic meter." The tone isiconoclastic (e.g., "the basic English measure is the iambic octosyllable"), vig-orous, and pragmatic.

E22 -----. "The Problem of Form." In The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham.Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976. pp. 247-50.Form is "that which remains the same when everything else has changed. . . .form is discoverable by the act of substitution. It is what has alternative realiza-tions. And the generality or particularity of a form lies in the range or restric-tion of alternatives. It follows, also, that the form precedes its realization. . . ."It is "not that a literary work has form, but that it is a convergence of forms,and forms of disparate orders. It is coincidence of forms that locks in the poem.. . . For this is the poet's Poetics: prose is written in sentences; poetry in sen-tences and lines. It is encoded not only in grammar, but also simultaneously inmeter, for meter is the principle or set of principles, whatever they may be, thatdetermines the line. And as we perceive of each sentence that it is grammaticalor not, so the repetitive perception that this line is metrical or that it is not, thatit exemplifies the rules or that it does not, is the metrical experience. It is theground bass of all poetry."

E23 De La Mare, Walter. "Metrical Technique I, II." The National and English Review146 (1956): 89-97, 156-67.The first installment may be ignored altogether. The second represents anelaborate appeal to ignorance ("no precision of analysis, I think, is attainable"),though there is a long passage on sonal mimesis and a good point on "verbalmelody." Emblematic: "units of English metre were better called boots than


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feet, since it is what they contain that is of any real importance, not them-selves."

E24 Eaton, Horace, A. "Irregularities in Verse." English Journal 1 (1912): 601-10.For its time, a very astute recognition of the implications of the dictum that"perfect regularity means monotony, and monotony destroys attention." Notonly are the five theoretically equal feel unequal in timing or pacing, thestresses are unequal, as are the unstressed syllables, and the greater and lesserpauses. Variation is everything in verbal--as all other--art.

E25 Eaton, Richard B. Jr. "A History of American Prosody from Its Beginnings to1880." DA 28 (1968): 3669A (North Carolina).Traces the history of American prosodic theorizing from 1785 to 1880, dis-cerning therein two major modes: "auralism" and "visualism."

E26 Elze, Karl. "Metrik." Grundiss der englischen Philologie. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1887;2nd ed., 1889. pp. 361-86.A general bibliographical review essay.

E27 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The Poet." In Essays: Second Series. Vol. 3 of The CompleteWorks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4. pp.9-10."For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,--athought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it hasan architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thoughtand the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis thethought is prior to the form." Two other dicta: "Art is the path of the creator tohis work" and, better, "Language is fossil poetry."

E28 Erskine, John. "A Note on Whitman's Prosody," SP 20 (1923): 336-44.Insofar as this essay is about Whitman it is nothing other than utterly ludicrous.But in fact it is not about Whitman, it is about the nature of the line-end inverse. The line-end is the "one fixed mark" which enables the reader to distin-guish between verse and prose in audition. It can be denoted either by arhyme-chime or by a pause. Lines having an odd number of stresses have aninvariable pause, but lines with an even number have none and so naturallytend to be enjambed. Larger issue looming in the distance: poetry's two modes,visual and aural.

E29 Fairchild, Arthur H. R. "The Making of Poetry: Versifying." The Making of Poetry:A Critical Study of Its Nature and Value. New York: G. P. Ptunam's Sons, 1912.pp. 105-51.A curious but interesting fifth chapter eschews the process of verse-making forits (undeniably more interesting) effects: to mold language into a a kind of in-evitable, measured rhythm . . . is to bind the language more closely together,for these are really forms of word-association by sound. And to bind the lan-guage more closely together is to help knit together the images which that lan-guage represents."

E30 Fucks, William. "Possibilities of Exact Style Analysis." Patterns of Literary Style. Ed.Joseph Strelka. University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1971. pp. 51-76.That is to say, quantitative analysis: charts and statistics of such features asword-length and sentence-length. See "Establishing the Strength and EffectiveRange of Metric Connection," pp. 65-68.


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E31 Fussell, Edwin. Lucifer in Harness: American Meter, Metaphor, and Diction. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1973.Chapter 1, "The Meter-Making Argument," is reprinted from Aspects of Ameri-can Poetry (Ed. Richard M. Ludwig. Columbus: Ohio State University Press,1962. pp. 3-31); it is an arid region, full of airy remarks on the ambivalencesand tensions of American poetry and its forms. "The history of American po-etry is the history of recurrent explosions, metrically centered, caused by thefrustrations of the American poet, who is and is not an English poet, who hasfree verse but doesn't always want it, alternating with longer periods of con-ciliation and consolidation." Chapter 3, "What the Thunder Said," takes updiction.

E32 Fussell, Paul, Jr. "English [Versification]: I. Historical." Wimsatt (A20), pp. 191-203.Actually "typological and historical": the article surveys the four principal met-rical systems (accentual, syllabic, combined, quantitative) and traces the devel-opment (or at least change) of English metrics through six periods (OE to 20thc.) of extensive historical changes in the language and oscillations between con-vention and experimentation in poetic technique. The essay merely revises thematerial the author had used earlier in his handbook (E537) and in his PrincetonEncyclopedia articles (E33 and E535).

E33 -----. "English Prosody." Princeton (A18), pp. 238-40.A valuable review, organized chronologically, reaching from Old English to thepresent. Fussell believes that no one metrical system can account for the entiregamut of English poetry, but that three things may at least be said: English verseis accentually based; it seems to flow "most pleasantly and naturally" in risingrhythm; and its natural line-length is one of "4 or 5 isochronous units." Theessay then proceeds by showing the drifts toward either pure Accentualism orSyllabism that have taken place at various times in the history of English verse,drifts from the central norm of a regulated number of both syllables and stresses.(The only faltering in this regard is the statement that Lanier's Musical prosodyhas a theoretical position emphasizing accentualism; obviously, it emphasizedtiming.) "Prosody" in the title is a solecism for "Metrics."

E34 -----. Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England. New London, Conn.: Con-necticut College Monographs, 1954; rpt Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,1966. 170 pp.Fussell's approach to the history writing is (a) thematic and (b) partitive. Fromthe various prosodic issues and trends of the century he selects three for exami-nation: views on the metrical structure of the line; theory of elision (i.e. sylla-bism perserved thereby); and the increasing legitimacy of trisyllabic substitution(i.e. anti-syllabism, or the rise of accentualism as the dominant metrical princi-ple). He therefore ignores: the crucial question of the definitions and employ-ments of accent vs. quantity; rhyme; the complex relations of poetry and music,so important in the age; and the sundering of metrical theory between Timersand Stressers early in the century. In short compass, the history of versificationin the period 1660-1800 is as follows: heavy French influence on English lettersafter the Restoration resulted in the complete establishment of Syllabism (sylla-ble-counting) as the chief principle of meter; Bysshe is the central figure here(1702 etc.). At the same time, by a process that (pace Fussell) is still not wellunderstood either theoretically or historically, counting-of-syllables led inevita-bly to regularity (regular alternation) of stresses. These principles dominate the-ory until about 1740 and remain visible up to about 1770; thereafter, the storyis one of Accentualist insurgency, leading to (the French Revolution and) Ro-manticism. Over the century there is also a concomitant diremption in theview of prosodists as to whether Quantity, Time, or Accent is the basis of


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verse. This area is far more complex than Fussell allows. Altogether his studymakes a series of compromises between a full history of versification theory inthe century and a full account of the positions of the major theorists, whosometimes receive short shrift when their views are fragmented among Fussell'sthematic divisions. Omond's method (A5) is less artful but more cogent: therewe find a fuller assessment of the contribution of each theorist to the develop-ing understanding of the century. See also the criticisms in Kumbier (E1009).

E35 Gillis, Everett A. "American Prosody in the Eighteen-Nineties with SpecialReference to Magazine Verse." Diss., University of Texas, 1948.Still a useful source of information, mainly on account of its scope. Gillis ex-amines the (a) prosodic theories or comments and (b) prosodic practices in theverse printed in the prominent American literary journals of the Nineties,placing both of these within the wider perspectives of both prosodic theory andpractice in America, and also in England, in the nineteenth century. Out of theenormous mass of verse he examined (as cited), he scrutinizes more closely thework of eight prominent young poets (none of which ever rose into the firstrank); nearly all of it is metrically very conventional. In the area of theory, thedecade was still spinning out the ideas of Poe, Lanier, and perhaps Whitman;essays by the would-be literari were legion, of course, though Alden and otherswere pursuing the quiet ends of scholarship, while Bolton, for the scientists,looked into the mechanics of rhythm. Perhaps the principle issue of the daywas the legitimacy of off-rhyme. Whoever writes the successor to Allen'sAmerican Prosody will find source-material here.

E36 Goodell, Thomas. "On English Versification." The Nation 93 (1911): 334-36.A review of Matthews (E588), Saintsbury (E636), and Kaluza (A4). See also R.M. Alden's following letter on "English Rhythm" (E269).

E37 Graves, Robert. "Harp, Anvil, Oar." In The Crowning Privilege. New York:Doubleday, 1955. Rpt in Gross (A23), pp. 52-71.Wonderful speculations on the origin of verse (harp), the nature of syllable-counting verse (anvil), and stress-verse (oar), followed by observations on thenecessity of variations against the norm in meter, and on craftsmanship of versein general; throughout, Graves emphasizes the seminal role of the Irish poetsand verseforms on the development of the English meters.

E38 Gross Harvey. Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: A Study of Prosody from ThomasHardy to Robert Lowell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964; rpt1968. An abridgement of chapter 7, "T.S. Eliot and the Music of Poetry,"appears in Gross (A23), pp. 202-17.Rev: by Wimsatt in Michigan Quarterly Review (see E699); by G. W. Allen inAmerican Literature 37 (1965): 350-52; by Hemphill in Kenyon Review 27 (1965):777-79; in English Language Notes 3 (1966): 237-38.Excellent Prologue (on the four "beast of confusion" in the study of versifica-tion) followed by chapters on "Prosody as Rhythmic Cognition" (see B85) and"The Scansion of the English Meters" and separate studies of Pound, Crane andStevens, and Eliot. Shorter sections treat Hardy, Yeats, Bridges, Robinson andFrost, Muir, Ransom, Browning, Whitman, Hopkins, the Imagists, Moore,Williams, Cummings, visual prosody, Auden, Spender and MacNeice, Thomas,Empson and Watkins and Reed, and Kunitz and Roethke and Lowell. AnEpilogue reflects on the possibility of a "modern style."

E39 Haas, Robert. "One Body: Some Notes on Form." Antaeus 30/31 (1978): 329-42."The pure iamb in fact can't be rendered; it only exists as a felt principle of or-der, beneath all possible embodiments, in the mind of the listener. It exists in


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silence, is invisible, unspeakable.""I don't think we are in a position yet to understand the reaction against metri-cal poetry that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. It's an astonish-ing psychological fact, as if a huge underpinning in the order of things hadgiven way, and where men had heard the power of incantatory repetition be-fore, they now heard its monotony. Or worse."

E40 Hafner, Charles, Y. "Foundations of English Poetics: 1570-1575." DA 28 (1968):3143A (Stanford).A study of Ascham (E109), Gascoigne (E538), John Rainolds' Oratorio in laudemartis poetica (1572), and Richard Wills' De re poetica disputatio (1573).

E41 Hamm, Victor M. "Meter and Meaning." PMLA 69 (1954): 695-710.In the relation of these two dimensions two factors may be discerned: "a prin-ciple of phonetic autonomy and a principle of semantic cooperation." Of theformer, the level of background texture, Ransom is simply wrong to thing themeter a mere correlative or superadded external form; the meter is "part of themeaning," a kind of "emotional semantic," a statement of ambienceor, at thevery least, order. Of the latter: meter can (1) serve as expository function, rein-forcing lexical sense; (2) "modulate and define emotion" in its emotive func-tion; or (3) reassure or else surprise the reader, in its affective function.

E42 Hamp, Eric P. "Phonetic and Semantic Metrics." Meaning: A Common Ground ofLinguistics and Literature. Ed. Don L. F. Nilsen. Cedar Falls, Iowa: University ofNorthern Iowa, 1973. pp. 146-52."Some poetry is manifested heavily through phonetic recurrence in patternedconfigurations; other poetry is characterized by patterned configurations inrather abstract semantic features; and there is some poetry, a great deal in fact,that relies on a skillful blend of these two configurational mechanisms." Moresimply: a poem may be "metered" or organized not only by stresses or syntacticstructures but by underlying semantic units also.

E43 Hannauer, Leo. "Das einsilbige Wort im engishchen Vers." Die Neueren Sprachen 33(1925): 348-51.Actually he gives statistics for monosyllables in French, German, and Englishprose fiction and poetry.

E44 Hart, James M. "The College Course in English Literature, How It May BeImproved." PMLA 1 (1884-85): 84-95.A fascinating note on pp. 92-95 deplores the absence of any convenient metri-cal handbook, followed by a divagation on the history of blank verse. Was itthis tiny crack which started the flood?

E45 Hemphill, George. "Jonson's 'Fit of Rime Against Rime.'" Explicator 12 (1954): Item50.Suggests defining rime as "modern conventions of verse." Cf. E74.

E46 Hollander, John. "The Metrical Emblem." Kenyon Review 21 (1959): 279-96.Abstracted in Sebeok (A19), pp. 191-92; rpt in full in Chatman and Levin(A21), pp. 115-26; revised and expanded into chapter 7, "The Metrical Frame,"of his Vision and Resonance (A13), pp. 135-64.Peregrine. Topics covered: linguistic treatments of metrics; the rhythmicstructure of the mimetic lines in Pope's Essay on Criticism; alliteration, asso-nance, onomatopoeia, and echoic patterns in general; and musical-metricalmodality.


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E47 Ing, Catherine. Elizabethan Lyrics: A study of the development of English metrics and theirrelation to poetic effect. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951. 252 pp. Based on herdissertation, "Metrical Theory and Practice in the Elizabethan Lyric," at Oxfordin 1949.Rev: in TSL, 9 May 1952, p. 314; in Etudes Anglaises 5 (1952): 155-56; inShakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 79-83; in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 89 (1953): 239-40.Though now supplemented by more recent, specialized studies, Ing's book re-mains a classic still to be consulted. The general plan is to anatomize Elizabe-than theories of meter and then compare these to the actual productions inverse--the lyrics--which were nearly always meant to be sung as madrigals andairs. Chapter 2 provides an extremely convenient synopsis of the theorists re-printed in Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (A26). Chapter 3 gives a similarlyvaluable Glossary of prosodic terms; the usage of such terms in the Renaissancewas often ambiguous, inconsistent, and indiosyncratic, yet discriminations arecrucial, and the terms are delicately unravelled. (Cf. these two chapters to E57and E228.) Chapter 4 examines the "visual thing" of pattern poems and alsothe theories about quantitative verse (cf. Attridge, E112); chapter 5 confrontsthe central metrical phenomonon of the age, verse set to music.

Chapter 7 explores the role of the three prosodic aspects of speech--pitch, stress, and duration--in Elizabethan lyrics in considerable detail; p. 200 ffdiscusses the role of stress in meter. Remaining chapters focus on the lyrics ofCampion, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne. The book must be set alongsideThompson's (E91), since the latter stops with Sidney, while Ing, beginningwith Tottel, surveys 1557-1633. More elegantly informed in its style and moresynoptic in its erudition than Fussell (E34), Ing's work may be our best periodstudy.

E48 Jacob, Cary F. "Some Phases of Recent Study in English Versification." SewaneeReview 19 (1911): 498-503.A review of Schipper (All), Verrier (E454), and Matthews (E588), praisingVerrier while denigratig the other two works.

E49 Justice, Donald. "Meters and Memory." Antaeus 30/31 (1978): 314-20.The question of "the mnemonic value of meters," intriguing in itself, yet leadsto the even-deeper question of the effects of meter: Justice points to "the variouscombining and intersecting functions" of metering, remembering, control, andunderstanding in the poetic craft. In contrast to some others, his own view isthat "the meters move along in their own domain, scarcely intersecting thedomain of meaning, except in some illusory fashion or by virtue of conventionsnearly private. The responsibility they bear to the sense, comic writing aside, ismostly not to interfere." That is, in themselves they are little, as Coleridge said,but their effect superimposedon powerful sense is more powerful still. "The twinillusions of control and understanding seem more valuable to me than this illu-sion of the real or the natural [i.e. mimetic meters].

Yet he can admit that "the meters seem always faintly teleological by im-plication. . . . they seem to propose that an emotion, however uncontrollable itmay have appeared originally, was not, in fact, unmanageable." (Cf. Malof,E582.) And "the meters serve as a neutral and impersonal check on self-indul-gence and whimsy; a subjective event gets made over into something more likean object." Even memory is an "act not without craft," we know, and the me-tering of our verbalizing of our experience we want to know much moreabout.

E50 Kelley, Frank B. "The Rise and Development of English Metrification, with SpecialReference to the Question of Quantity versus Accent as the UnderlyingPrinciple." Diss., New York University, 1894. 36 pp.


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E51 Ker, W. P. The Art of Poetry: Seven Lectures 1920-1922. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1923; rpt Freeport, N. Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967.Rev: in TLS, 9 August 1923, p. 1; in South Atlantic Quarterly 23 (1924): 286-87; in MLR 19 (1924): 361-62.Remarks in the first lecture on the foreign and early influences on our versifi-cation.

E52 Koch, Walter A. Recurrence and a Three-Modal Approach to Poetry. The Hague:Mouton, 1966. 55 pp.A general theory of poetic structure (expressed in very concise form) based onthe key feature of recurrence; the three modes of analysis identified are Topical,Metrical, and Stylistic. In Metrics, recurrence may be either Phonetic, Syntac-tic, or Semantic (English verse has heavily exploited the first of these, but whohas demonstrated a metering of "sememes"?) or a combination of them (i.e.phonetic + syntactic rather than phonetic + phonetic). Koch then examines therelationships of metrical constituents ("immediate juxtaposition, recurrent in-terval, non-recurrent interval"), patterns of such relationships ("contiguousoverlapping, congruent, engrafted"), and the principles of metrical "piling,""imposition," and "saturation." Altogether the merit of this brief monograph isto demonstrate afresh the possibiities for complexity in meter and (even further)in poetry.

E53 See also: Hans Gumbrecht's "Poetizitätsdefinition zwischen Funktion andStruktur: Ein Diskussions vorschlag an Walter A. Koch." Poetica 10 (1978):342-61.

E54 Körting, Gustav. Encyklopaedie und Methodologie der englischen Philologie. Heilbronn:Henninger, 1888.An early philological handbook. Chapter 8, "Die Rhythmik des Englischen,"pp. 368-90, gives a summary of the research to that date on Old through Mod-ern English meter. K. accepts the vierhebungstheoriefor OE and ME. Bibliogra-phy.

E55 Koziol, Herbert. Zahlen in englischen Versdichtungen. Sitzungsberichte derÖsterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historishe Klasse,vol. 291, no. 5. Vienna, 1973. 47 pp.In part Koziol is interested in how the names of numbers are used by poets tofill slots in the stress pattern of the verse-line.

E56 Kremer, Charles F. "Studies in Verse-Form in Non-Dramatic English Poetry fromWyatt to Sidney." Diss., Northwestern University, 1942.

E57 Kuhn, Ursula. "Prosody." English Literary Terms in Poetological Texts of the SixteenthCentury. 3 vols. Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, nos. 32, 33, 34. Salzburg:Salzburg Institut for englische Sprache and Literatur, 1974. Vol. 2. pp. 453-70.An extremely convenient and useful resource which cites brief extracts fromthe major Renaissance prosodists--Gascoigne, Puttenham, Sidney, Spenser,Harvey, Stanyhurst, and Webbe--on thirty-nine topics in prosody--e.g. rhyme,rhythm, meter, accent, quantitative verse. Prefixed by short topical Index.(Unfortunately the overprinted typescript is painful to read.)

E58 La Drière, J. Craig. "Prosody." Princeton (A20), pp. 669-77.A remarkable general survey, sustained at a level very near the purely theoreti-cal. Prosody is defined as the study of "the elements and structures involved inthe rhythmic or dynamic aspect of speech . . . as they occur in speech and lan-guage generally (linguistic prosody) or in the compositions of the literary arts (lit-erary prosody)" (italics original). This latter area has been more often termed ver-


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sification. Descriptive prosody may be either theoretical or historical, while evalua-tive work lies in the domain of criticism. The rhythm of verse is one manifesta-tion of rhythmic activity in general, and as a species is more closely related tothe rhythms of dance--bodily movement--than to those of music, since thespeech-mechanism itself is a motor behavior. Yet, "it is the sound as heard, theperceptual 'phone' or 'allophone' rather than the phoneme as such, that is rele-vant for literary, as distinct from linguistic, structure of sound." All verse-rhythm is a patterning of the qualitative and quantitative features of sound,chiefly intensity or duration: La Dri|`ere gives a very extensive theoretical ac-count of the systematic possibilities of such patterning. Worthy of special note:"the datum of a prosodic analysis is ideally an oral performance (actual or con-ceived) rather than a written text."

E59 Legouis, Émile. A Short Parallel Between French and English Versification. Publicationsof the Modern Humanities Research Association, no. 9. Cambridge: Bowes &Bowes, 1925. 18 pp. His Presidental Address to the Association published as apamphlet."The modern versification of England is the result of compromise, the trium-phant but painfully laborious ordering of chaos. It was only attained after yearsof groping efforts to fuse and reconcile antagonistic elements. . . . In fact, ittook centuries to accomodate the language to the versification or the versifica-tion to the language. The verse which prevailed in the end was not primarilymade for the language upon which it was imposed." The result? "English hasemerged with two distinct kinds of verse, now no longer confusedly blendedbut kept separate for different uses and different effects." Nowhere is the wholehistory of our metric more succinctly or accurately expressed.

E60 Malof, Joseph. "The Artifice of Scansion." English Journal 54 (1965): 857-60, 71.The modern sensibility is so glaringly inept at recognizing and discussing poeticmeter primarily because no adequate system of scansion is currently taught orunderstood. Scansion is not a theoretical construct but simply a "practical lan-guage of description," and the best notation is the one which provides the mostaccurate, concise, yet flexible description of the interplay between rhythm andmeter. To deride scansion as "artificial" is to misunderstand its very nature.There is no one right scansion, all others being wrong; there are only better andworse scansions.

E61 Maxim, Hudson. The Science of Poetry and the Philosophy of Language. New York andLondon: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910.A true curiousity, this. The most dogged of prosodic historians will find rele-vant remarks following p. 152; all others will be intrigued by the illustrationsmore than anything else.

E62 "Metrical Technique." TLS, 6 April 1956, p. 207.Encourages the teaching of metrical form, not so much in the spirit of rigidrules and devices, but in such a way that the student can attend to the supplenuances of sullables.

E63 Moore, T. Sturge, D. S. MacColl, et all. "English Numbers." Correspondence inTLS, 9 January-27 March 1919, pp. 20-21, 33, 45, 56-57, 69, 83-84, 97, 112,125, 137, 151-52; 164-65.Interminable debate, each correspondent propounding his own theory of met-rics--Moore, the intuitivist; MacColl, the temporalist; Bayfield, the trochaic--and the whole dreary exchange degenerating into bickering between Mooreand MacColl. However, T. B. Rudmose-Brown's acknowledgment of signifi-cant shifts in his thinking (at p. 83) must not go unnoticed.


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E64 Morse, Lewis K., ed. Melodies of English Verse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.An anthology arranged by meters for training students to recognize and memo-rize metrical verse. Divided merely into Iambic, Trochaic, Anapestic, andDactylic, but notice the Index of Metres. Cited in NUC, vol. 396, p. 362.

E65 Morton, Edward P. "Chronology and Metrical Tests." PMLA 25 (1910):xxxix(Proceedings). Abstract.Metrical evidence generally corroborates the accepted chronologies for Milton,Keats, Browning, and Tennyson.

E66 Murray, Gilbert. "Metre." The Classical Tradition in Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1927. pp. 80-121.An urbane, informed, detailed, non-technical explanation of the differencesbetween Classical Greek and Modern English versification, with Hebrew andChinese also discussed for contrast. Should be just the thing for undergraduates.

E67 Nakao, Toshio. [Poetic License and Three Models of Prosody.] Eigo Seinen (TheRising Generation) 118 (1972): 158-59. (In Japanese)Compares the Traditional, Trager-Smith, and Halle-Keyser systems.

E68 Newbolt, Henry. "A New Study of English Poetry, II: Poetry and Rhythm." TheEnglish Review 10 (1911-12): 657-72; rpt in his A New Study of English Poetry.New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919. pp. 26-51."Poetic rhythm is, in short, neither strict mechanical rhythm nor free speech-rhythm: it is speech limited by metric law, or Prosody. . . . A prosody, then, ormetric law, there must be, to save the gesture from becoming invertebrate."Reviewing the course of meters over European history, the author makes anarticulate plea for "the recognition of two principles": "That poetic rhythm isnot an applied ornament" and that "the natural tendency of poetic rhythm willbe toward perpetual change."

Part I appears on pp. 285-300 of the same vol. 10.

E69 Ogden, C. K. "Sound, Sense, and Intelligibility." Psyche 15 (1935): 19-76.See the sections on "Verse Rhythm" (pp. 50-59) and "Prose Rhythm" (pp. 59-74). Despite all the pedagogical platatudes about iambic meters, Ogden insists,the English language is deeply, irrefrangibly trochaic, and so therefore is itsverse. Longfellow and the Hiawatha-meter merit a long digression in the"Verse" section, and indulgence which then widens to include the whole of thefollowing section, a peregrination on the subjects of the relations of verse andprose, isochronism, prose rhythm, and stress. Surprisingly well informed.

E70 Owen, W. J. B. "The Theory of Metre." Wordsworth as Critic. Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1969. pp. 27-36. See also pp. 125-27.Since one of the linchpins of Wordsworth's poetics in the 1800 and 1802 ver-sions of the Preface is his view of poetry as "the natural language of men," hissimultaneous insistence on the preservation of meter in poetry would seem in-consistent. WW's defense rests on three conceptions of the function of meter:pleasure, regularity, and contrast. Meter per se gives pleasure as an ornament tolanguage already efficacious. The regularity of meter tempers and restrains theexcitement raised by the poetic fiction, as well as reminding the reader, implic-itly, that he is experiencing literature not life. And meter balances or contraststhe real language of men. Owen notes the evident discrepancy in WW's theo-ries and his practice, also admitting that "the prose parts of Wordsworth's blankverse, especially, appear to gain no advantage from being in metre."


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E71 Parrish, Stephen M. Wordsworth and Coleridge on Meter." JEGP 59 (1960): 41-49.By close explication of the statements and arguments made by Wordsworth (inthe Preface) and Coleridge (in BL) on meter, Parrish controverts the receivedcritical opinion that Wordsworth denigrated meter as adventitious whileColeridge defended it as indispensable to the organic whole, the poem. That isthe view Coleridge would have us believe. But in fact, though Wordsworthdid argue that meter has no necessary connection with language,he held it to beessential for effecting the tranquility that is poetic pleasure, while for Coleridgemeter was a stimulant and a matter of "superficial form," separable from thelanguage that was central. Indeed to Coleridge meter was a symbol of a special-ized poetic language--precisely the view Wordsworth attacks in the "Preface."Wordsworth, focusing on the function of art, treats the role of meter in aestheticresponse; Coleridge, focusing on the sources of art, treats the role of meter in thecreative process.

E72 R, D. L. "On Versification." The Inspector, Literary Magazine and Review 2 (1826):19-22.Short exposition of the metrical forms of blank verse, couplet, octosyllabicverse, quatrains, Spenserians, and the sonnet. Most interesting are the remarkson the structure of blank verse and citations of several obscure remarks on thatform by Dr. Johnson; the rest is trite.

E73 Ramsay, Robert L. "Changes in Verse-Technic in the Sixteenth-Century EnglishDrama." American Journal of Philology 31 (1910): 175-202.From 1480 to 1590 the verseform of English drama developed from the rhyme-royal and tail-rhyme stanzas (in four-stress lines) through the "septenary" cou-plet (the Fourteener) to the decasyllable (rhymed and blank) and prose. But"the attempt to find pentameters, alexandrines, or septenaries, even of an im-perfect kind, in [the dramas of the first half of the sixteenth century] reducestheir versification to chaos." The old order was completely upset by "the mostimportant innovation in versification of the century," the introduction of regu-lar meters (regular in syllable-count), the earliest example of which in thedrama is Jasper Heywood's Senecan Troas of 1559. Blank verse, of course, firstappeared in Gorboduc, 1562.

See esp. p. 188 here, and see also K307. The final paragraph summarizessuccinctly "the residuum of a hundred years of experimentation" in dramaticverseform, specifically the four metrical styles employed by the dramatists of theday to differentiate the Virtue and Vice characters and high social stations fromlow. Highly informative, Ramsay's essay is still authoritative, and its lucid map-ping of a bewildering terrain is augmented by frequent, detailed metricalanalyses of plays.

E74 Rankin, J. W. "Rime and Reason." PMLA 44 (1929): 997-1004.Proposes an etymology for the idiom based on medieval Latin grammar: rhyth-mus denoted accentually based verse, while ratio meant quantitative, syllable-counting meter. (This was also the distinction between rhythmus and metrum.)The Renaissance classicists, then, used rime in the older sense of rythmus, to in-dicate meter based on stress. See also E45 and C273.

E75 Renz, Merl F. "A Coleridge Unpublished Letter and Some Remarks Concerningthe Poet's Interest in the Sound of Words." Notes & Queries 198 (1953): 163-65.Coleridge gives English accentual equivalents of the Greek quantitative feet inthe first letter and exemplifies them in a Pindaric ode. In the second letter hemuses on a stray couplet which he couldn't get out of his head on account of


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the intonation of the second line, "The pretty, pleasing playful, proley-prowleyPricket."

E76 Reyher, Paul. Essai sur le Doggerel. Diss., University of Paris. Bordeaux, 1909. 114pp.Defining "doggerel" as "un mechant poeme depourvu d'originalite et sans pro-portions, mais il semble avoir surtout trait a sa versification d'une regularite ex-cessive," Reyher examines incompetently wooden and parodically incompe-tently wooden verses from Layamon to Swift, with heavier emphasis on theMiddle English period.

E77 Richards, I. A. "Rhythm and Metre." Principles of Literary Criticism. New York:Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1925; rpt 1948. pp. 134-46. Rpt in Gross (A23),pp. 42-51.Richards takes what might be called a Gestalt (i.e., perceptional-field) approachto literature. Sound in poetry depends for its meaning entirely on context: itseffect cannot be separated from the effects of other contextual elements; soundin itself has no meaning. The sound of a word cannot be considered apart fromits meaning. The interaction of succession and simultaneity comprises rhythm.Meter, as "a specialized form of rhythm," is not a patterned stimulus but a pat-tered response, as well as being a "framing device" (cf. Hollander, E46).

E78 Richardson, Leon J. "Repetition and Rhythm in Vergil and Shakespeare." Universityof California Chronicle 32 (1930): 177-82.A model of import and economy. The question raised is how repeated wordsin verse are fitted into the metrical pattern (or grid), or in other words, the ef-fect of repetition on word-meter alignment and, hence, the rhythm of the line.Given any word repeated (as a then b), there are four possibilities: (1) a and bhave identical placements in the meter--such diaeresis tends to make the meterglare, and Richardson calls it "unmusical" in contrast to the other three types;(2) a and b may vary slightly in word-form (lover, loved, etc.) but be identicallymetrically treated; (3) a and b fall in different metrical positions (now arsis, nowthesis) though identical in word-form; and (4) a and b differ both in metricaland in lexical treatment--the most "musical" type of all four. Convincing ex-amples from both poets (no influence is claimed).

E79 Sasaki, Tatsu. "Apocope in Modern English Verse." Studies in English Literature(Tokyo) 13 (1933): 585-603.On words used in poetry which have dropped the final syllable: the mostcommon are divided into seven catagories and discussed, with etymologies andvery copious examples, Renaissance to Modern.

E80 Selden, R. "Roughness in Satire from Horace to Dryden." MLR 66 (1971): 264-72.The Elizabethan theory of the "roughness" of true sature understood the Ro-man view correctly in terms of roughness of tone (invective, vituperation), butnot in terms of roughness of versification, since Horace believed that the num-bers should be polished even in the most virulent of lines. Jonson and Dryden,however, were the chief exponents of a return to the orthodox classical viewdemanding smoothness of metier despite sharpness of matter. A dense, discrimi-nation, yet extensive essay.

E81 Shapiro, Karl. "English Prosody and Modern Poetry." ELH 14 (1947): 77-92;published at Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947; rpt Folcroft, Pa.:Folcroft Library Editions, 1975. 16 pp.Rev. in Poetry 72 (1948): 332-35.

Shapiro finds two historical trends to lament: one is that prosody, as an


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ostensible science, has seen little progressive development until the latenineteenth century; the other is that after the turn of the century and "one ofthe few great upheavals" in English poetry--free verse--prosody was thrownagain into anarchy, from which it has not yet recovered. Shapiro then sketchesin cameo the theoretical positions of the two chief schools of prosody, theAccentualists (Saintsbury and Bridges) and Temporalists (Lanier), with Omondin a medial position. These correspond roughly to the two broadest traditionsin English verse, the stress-verse (Beowulf to Skelton to Hopkins) and thestress-verse (Chaucer to Housman). But the nineteenth-century prosodicsynthesis was unable to cope with the new prosaic structures and rhythms inverse.

E82 -----. Essay on Rime. New York: Reyal & Hitchcock, 1945.Rev: by Delmore Schwartz in The Nation 160 (1945): 498; reply by Shapiro, p.690, rejoinder by Schwartz, pp. 691-92.In the first major section, "The Confusion of Prosody," Shapiro attempts tomap out the theorists and practitioners of his time in a prosaic verse, as if theEssay on Criticism were rewritten as The Prelude Of the theorists, Bridges onMilton, Lanier on verse, and Saintsbury on prose-rhythm are discussed; of thecloistered makers, Joyce and Eliot are assayed the great masters of our time(both indebted to Pound), as against the more ephemeral, weaker metrics ofDonne, Browning, Hopkins, Whitman, Cummings, Lawrence, Williams, andthe Imagist, Visual, and Objectivist prosodies. Strong stressing is hammeringdown the old "rising rhythm," and Shapiro ventures his hypothesis that"rhythm/Flows but in one direction, and that from Prose/To rime. The oppo-site is upstream, against/The grain of language and the course of change./ Themeasure of prosody is the current speech,/The cadences inherent in thevoice/Of one particular generation." See also:

E83 Williams, William C. "Shapiro is All Right." Kenyon Review 8 (1946): 123-26.And

E84 O'Conner, William Van. "Shapiro On Rime." Kenyon Review 8 (1946): 113-22.

E85 Sharp, Robert L. "Some Light on Metaphysical Obscurity and Roughness." SP 31(1934): 497-518.(Begin at p. 510.) This is a clear statement of the older view that Donne andthe metaphysicals deliberately wrote their meters rough, so as to suit the verse-form to the sense and mood of satire. This "harshness" lay not in syllable-count(here they are all relatively regular) but in preserving regularity of stresses.Roughness was also associated with "masculinity." The virtuosity of the meta-physicals in stanza-forms is also adduced as proof of the intentionality of theirwriting rough.

E86 Stanford, Donald E. "The Experimentalist Poet." In his In the Classic Mode: TheAchievement of Robert Bridges. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978. pp.80-125.Presently the authoritative survey of Bridges' theories and experiments in stress-, quantitative-, and syllabic-verse. But cf. Gu|'erard (B86).

E87 -----. "Robert Bridges and the Free Verse Rebellion." Journal of Modern Literature 2(1971): 19-32.Summarizes Bridges' metrical experiments in non-conventional meters, i.e. ac-centual verse (cf. Milton's Prosody), quantitative verse (Now In Wintry Delights,etc.), "Neo-Miltonic syllabics" (The Tapestry), and "loose Alexandrines" (TheTestament of Beauty).


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E88 Stockley, W. F. P. "Uncertainty in English Prosody." Poet-Lore 41 (1930): 204-22.The author requires nineteen pages to tell us that metrists are confused aboutwhether English verse is metered by time, accent, or syllables. Criticism ofBayfield (E336).

E89 Thiesmeyer, John E. "Problems in the Application of Linguistic System to the Studyof Versification." Venture (University of Karachi) 6 (1970): 24-33.A critique of both Structuralist and Generative Metrists. Thiesmeyer notes thatthough the history of metrics has been muddled, the new linguistic efforts havebeen no improvement because they, like all the rest, have failed to be utterlyexplicit about defining terms.

E90 -----. "Prosodic Theory: A Critique and Some Proposals." DAI 35 (1974): 1064A(Cornell).Reviews and criticizes traditional, structural, and generative metrics. Metricaltheory itself is said to be unsuccessful because it has not yet answered the fun-damental question of poetic ontology--what kind of object the poet is--andcritical epistomology--how prosodic data is to be defined, gathered, and veri-fied.

Thiesmeyer proposes a solution to the impasse in theory by redefiningthe subject of metrics as the poetic experience rather than the poem-object.

E91 Thompson, John. The Founding of English Metre. London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1961; 2nd ed. 1989, with Preface by John Hollander.Rev: in Sewanee Review 70 (1062): 688-91; in Criticism 5 (1963): 80-82; in Ar-chiv 200 (1963): 219-21. See also Hawkes and Bateson (E719). Based on hisdissertation, "The Iambic Line from Wyatt to Sidney," DA 18 (1958): 1040A(Columbia).Should become the locus classicus on Renaissance metrics and, indeed, on themore general subject of the nature of English accentual-syllabic meter in its sta-ple form, the iambic pentameter line. Beginning with a rigorous distinctionbetween the natural (rhythmic) stresses of the language and the abstract metricalpattern, and adopting the two axioms entailed by this distinction--that versecan be read one way and scanned another, and that the effect of counterpoisingrhythm against meter is to create tension [this is the hallmark of the structuralapproach]--Thompson traces out carefully the development of the pentameterline in early Renaissance verse, from the domination of natural speech rhythmsin Wyatt through the other extreme of excessive metrical regularity in Surreyto the synthesis of both of these styles in the supple, finely modulated metricalinstrument of Sidney, the meter which will be the standard of English poetryfor three centuries thereafter. But equally remarkable is Thompson's argumentthat "the iambic metrical pattern has dominated English verse because it pro-vides the best symbolic model of our language"--that is, through meter "whatpoetry imitates is the structure of the language itself." Meter crystallizes (by se-lection, reduction, and abstraction) the deep structure of the language.

Chapters: on Wyatt, Tottel, and Surrey; The Mirror for Magistrates;Googe, Turberville, and Gascoigne; The Shepheardes Calender; classical meters;and on Sidney. Two Appendices, Bibliography. Synopsis of the book will befound at E687.

E92 Tsur, Reuven. "Articulateness and Requiredness in Iambic Verse." Style 6 (1972):123-48.The relationship of grammatical to prosodic features ("strings") in verse may beeither convergent or divergent, states which differ markedly in "perceptualquality" or texture; divergence produces either soft focus (Milton, Shelley) wherethe two kinds of features gradually fade into each other, or split focus (Pope),


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where they are polarized. Articulateness and requiredness, antinomies, two sides ofthe same coin, are the two aspects of "breaking up a whole into segments." Ar-ticulateness implies segmentation of a whole into parts both "distinct" and"jointed" in order to simplify its perception. Requiredness implies the integrityof the whole through its parts: no part is superfluous. In general the morehighly articulated a structure is, the more highly required are its parts, thoughnot always.

Split Focus: Clearly one of if not the chief function of verse-structureis to heighten the "visibility" of the segmentation, i.e. of the small-scale units.When grammatical and metrical units are not convergent, they "compete" witheach other for our attention. The first of the two versions of the couplet belowseems wittier to us--sharper in bite, stronger in pull--because "awake" (firstversion) is more highly required by the positioning of the syntactic break late inthe line:

Now Lapdogs give themselves the rowzing Shake,And sleepless Lovers, just at Twelve, awake.

Now Lapdogs give themselves the rowzing Shake,And, just at Twelve, the sleepless Lovers awake.

From this example and others we can see however that position is byno means the only factor in establishing tension--meter, narratorial voice, andmany other factors pertain. Among the major English poets, Browning is by farthe most vigorous at sustaining split focus; his verse has a very evident sharpnessand a "conclusive" tone.

Soft Focus: More extreme pressures and more complex structures pro-duce a melding of polarity into continuity and a "suspensive" tone, as inWordsworth, Shelley, and Milton. A high frequency of syntactic breaks nearthe ends of the line normally produces split focus, but after sufficient reiterationwill slide over into the blurred, multi-layered texture so common in Milton.Similarly the strong requiredness generated by enjambment produced fluidityby weakening the line-end. Stress-shifts and complex syntax may achieve thesame effects. An important new approach to the description of verse-structure;see also Tsur's monography (E810), of which this article is anything but a mereredaction.

E93 "The Value of Meter in Verse." Current Literature (Later Current Opinion) 34 (10 Jan.1903): 10-11.Meter is as indispensable to poetry as the laws of perspective and color are topainting or the laws of scale and harmony are to music.

E94 Versification: A Monthly Magazine of Measure and Metre. Ed. Alfred Nutting. June1891-June 1892. London.Continued as Poetry and Prose until suspended in 1895; completely irrelevant toour concerns.

E95 Welch, Constance. "Some Experimental Work in Speech Rhythm." QuarterlyJournal of Speech 11 (1925): 247-52.The author believes that certain emotions are expressed in certain characteristicrhythms, and so her little experiments find what they were designed to find.She divides passages of prose into lines and feet of verse, mainly on the basis oflogical breaks, then hunts for meters, producing such results as "Joy fell intotwo feet anapestic lines. The rhythm of love was very complex."


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E96 Wells, Henry. W. "The Heritage of Form." In his New Poets From Old: A Study inLiterary Genetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940; rpt London,1964. pp. 129-71.A very broad yet informed survey of Poetic Influence, particularly metrical.The most interesting claim is that modern poetry is metrically more indebted toMedieval, Elizabethan, and Cavalier verse than to the Augustans, Romantics,and Victorians. Many examples.

E97 Williams, Miller. "The Line in Poetry." Antaeus 30/31 (1978): 309-13.Generalizations and observations on what is probably the most crucial area inall of poetics--the reader's perception of the line as a unit in the poem; whywasn't this essay written twenty years ago?

E98 Williams, Ellis, Mrs. Annabel. "Uses and Abuses of Metre." An Anatomy of Poetry.Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1922. pp. 68-81.Peregrine thoughts.

E99 Woods, Suzanne. "Aesthetic and Mimetic Rhythms in the Versification ofGascoigne, Sidney, and Spenser." Studies in the Literary Imaginination 11 (1978):31-44.Woods tries to distinguish mimetic rhythms (metrical figures which imitate "thespeaking voice the poem seeks to present or the statement the poem is mak-ing") from aesthetic ones ("in themselves somehow pleasurable"), but the firstdefinition fails to explain how the actual presentation differs from a simulacrumof it, and the second amounts to nothing more than "non-mimetic," since nocorollary class of "displeasurable" rhythms is identified. This distinction sheclaims did not obtain before the sixteenth century and cuts across the traditionalseparation of plain and aureate styles in Renaissance verse.

E100 Wordsworth, William. "Preface." Lyrical Ballads, With Pastorals and Other Poems.3rd. ed. London: Thomas Longman, 1802; rpt in Literary Criticism of WilliamWordsworth. Ed. Paul M. Zall. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966. pp.38-62.In the fifth paragraph Wordsworth commences upon the creation of his properaudience by warning his readers against any expectation of (what later came tobe called) the "metrical contract"--reader presuppositions about the style andthemes of poems set in a certain meter. His larger problem is to explain hisparadoxical view that the "language" of poetry is identical to the language ofprose, the "real language of men." Part of his strategy for a solution is to mapout a rough theory of meter, defending meter as a source of "charm" and"pleasure" which may be beneficially superadded to the effects of prose, senseand order. The pleasure inhering in the regularity of meter will function as amild narcotic, soothing the reader whenever the sheer excitement of good po-etry tends to overwhelm his emotions, and reminding him subliminally thatwhat he is experiencing is art not reality. Thus the meter, emblem of "simili-tude in dissimilitude," produces "a complex feeling of delight." And whatWordsworth terms "the tendency of meter to divest language in a certain de-gree of its reality" will later be called "aesthetic distance." See Coleridge's replyat E13, and see E70 and E71.

E101 Yeats, William Butler. "A General Introduction for My Work" [1937]. In Essaysand Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961, 1968. pp. 509-30.Especially section 3; Yeats's phrases speaking of the language and meters of po-etry, have come to be scarcely less memorable than Wordsworth's: "I discov-ered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought,words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax, and a complete


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coincidence between period and stanza. Because I need a passionate syntax forpassionate subject-matter I compel myself to accept those traditional metersthat have developed with the language. . . . If I wrote of personal love or sor-row in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its acci-dence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscre-tion. . . . all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt. . . . Imust choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional."

See also section 5 of "The Symbolism of Poetry" [1900] in the same vol-ume.

See also B36, B42, B85, B156, B158-59, B176, B193, B214, C58, D323, D332, E756-57, E764, E794, E1215, G15, G111, H17, H22, L42, L57, L100, L155, M181, N77.


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(Schools of Metrists)

QUANTITATIVE METRICS

Perhaps the single most persistent and influential force in English intellectual life overthe last milennium has been the teaching of Latin to English schoolboys--not only the vo-cabulary, but also the grammar and prosody. Up until the twentieth century, educated Eng-lishmen had been inclined to look at English verse through the lenses of Latin verse forcenturies. Coleridge is a prime example. It was long believed that English verse could(should) be written to the rules of Latin metric (Bridges thought so as late as 1916; somethink so still), but even those who recognized that stress was the thing continued to speak--perhaps think--of quantities.

"Quantitative," however, is not entirely accurate as a descriptor, for the distinction isnot one between a meter written on the basis of stress and one written on the basis of syl-labic duration (or any convention about such), but rather between any meter which attemptsto reproduce the classical Greek or Latin metrical patterns (usually the hexameter), whetherin stress (as an accentual analogue-meter) or quantity )as a direct transplant of the rules for ameter in one language to another language, regardless of how dissimilar), and a meter withan abstract metrical pattern originally established in English and therefore organized bystresses, and possibly quantities also in some cases (Old English, for example). For in factthree types of "quantitative verse" are possible in English:

(i) Verse that observes quantity strictly, according to the classical rules, ignoringaccent altogether. Bridges though such a verse possible and pleasing for a very sensitive eareven though unnatural to English.

(ii) Verse that replaces quantity with accent, so that the stress-pattern is asimulacrum of the classical metrical patterns of longs and shorts. Such as the "accentual hex-ameters" of the Germans, Southey, Clough, and Longfellow among many. This kind of"mixed-breed" analogue-verse retains the English verse-constituent while adopting the clas-sical verse-design.

(iii) Verse that manages to make both quantity and accent coincide systematically(and also make sense). Such double identity is understandably difficult to maintain for long,though Tennyson seems to have managed it.

Altogether, "classical-imitative" or "pseudo-classical" seems a better cover term,though awkward, than "quantitative." The standard authority on the Renaissance effort towrite classical-imitative verse is now Attridge (E112); the history of the nineteenth-centurymovement remains to be written. The long-weakening but historically important practice byEnglish poets of writing Latin verse directly is closely related: consult J. W. Binns, ed. TheLatin Poetry of English Poets. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Latin grammars arealso important, and they were legion (today we are inclined to think only of Lyly or Foster);the question of how much English metrists took from Latin grammars seems to have beenlittle studied.

E102 Abercrombie, David. "A Phonetician's View of Verse Structure." Linguistics, no. 6(1964), pp. 5-13; rpt in his Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics. Language andLanguage Learning Series, no. 10. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. pp.16-25; rpt also in Phonetics in Linguistics: A Book of Readings. Ed. W. E. Jonesand J. Laver. London: Longman Group, 1973. pp. 6-13.The study of verse-structure is a proper domain of phonetics "because verse isverse as a result of the way certain aspects of sound, or rather perhaps thesound-producing movements, of speech have been exploited or organized."The air-stream produced in speech is not continuous but pulsatory in two di-


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mensions: the regular muscular contractions creating pressure peaks, heretermed chest-pulses (each of which corresponds to one syllable), and also the"less frequent, more powerful contractions of the breathing muscles whichevery now and then coincide with, and reinforce, a chest-pulse stress-pulses."Languages which organize the latter are stress-timed, those organizing the for-mer, syllable-timed. English verse, not different in kind from English speech, isstress-timed (stress-pulses may occur even in the absence of a sounded syllable),divided into isochronous stress-initiating units called feet, and "must be there-fore in some sense quantitative." Silent stresses are unexpectedly common,English verse has many more types of feet than Greek, and line-end is usuallysignaled by a silent stress, monosyllabic foot, or the rhyme.

Notice the sample scansions, whch seem especially forced and unnatural.

E103 -----. "Syllable Quantity and Enclitics in English." In Honour of Daniel Jones. Ed.David Abercrombie et al. London: Longman's 1964. pp. 216-22; rpt in hisStudies in Phonetics and Linguistics. Language and Language Learning Series, no.10. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. pp. 26-34.Appropriating the concepts (while oddly eschewing the terms) of classical ver-sification to the description of the rhythm of the English language (and verse),A. argues that there are consistent relations of quantity to be found betweenEnglish syllables. Quantity in English syllables is relative to that in adjacent syl-lables and varies with context, in contrast to Greek, where syllabic quantity wasabsolute and constant. N.B.: syllable-quantity does not equal vowel quantity.A. postulates that English utterances are divided into isochronous stress-timedfeet, such that "we cannot therefore sway anything about the quantity of a sylla-ble until we know its place in the foot." Three disyllabic feet are identi-fied(short-long, equal-equal, and long-short), all in triple time.

E104 Adams, Stephen J. "Pound's Quantities and 'Absolute Rhythm.'" Essays in Literature[Western Illinois University] 4 (1977): 95-109.Explicates those two principles in Pound's poetry. By the latter, he meant"melopoeia," or the absolute association of emotions with word-sounds--acomplex but precise system of correspondences Pound held to be different foreach language. Hence, Adams shows, he often subordinated lexical and seman-tic accuracy in his translations to melopoeic accuracy. By the former, Poundmeant a rigorous system of verse-composition based on quantity, but lackingany consistency of principle: "Pound's syllable may be long either by nature, orby position, or by stress, but sometimes a stressed syllable is insisted on as shortand counterpointed. Pound's principles are thus arbitrary and contradictory. . . .This is not to say that Pound's sapphics are failures, but that they are an illu-sion--a skillfully designed illusion."

E105 Allen, [Charles] Grant [Blairfindie]. "On the Galliambic Metre." The Attis of CaiusValerius Catullus Translated into English Verse, with Dissertations. . . . London:David Nutt, 1892. pp. 126-54.Argues Catullus's meter to be highly regular (contrary to opinion) and of theform Ë Ë Ì Ë Ì Ë Ì Ì Ë Ë Ì Ë Ë Ë Ë Ì , the half-lines beingderived from Greek iambic tetrameters. Tennyson's translation uses trochaicmeter, George Meridith's iambic-anapestic. Tennyson's choice, Allen believes,arose from a mistaken accentual scansion of the classical verse.

E106 Applegate, James. "Sidney's Classical Meters." MLN 70 (1955): 254-55.Corrects a mistake by Theodore Spencer in ELH 12 (1945): 251-78. Sidney'sfine little poem "When to my deadlie pleasure" is written in the Aristophanicnot the Anacreonic meter. Wider discussion of Sidney's classical-imitative ex-periments follows.


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E107 Arnold, Matthew. Three Lectures on Translating Homer. London: Longman's 1861.

E108 -----. Last Words on Translating Homer. London: Longman's, 1896.There is a noteworthy Introduction in the 1905 edition edited by W. H. D.Rouse, but the best modern text (with excellent notes) is On the Classical Tra-dition. Vol. 1 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. R. H. Super.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. See also Omond (E214),Spedding (E238), Munro (M140), Newman (E210), and Lord Redesdale(E220).

On the criticial question of audience, Arnold considers the best reader andjudge of a Homeric translation to be the scholar, both fluent in the originalGreek and possessed of genuine taste in poetry. And though the lectures treatmainly of style and movement, the third of the original three turns to the ques-tion of meter, Arnold rejecting couplets (Chapman's and Pope's), blank verse(Cowper's Miltonic convolutions) and ballad meter (Francis W. Newman's),preferring instead the hexameter (Hawtrey's are approved, Clough's and Long-fellow's rejected) as being the closest to the original Homeric "movement" (acrucial term). The stiffness of the dactyls in the English hexameter may beavoided by frequent spondees; the only other requirement (also crucial) is thatthe lines must "read themselves"--i.e. the natural accent should not be wrenchedunnaturally to fit the metrical pattern. The lines must read naturally to the Eng-lish ear, though at the same time the quantities must not be "utterly discarded."

In the Last Words lecture (delivered November 30, 1861), Arnold makesa sincere effort to mollify Newman (whose Reply to Arnold's earlier criticismsin the second lecture showed him eager to avenge an inflated sense of injury)while at the same time defending his original judgments, then examines theviews of Spedding (English hexameters should be quantitative) and Munro(quantity should be entirely ignored) with surprising energy, generally sidingwith Munro in favor of the accentual imitation as something "necessary and in-evitable" to the English ear. "We must work with the tools we have." Thelecture concludes with the memorable soft eulogy for Clough.

See also the untitled review by Noel Annan in The New Statesman n.s. 27(1944): 191.

E109 Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster [1563-69]. London: John Daye, 1570; 2nd ed.1571. Ed. Edward Arber. English Reprints series, no. 23. London, 1870, 1888.In Smith (A26), vol. 1, pp. 1-45. In the English Experience series, no. 15. NewYork: Da Capo Press, 1968. In facsimile, Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press,1967. Ed. Lawrence W. Ryan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. Ed. R. J.Schoeck. Ontario: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1966.Near the end of Book II, Ascham criticises his contemporary verse-writers,those "rash, ignorant heads, which now can easily reckon up fourteen syllables,and easily stumble on every rhyme" but are too idle and ignorant to labor forcomplete perfection of verse, "true quantity in every foot and syllable." Rhymetoo earns his scorn: "our rude beggarly rhyming [was] brought first into Italy byGoths and Huns, when all good verses and all good learning too were de-stroyed by them. . . . to follow rather the Goths in rhyming, than the Greeks intrue versifying, is even to eat acorns with swine, when we may freely eat wheatbread among men." Surrey and Periz are noticed as laudable poets who avoidrhyme and "observe just number and even feet" but their feet are unfortunately"feet without joints, that is to say not distinct by true quantities of syllables."

Thus, the first important English commentator on verse-structure mis-understands the native accentual meter entirely, and so damns it for being tooformless and easy, requiring neither labor nor learning. See also E40.

As for the earliest English verse written in quantitative meters, there are


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some specimens in Ascham's Toxophilus (a popular treatise on archery) of 1545,and in Book I of The Scholemaster Ascham quotes verses by Thomas Watson(Bishop of Lincoln) from his unpublished translation of the Odyssey (ca. 1545).The interest in England in setting modern verse to classical meters seems tohave been transmitted through Jacques de la Taille in France from ClaudioTolemei in Italy (1539). For further discussion of Ascham see:

E110 Strozier, Robert M. "Theory and Structure in Roger Ascham's TheScholemaster." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74 (1973): 144-62.

E111 Ryan, Lawrence V. "The Scholemaster." In his Roger Ascham. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1963. Especially pp. 272-76: a very sanguineperspective.

E112 Attridge, Derek. Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Meters.London: Cambridge University Press, 1974; rpt 1979. 258 pp. Based on hisdissertation, "The Elizabethan Experiments in English Quantitative Verse," atCambridge University in 1971.Rev.: in MP 76 (1978): 69-73; in English 24 (1975): 91-92.Attridge is now the standard reference on the subject of quantitative experi-ments in the Renaissance. The book contains three parts: parts 2 and 3 reviewthe theorizing and the verses of poets, first synthetically (in 2), exam-ining theRenaissance attitudes toward both vernacular verse and classical imitators, theorigin and extent of the vogue for quantitative verse, and the nature of theverse itself, then analytically by author (in 3), with separate examinations ofeach of the major theorists and poets. But more important is the more abstract--but more crucial--analysis in part 1, not hitherto researched fully or directly,of the exceedingly complex question, "What is quantity?" This question resolvesitself at once into three others, scarcely easier--"What is the modern under-standing of Latin verse?" "How did the Renaissance understand Latin verse?"and "How did the Romans understand Latin verse?" Everyone speaks glibly oflongs and shorts, but as Attridge convincingly shows, the phonetic evidence isfar too complex and ambiguous for the simplistic, text-book definition ofquantity to be correct. It would seem, judging from Renais-sance primers forschoolboys, that the Renaissance approach, at least, was not to stress (in pro-nunciation of Latin verses) the ictuses (i.e. the "long" syllables" but rather thesyllables which would be stressed according to normal English rules of accen-tuation. Such a "prosaic" stressing, rather than an ictic stressing, would effectu-ally polarize the normal accentual system from the more abstract and artificial"quantities," which were determined by a complex system of rules (not reallyvery intelligible, even to them, but accepted on authority), among which wasone which allowed determination of quantity by orthography (i.e. by varying thespelling of a word one could produce a desired quantity). Thus we can see howabstract and visual rather than aural was the whole Renaissance understanding ofLatin verses, and also how sophisticated and antithetical it seemed in the face ofvernacular poetry. It is this demonstration of the crucial role of phrase-stressingand orthography (taught to the Elizabethan schoolboy as he scanned his Latinverses) that Attridge is able to achieve an altogether remarkable synthesis ofsome very confusing evidence into that most difficult of all historicial results, acoherent, convincing, and "natural" account of what the problem looked likethrough the eyes of the men of the time.

E113 Related: Percy Simpson, "The Elizabethan Pronunciation of Accented GreekWords." MLR 45 (1950): 509-10.

E114 Auden, W. H. Preface to Selected Songs of Thomas Campion. Boston: David Godine,1973. pp. 9-14.The poet setting verse to music must take vowel length into account, and


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surely Greek meters were originally derived from music. Scansions. Cf. E177.

E115 Aylward, Kevin J. "Milton's Latin Versification: The Hexameter." DA 27 (1966):1331A (Columbia).How closely did Milton approximate the classical model? Aylward emphasizesthe considerable inadequacies of the models-- contemporary grammars, schooltraining, scholarship and informed opinion, and treatises on poetics--as partialjustification for Milton's achievement, which he characterizes in various poemsas "peculiar," "uncertain," "indiscreet,""insensitive," "inept," and "arbitrary,"the last of these being particularly apt.

E116 Baker, Sheridan. "English Meter Is Quantitative." College English 21 (1960): 309-15.A thesis Baker can uphold because he believes that stress "is the only cause of"quantity, or that quantity "more or less rides along with stress" nearly always.[This has yet to be proven.] "In Latin, syllables are long by intrinsic nature orposition, and they stay in position. In English, stress alone makes quantity, andwhat one minute you think is stressed may not be the next time you look."[This is question-begging.]Baker identifies two types of short syllables in Eng-lish (time-values 1/4 and 1/2) and three types of longs (1, 3/4, and 1- 1/4).

E117 Barnard, Mary. "A Communication on Greek Metric, Ezra Pound, and Sappho."Agenda 16, 3-4 (1978-79): 62-68.Pound suggested a reference for study of Greek meters to this poet; she eventu-ally developed a short "balanced" line for translating the Sapphic fragments.

E118 Bayly, Anselm. An Introduction to Languages, Literary and Philosophical. London: JohnRivington, 1758; rpt Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1953. See p. 173 ff.A comparative grammar. Bayly complains of the absence of fixed quantities forEnglish words, then later remarks that "Accent is in English the same as Quan-tity, making that syllable long, on which it is laid, and the other syllable short."Accent (acute, grave, or circumflex) is taken as the rising or falling of the voice;"quantity then may be considered as the time, and accent, the tune [of lan-guage]."

E119 -----. "Poetry." The Alliance of Musick, Poetry, and Oratory. London: John Stockdale,1789. pp. 79-122; rpt Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1953.The scope of Prosody encompasses Accent, Quantity, Feet, and Rhythm. Ac-cent, the elevation or depression of the voice, "answers to tones in musick."Musical notes are occasionally used in scansions, and though Bayly traces accentback to Greek versification, still he thinks that "certain syllables of a certainquantity constitute feet" in English verse.

E120 [Bayne, Thomas?] "English Hexameters and Elegaics." Macmillan's Magazine 86(1901): 430-37. Cf. Thomas Bayne's note on "English Hexameters and

E121 Elegaics" in Notes and Queries, 9th series, vol. 7 (1901): 321-22.Correcting an ill-informed critic, the author mentions the hexameters ofColeridge, Clough, Longfellow, and Kingsley, discusses Harvey and Spenser atgreater length, then notes the elegiac verses of Arthur Munby and Sir LewisMorris, discussing Browning's "Ixion" at length.

E122 Benson, Carl. "Short Chapters on Novel and Exotic Metres." American Review: AWhig Journal 4 (1846): 482-85; 5 (1847): 72-73, 174-75, 502-4.On the possibilities for English versions of the classical Hexameters, Pentame-ters, Iambic Trimeters (our Alexandrines), Sapphics, Alcaics, Hendecasyllabics,and irregular meters. Mentions the poverty of English spondees.

E123 [Benson, William.] Letters concerning Poetrical Translations, and Virgil's and Milton's


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Arts of Verse &. London: J.Roberts, 1739; rpt New York: Garland, 1970. 83 pp.A rather detailed comparison of the versification of Virgil and Milton in elevenfeatures of their verse; Benson scans by duration (Letter 8). Milton is taken upin letter 5.

E124 Blackie, J. S. "Homer and His Translators." Macmillan's Magazine 4 (1861): 268-80.Professor Blackie takes a more philosophical view of the question than most ofthe reviewers did; he also gives a lengthy defense of rhyme, concluding there-from that the ballad-meters (long- line couplets of Common Measure, that is)would be best. Penultimate paragraphs takes up (and promptly flings down) thehexameter.

E125 -----. "Remarks on English Hexameters." In his Horae Hellenicae. London:Macmillan, 1874. pp. 278-96."The beau ideal of a translation as a work of art unquestionably is, that it shall be. . . a FACIMILE, as far as may be. . . . a translator is bound to transfer everymeasure of his original into that measure of his own language, which in itsstyle, character, associations, and effects, corresponds to his model." The prin-ciple to be followed, then, is not literal reproduction but correspondence ofeffect, whatever the means. Blackie favors the old fourteeners of Chapman andthe fifteen- syllabled trochaic lines of Locksley Hall to any other measure inEnglish--quantitative or accentual hexameter, couplet, or blank verse--for ren-dering Homer.

E126 [Blundell, James, tr.] Hexametrical Experiments, or A Version of four of Virgils Pastorals. . . done in a structure of verse similar to that of the original Latin, with hints toexplain the method of reading and a slight essay on the laws of the metre. London:William Pickering, 1838.The two "slight" introductory essays on the hexameter (pp. 1-25) take up afourth of the book. Though the "longs" and "shorts" of Blundell's metricthwart accent only rarely, he bases his system of quantitative hexameters ontime: "in relation to the time which their utterance requires, the syllables of ourlanguage may be divided into four kinds, the long, the short, the double short,and the common."

E127 Bridges, Robert. "Epistle to a Socialist in London." The Monthly Review 12 (1903):150-64.Hexameter verse, with a "Summary of Stone's Prosody," pp. 165-67. Said to bethe second of two Epistles, the first being Now in Wintry Delights. See also "APeace Ode" (alcaics?) in the same periodical, 11 (June 1903): 141-43.

E128 -----. The Feast of Bacchus. Oxford: Privately printed by H. Daniel, 1889.Brief note at the end, dated 1885. The meter of his version of Terence, Bridgessays, is a six-stress line, with certain additional provisions for "distribution" ofstress among several short syllables, and any other similarity to the iambic tri-meter of Latin comedy is accidental.

E129 -----. Ibant Obscuri: An Experiment in the Classical Hexamater. Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1916.The Introduction, "Virgil's Rhythms," pp. 1-18, originally appeared in the NewQuarterly for January 1909. "A Note on Stone's Prosody," at the end, pp. 154-58, reprints Bridges' 1903 "Summary of Stone's Prosody" (E130) with new1916 "Observations" in parallel columns. Throughout the Introduction Bridgesreiterates that a poet can achieve great effects only in those forms that are coge-nial to the language, so that any attempts to reproduce a form successful in an-other language but graceless in one's own, simply for the sake ofcopying, is ut-


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ter folly. Bridges' own "undertaking was not to copy the Latin imitation of theGreek but to make an analogous attempt in [his] own language."

E130 -----. Now in Wintry Delights. Oxford: Daniel Press, 1903.See the six-page note at the end, where Bridges confirms that this verse iswritten in a classical-imitative meter based on the system of Stone. (E251),which Bridges sketches briefly for readers unfamiliar with it, adding remarksand observations.

E131 [Brightland, John?] "The Art of Poetry." A Grammar of the English Tongue, WithNotes, Giving the Grounds and Reason of Grammar in General, To which are nowadded, The Arts of Poetry, Rhetoric, Logic, &c. . . . London, 1711; 2nd rev. ed.1712. pp. 131- 68.The Prosodia affixed to the grammar mainly treats the principal genres of po-etry, but chapter 1 gives a quantitative account of meter. I have seen only thesecond edition, but Culler reported that the first edition titled its section onverse "New Prosodia; or the Art of English Numbers." Three degrees of quan-tity are stipulated (long, short, and variable) as well as three of accent; "Accent isthe raising and falling of the Voice, above or under its usual Tone, but an Artof which we have little Use, and know less, in the English Tongue." Bysshe iscriticized in a note for the "erroneous use of Accent for Quantity."

E132 Calverley, C. S. "On Metrical Translation" and the two following essays in LiteraryRemains of Charles Stuart Calverley. London: George Bell, 1885. pp. 172-85.(The first originally appeared in the London Student for October 1868.)Calverley intends to correct a modern misconception by insisting that the an-cients read (pronounced) their verse one way but scanned it another, i.e. "by anaccent which was so far arbitrary that it was wholly independent of the scan-sion, and was intended partially to conceal the scansion," in contrast to modernimitations of classical meters. In these latter he finds their monotony and ca-cophony most offensive.

E133 Campbell, T. M. "Longfellow and the Hexameter." MLN 23 (1908): 96.Addendum by Charles Eliot Norton, p. 231.Longfellow's early dislike of the accentual hexameter (1841) was apparently re-versed by an approving review in a German periodical, resulting in his use ofthe meter in 1845.

E134 Campion, Thomas. Observations in the Art of English Poesie. London: Richard Fieldfor Andrew Wise, 1602; rpt in the Works of Thomas Campion. Ed. Walter R.Davis. London: Faber & Faber, 1969; in Smith (A26), vol. 2, pp. 327-55; infacsimile: Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1969.Written perhaps as early as 1591, by its publication date Campion's treatise hadbecome simply an index of what concessions the faltering theory of classical-imitative verse in English was driven to in order to have any credence at all. Inthe First Book of Ayres in 1601 Campion had declined the use of quantitativemeters in favor of "ear-pleasing rimes," and when he came to a full-scale de-fense of the classical forms the following year, his position was mixed at best:he bases quantity directly on accent ("above all the accent of our words is dilli-gently to be observed, for chiefly by the accent in any language the true valueof the syllables is to be measured"), though "accent," being described as rising,falling, grave, or flat, seems to be not only stress but pitch. Yet at the same timehe allows length by position, which does in fact wrench accent. Fortunately,though, he scans by ear (phonetically) rather than by eye, allowing no clumsymachinery of orthography. The bulk of the Observations presents the eightmeasures (iambic, dimeter, trochaic, elegaic, three types of lyric, and ana-


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creonic) which English could improve itself by adoption. But the most interest-ing matter is that Campion's close training in music leads him to treat verse-structure (quantity) in terms of Time. Anyone who can "time a song" can seethat Latin and English pentameters "are in nature all of the same length ofsound . . . for either of them being timed with the hand, quinque perficiunt tem-pora, they fill up the quantity (as it were) of five semibreves." Metrical rests areallowed in verse as in music, and the failing of pyrrhic substitutions in iambiclines lies in their "curtailing their verse." Number in poetry, too, refers not onlyto the number of syllables but also to "the length or shortness of their sound" asis the case when verse is set to music. Omond (A5) misses this crucial matterentirely, as well as one other: in his chapter 4 Campion reveals what is demon-strably a clear understanding of trochaic and trisyllabic substitutions. But noneof these keen perceptions did any good: the whole quantitative controversy hadbeen moribund for a decade when the Observations was published, and Daniel'sreply (E521) was irrefragable. And Campion's defense, by revealing the severeweaknesses of his position, served only to advance the case of the Accentualists.See N75.

E135 Carne-Ross, D. S. "New Metres for Old: A Note on Pound's Metric." Arion 6(1967): 216-32.Lucid technical analysis of The Cantos and some Greek verse to show thatPound's metric is based on a "rhythmic constant"(recurring phrases equal insyllable count) and, indeed, quantity (taking quantity in English verse as pitch isin Greek, i.e. variable not central). The impressively marshalled evidence in-cludes a little book which Pound read, Duhamel and Vildrac's 1912 Notes sur latechnique poétique.

E136 Carpenter, Edward. "On English Hexameter Verse." Cambridge Review, 22 Februaryand 1 March 1900, pp. 219-21, 235-36.Very skeptical of the practicability or range of the quantitative hexameter inour stress-marked language. Discusses Clough (E140), Arnold (E108), andStone (E251).

E137 Cayley, C[harles] B[agot]. The "Prometheus Bound" of Aeschylus, translated in theoriginal metres. London: John Camden Hotten, 1867.Seven page Preface: "I have endeavoured to realize the metres of my originalby the strictest consideration of the quantities of the words I have employed,"and further, "I have taken pains to combine the accents of my lines in modespartially regular and familiar to the English ear."

E138 -----. "Remarks and Experiments on English Hexameters." Transactions of thePhilological Society, 1862-63. pp. 67- 85. Later published separately at Berlin,1863. 21 pp.A series of divagations ending in an outright evasion, but one gathers that, forCayley, paying attention to the accentual structure of classical verse is of evengreater importance than attending to the quantities of English syllables. But hedenies that accent lengthens syllables in English and that "accent in the modernlanguages is the same thing as quantity in the ancient"; indeed, an accentualhexameter is "diametrically opposed to classical usage and principle." Yet mod-ern translators of classical verse can never succeed until "they can become inposse, if not in esse, exact imitators of both the accentual and quantitative com-binations of the ancients." Time and pauses in English verse also mentioned(first page).

E139 Chasles, Philarète, et al. Letters to The Athenaum, April-June 1849, pp. 411, 487,517, 597-98, 644-45.


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E140 Clough, Arthur Hugh. The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich. London, 1848; rpt as TheBothie of Tober-na-Vuolich in The Poems and Prose Remains. Ed. Blanche Clough.2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1869. Vol. 2, pp. 201-87. Also rpt in the OxfordStandard Authors edition of A. L. P. Norrington (Oxford University Press,1951, 1967) with a valuable Introduction (section IV of which discusses thequantitative verse).Accentual hexameters written in imitation of the classical quantitative meter.Also in accentual hexameters are Amours de Voyage and the six "Essays in Classi-cal Metres" (two passages from the Iliad, two Elegiacs, on Alcaic, and "Ac-taeon"). Add to these an essay, "Illustrations of Latin Lyrical Meters," and the"Letters of Parepidemius, Number Two: On Translating Homer" which maybe located conveniently in the Selected Prose Works edited by Buckner B.Trawick (University of Alabama Press, 1964, pp. 66-84,180-86). The latter es-say first appeared in the 1888 edition of the Prose Remains.

Clough's view is that both accent and quantity are important to bothclassical and modern verse; in classical verse, however, the metrical accent wasbased on pitch, and independent of the ordinary accentuations based on stress--i.e., "The accent of speech was lost in the accent of song." Thus, "with the an-cients the accent of words in metre was . . . independent of their colloquial ac-cent: while with us the two are kept simply identical. The accent of wordswith us is fixed, with them was in metre arbitrary. So on the other hand, withthem, the quantity was fixed and carefully observed;with us it is variable, andgreatly neglected. Still there can be no question but that discrimination ofquantity enters largely into the modern art of versifying." To modernize a clas-sical meter, then, two rules are necessary: "the Metrical Accent must remain thesame" and "Quantity should be preserved." Clough cleaves strictly to the firstbut not the second. In short, he uses the modern English stress-accent as ana-logue of the classical Greek pitch-accent to mark the metrical ictus. The Britishreader has no patience, he observes (second letter of Parepidemius), for so so-phisticated a treatment as one which might counterpoint or oppose the stressand the ictus.

E141 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Hexameters," "Translation of a Passage in Ottfried,""Catullian Hendecasyllables," "Homeric Hexameters," "The Ovidian ElegaicMetre," "Hexameters (Paraphrase of Psalm XLVI)," "Hymn to the Earth,""Mahomet," and "Ad Vilnum Axiologum." In Poetical Works. Ed. ErnestHartley Coleridge. London: Oxford University Press, 1912, 1967. pp. 304-8,326-30, 391-92.Accentual hexameters, mainly, written about 1799 in most cases. The ElegaicMetre" couplet is the only that has become well-known, but the note to"Hymn to the Earth" proffers some instruction for "intelligent female readers ofpoetry": "in the attempt to adapt the Greek metres to the English language, wemust begin by substituting quality of sound for quantity--that is, accentuated orcomparatively emphasized syllables, for what in the Greek and Latin verse, arenamed long. . . ."

E142 Crowe, William. A Treatise on English Versification. London: John Murray, 1827. 334pp.The book had been earlier serialized under the title "On English Versification"in the London Magazine 7 (1823): 29-37, 173- 80, 273-82, 429-36, 661-68; 10(1824): 29-35.

Public Orator of long standing at Oxford, Crowe's theoretical positiondates from the 1760's: he accepts quantity as the basis of verse almost as if itwere axiomatic. More curious still, "the simplest elements of verse are letters--of letters are formed syllables--of syllables feet--of feet a verse." Yet having


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been faithful to the letter, he turns to the spirit--sounds. The Introduction givesan interesting historical review of the prosodists--Webbe, Gascoigne, Putten-ham, Campion, Daniel, Cowley, Woodford, Poole, Bysshe, Pemberton, Fos-ter, Mitford, and several other lesser mortals. Of the several "experiments" inmetric undertaken in English poetry (alliterative, classical-imitative, and four-teener, e.g.), only that of "ten syllables, free from rhyme" has succeeded. Fromthis we can see that Crowe takes decasyllabism as an absolute. In its time, hisbook was the voice of things past.

E143 Cuddy, Lois S. "The Influence of Latin Poetics on Emily Dickenson's Style."Comparative Literature Studies 13 (1976): 214-29.Proposes a new explanation for Dickinson's verseform: the meter is meant to bequantitative. What E. D. learned in the Stoddard and Andrews Latin grammartext she read at the Amherst Academy she later tried to replicate in her ownwork, using dashes to denote caesurae and foot boundaries and using capitali-zation and italics to insure that certain words within the lines would receiveunusual stress and hence lengthening of syllables.

E144 Cummings, Prentiss. Hexameter Verse and its requirements in order that it may "readitself." Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1900. 68 pp.The requirements for meeting Arnold's dictum about the smoothness of Englishhexameters are that "accent should not be sacrificed for the sake of quantity"and that "every ictus syllable should be an accented syllable." Cummings distin-guishes ictus, accent, and emphasis, and constructs a schema of nine line-types,based on the number and position of "emphasized feet"; "emphasis may be ef-fected by stress or by lengthening the vowel." But after the Introduction of theEnglish forms, the book turns exclusively to Greek and Latin examples.

E145 Davis, Walter R. "A Note on Accent and Quantity in A Booke of Ayres." MLQ 22(1961): 32-36.Campion repeats vowel sounds to insure identical quantity and thereby en-riches the traditional accentual meters with superimposed quantitative effects in"Come let us sound,""Turne backe you wanton flyer," and "Harke al you la-dies."

E146 Duckworth, George E. "Milton's Hexameter Patterns--Vergillian or Ovidian?"American Journal of Philology 93 (1972): 52-60.In the hexameter poem, Milton's metrical style is mixed, resembling the Ver-gilian Eclogues rather more than the Aeneid or Ovid; in the elegies, he resemblesOvid more closely than the classical Roman poets did themselves. Extensivestatistical analysis.

E147 Dunn, Catherine M. "A Survey of the Experiments in Quantitative Verse in theEnglish Renaissance." DA 28 (1967): 193A (U.C.L.A.)A broad study of the movement through its vicissitudes in England, touchingalso on its Italian origin and French transmission. Poets examined: Ascham,Spenser, Harvey, Sidney, Abraham Fraunce, John Dickinson, "Anomos,"Richard Barnfield, Stanyhurst, Webbe, Abraham Fleming, Robert Greene,Francis Sabie, and author of Henry VII, Campion, and Daniel.

E148 Ellis, Robinson. The Poem and Fragments of Catallus Translated in the Metres of theOriginal. London: John Murray, 1871.The fourteen page Preface praises Tennyson's work and sets forth explicitly the"rules" for quantitative verse on "the true positional principle": (1) "accentedsyllables, as a general rule, are long, though some syllables which count as longneed not be accented"; (2) the laws of position are to be observed according to


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the general rules of classical prosody. Problems of application are discussed di-rectly. General principle: "Quantity," in English revivals of ancient metre, de-pends not only on position, but on accent." (The ambiguity is evident; seeMunro (E203).)

E149 Elze, Karl. Der englische Hexameter. Einladung zu den öffentlichen Prüfungen imHerzoglichen Gymnasium zu Dessau . . . 8-9 April 1867. Dessau: H.Neubürger, 1867.Formerly the best available source on English quantitative verse, Elze has notbeen entirely superseded by Attridge (E112); his treatment of second- andthird-rate writers is more detailed, and he covers both the Renaissance and thenineteenth century and also the classical imitations in general and the transla-tions of Homer in particular.

E150 English Hexameters Translations, from Schiller, Göthe, Homer, Callinus, and Meleager.London: John Murray, 1847.Contributions by Hare, Hawtrey, Herschel, Lockhart, and Whewell; "all thepieces are executed with the intention that the lines, being read according tothe natural and ordinary pronunciation, shall run into accentual hexameters orpentameters." Fifty pieces in a small oblong volume, bound in beautiful Ori-ental boards.

E151 "The English Translators of Homer." National Review (London) 11 (1860): 283-314.An historical survey of the various English translators, arising from a review ofNewman's and Wright's efforts; the reviewer approves ballad-meter as most ap-propriate.

E152 Ernle, George. The Wrath of Achilleus, translated from the Iliad into quantitativehexameters. London: Oxford University Press, 1922. 135 pp.Preface, pp. 1-17.

E153 Evans, Robert O. "Spenser's Role in the Controversy over Quantitative Verse."Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 57 (1956): 246-56.Evans believes that (1) the whole controversy has been "exaggerated," that (2)Spenser's skill at writing q. verse has been underrated, that (3) the Harvey cor-respondence should not be taken seriously, and that (4) though "there is noreason to assume that quantitative verse cannot be written with some success inEnglish," the whole phenomenon is simply a sophisticated literary game.

E154 Fairclough, H. R. "The Influence of Virgil upon the Forms of English Verse."Classical Journal 26 (1930): 74-94.Taking Bridges' Ibant Obscuri for a point of departure, Fairclough surveys theEnglish attempts at hexameters from Stanyhurst through Tennyson, especiallythe flurry in the nineteenth century, finding that none "has ever been reallysuccessful." The review then turns to the metiers of couplet and blank verse--the couplet in Douglas, Dryden and Pope, blank verse in Chaucer, Shake-speare, Dryden, many lesser poets, and most importantly, Milton.

E155 Fenyo, Jane K. "Grammar and Music in Thomas Campion's Observations in the Artof English Poesie." Studies in the Renaissance 17 (1970): 46-72.Commentators on Campion have always been unable to reconcile his evidentskill and subtlety at versecraft with the seeming obtuseness of many statementsin the Observations. But in fact, Campion's prosodic treatise simply follows theorder of Lyly's grammar (the standard Renaissance authority) rather closely.Fenyo gives a section-by-section comparison, then argues that Campion in ef-fect saw, heard, and spoke English verses quantitatively.


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E156 The First Booke of the Preservation of King Henry the VII. London: 1599.Written in quantitative hexameters and containing a noteworthy short preface.

E157 Fraunce, Abraham. The Lamentations of Amyntas for the death of Phillis, paraphrasticallytranslated out of Latine into English Hexameters. London: 1587, 1588, 1589, 1596.

E158 -----. The Countesse of Pembroke's Yvychurch. London: 1591.

E159 -----. The Countess of Pembroke's Emanuell. London: 1591. Also ed. by Grosart forthe Miscellanies of the fuller Worthies' Library, 1871.Next to Stanyhurst's Aeneis the most substantial body of quantitative hexame-ters written in the Renaissance. The title of the first section of Emanuell de-clares the verse to be in "ryming hexameters."

E160 Fuller, Roy. "Boos of Different Durations." Southern Review 11 (1975): 825-37.Leisurely speculations, acute and intelligent observations, and errant reasoningon duration of syllables (Quantity) in poetry. From a reading of Sonnenscheinand Scripture's work on acoustic metrics, Fuller derives "the 'myth' of stress" asthe basis for English verse. Duration is the thing. Noteworthy digression: "diffi-culties or irregularities of scansion may be minimized or explained if the ques-tionable passage is read for sense."

E161 Fulton, Edward. "Sidney, Spenser, and the Areopagus." MLN 31 (1916): 372-74.Though there is no evidence definitely establishing the existence of the Are-opagus as a club, it is indisputable that Spenser and Sidney were intimate friendsand that Spenser was seriously concerned to obtain agreement among the poetspracticing quantitative verse on the rules they were to follow.

E162 Garnett, Richard. "On Translating Homer." Universal Review, 1889; rpt in hisEssays of an Ex-Librarian. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901. pp. 3-27.Approves of the couplet as the superior meter to blank verse, the ballad Alex-andrine, and the English hexameter for purposes of translation.

E163 "German Epics and English Hexameters." Dublin University Magazine 44 (1854): 55-72.Reviews translations by James Cochrane of German poems by Voss and othersinto English accentual hexameters; the reviewer complains that though accentis principle in English, quantity should be attended to also. Technical notes onmeter in translation, pp. 63-64, 66-68. Omond was disappointed by this.

E164 Gildon, Charles. The Complete Art of Poetry. 2 vols. London: Charles Rivington,1718. Vol. 1, pp. 293-303.Gildon, arch-enemy of Bysshe (E505), represents the reactionary forces ineighteenth-century English metrics still attempting to apply the Classical systemto English verse. In this fictitious dialogue, Laudon defends the quantities ofclassical Greek as being the basis of English versification, accent being a matterpertaining only to performance, not to meter. The classical "feet," in fact, arerepresented by notes on a musical staff, since the "quantities" were thought tobe derived originally from actual time-values. Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" is soscanned as example.

E165 -----. The Laws of Poetry As laid down by the Duke of Buckinghamshire in his Essay onPoetry, By the Earl of Roscommon in his Essay on Translated Verse, and by the LordLansdowne on Unnatural Flights in Poetry, Explain'd and Illustrated. London: 1721.See pp. 62-72, 315-16.

Gildon defends blank verse against "rhyme" and discusses the nature of"accent" in classical verse as well as modern.


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E166 [Goldsmith, Oliver?] "Versification." The British Magazine, 1763; rpt as no 18. inThe Complete Works of Oliver Goldsmith. London: Charles Griffen, 1862. Seealso essays 14 ("Origin of Poetry") and 15 (Poetry Distinguished from OtherWriting"). The attribution has recently been questioned (see PMLA 39 (1924):310 ff).The author of the essay, rather ill-informed, seems to have been reading theRenaissance theorists. He claims that number in modern verse pertains only tosyllables rather than to feet as in the classical, and that quantitative verse couldbe written in English if only a little effort were bestowed, since "it is impossiblethat the same measure, composed of the same times, should have a good effectupon the ear in one language, and a bad effect in another." This is thoughtless.

E167 Goodell, Thomas D. "Quantity in English Verse." Transactions of the AmericanPhilological Association 16 (1885-87): 78-103.Though recognizing the differing prosodic bases of classical and modern verse,Goodell agrees with Lanier that time-values are the basis of English verse,which is therefore somewhat like Greek. The similarities between the twoprosodies are thereafter emphasized throughout, musical notation is correlatedto the classical scansion marks, and two modes are indentified: "feet of threetimes and feet of four times."

Rules are given on pp. 100-2. The essay explicitly conjoins the Tempo-ralist scansion with the classical Greek system. Notice M77.

E168 Hampton, Barnabas. Prosodia Construed, and the meaning of the most difficult wordstherein contained plainly illustrated;Being an addition to the construction of Lilie'sRules, and of like necessary use. London, 1639; rpt 1704. 29 pp.A pocket-sized standard handbook of the time giving metrical rules based onquantity. The text is in Latin and English, alternating after every term orphrase.

E169 Hanssen, Selby. "An Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's Metrical Experiments in 'TheArcadia.'" Diss., Yale University, 1942.

E170 Hardy, Douglas. "Influence of Finnish Kalevala in the Composition of theLongfellow's 'Song of Hiawatha.'" Brigham Young University Studies 4 (1962):140-47.Accentual hexameters. Cf. Moyne and Mustanoja (E205), Larrabee (E193),Kunze (E189), and Holman (E180).

E171 Harrison, Frederic. "The Old Books in War-Time." English Review 19 (1915): 389-404; 20 (1916): 13-24.The only possible verseform for translating the classics (Homer, Virgil) intoEnglish is blank verse.

E172 Harvey, Gabriel, and Edmund Spenser. Three Proper and wittie familiar Letters: latelypassed betweene two Vniuersitie men: touching the Earthquake in Aprill last, and ourEnglish refourmed versifying. London: H. Bynneman, 1580. And later in the sameyear, by the same printer:

E173 -----. Two other very commendable Letters of the same mens writing: both touching theforesaid Artificiall Versifying, and certain other Particulars More lately deliuered unto thePrinter.The second letter of the Three concerns the earthquake and may be ignored;the other four are reprinted in Smith (A26), vol. 1, pp. 87-122, and see also pp.123-24 (note that Smith prints the later two letters first, followed by the earliertwo, deleting the one on the earthquake). Harvey's other Foure Letters and his


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Letter-Book are available in A. B.Grosart's edition of the Works of Harvey (Lon-don, 1884-85), and there is also an extract from the Foure Letters in Smith, vol.2, pp. 229- 38. On the Letter-Book as a first draft of a literary hoax,

E174 see J. W. Bennett, "Spenser and Harvey's Letter-Book." MP 29 (1931): 163-86.The double exchange between "Immerito" (Spenser) and Harvey is perhaps thecentral surviving text of the whole quantitative movement, since it is oursource for the differing opinions of Drant, Spenser, and especially Harvey, whoseems to have been the prime mover behind it all. Spencer was himself mainlyunmoved. It used to be thought that these three writers formed a literarycoterie, the Areopagus (see p. 89 in Smith and accompanying Notes), but theevidence is tenuous and the opinion is not much promoted anymore. I followSmith's ordering of the letters below.

In the first letter, Spenser acknowledges that Sidney and Dyer have"prescribed certaine Laws and rules of Quantities of English sillables for Englishverse" and "drawen mee to their faction"; indeed, "I am, of late, more in louewyth my Englishe Versifying than with Ryming." He chides Harvey for "abreache in Maister Drant's Rules" and provides a sample of quantitative lines,the "Iambicum Trimetrum," which Harvey then chides in return, in the secondletter, with wit and energy turning serious, as not being precisely perfect(though he admits knowing nothing of Drant's rules). Spenser in the short thirdletter asks for a copy of Harvey's rules and offers to send Drant's as annotated byboth Sidney and himself; he also opines that the English Hexameter "will easilyand fairly yeelde it selfe to oure Mother tongue. For the onely or chiefest hard-nesse, whych seemeth, is in the Accente; whych sometime gapeth, and as itwere yawneth illfauouredly, comming shorte of that it should, and sometimeexceeding the measure of the Number, as in Carpenter the middle sillable, be-ing vsed shorte in speache, when it shall be read long in Verse, seemeth like alame Gosling that draweth one legge after hir. . . ." His following question issignificant for implying a sharp distinction between (accentual) reading and(quantitative) scansion of the orthographic line: "for why, a Gods name, maynot we, as else the Greekes, haue the kingdome of oure owne Language, andmeasure our Accentes by the sounde, reseruing the Quantitie to the Verse?"

It is in the fourth letter then that Harvey comes to give examples of hisown practice and to quarrel about theory. His view in a nutshell: "the Latine isno rule for us. . . .Position neither maketh shorte nor long in oureTongue."English orthograpyy is far too fickle to serve as the basis of a visualversification: only pronunciation will serve: "it is not either Position, or Diph-thong, or Diastole, or anye like Grammer Schoole Deuice that doeth or canindeede either makelong or short, or encrease, or diminish the number of Silla-bles, but onely the common allowed or receiued PROSODYE. . . . you shallneuer haue my subscription or consent (though you should charge me wyth theauthoritie of fiue hundreth Maister DRANTS) to make your Carpenter, ourCarpenter, an inch longer or bigger than God and his Englishe people hauemade him." All this may amount to no more than saying that the quantity of anEnglish syllable does not entail an accent, or vice versa; if so, Drant and Sidneythought precisely the same. Harvey does not dispel Spenser's confusion on thispoint. And his purpose throughout is to secure the right basis for determiningquantity, not to substitute accent for it. Webbe observed that Harvey's wholeapproach was not entirely serious, and clearly the statements near the end of thefourth letter are more rhetoric than anything else: they certainly are not a clearor careful synopsis of his views. In practice, Harvey scans by quantities, and heeven admits length by position except for doubled consonants, which he rec-ognizes are not sounded so. His verses are more or less passable by accent, butHendrickson attributes this to the arbitrary monosyllabic structure of the lan-guage not to any conscious choice. See also E224, E227, and E268.


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E175 Hendrickson, G. L. "Elizabethan Quantitative Hexameters." PQ 28 (1949): 237-60.The criticism of Elizabethan classical-imitative verse commonly raised byprosodists--that its pronunciation is aberrant beyond redemption--is a simplecatagory mistake: the quantivists never intended to write accentual-analoguehexameters, where the natural word-stresses correspond to the quantities andthe ictuses. When they read their (English quantitative) verses, they read fol-lowing the accents, even as Latin verses themselves were read during the Ren-aissance. When they scanned their verses, however, they scanned the metricalquantities without regard to accent. This is not a case of "double audition" butrather of two separate activities altogether. It is true that the quantities and theaccents do correspond perfectly in some lines, but this is due not to design butto the structure of the language itself; all such lines will be found to be entirelymonosyllabic.

Critics have also misunderstood Harvey. His theoretical statements areconfused, and he does recognize the impossibility of length by doubled conso-nants in English, but his verses show that like the others he accepted length byposition. Like them too he scans by quantity but pronounces by accent. Stany-hurst even went a little further toward Latin polysyllabicity in his verses, but hetoo conforms. See E240.

E176 "Hexameters in English." TLS, 8 March 1917, p. 114. Correspondence follows on22 March-31 May 1917, pp. 141, 153, 165, 177, 189- 90, 261-62.The initial article reviewing Ibant Obscuri is sympathetic and appreciative, tak-ing the trouble to explain very carefully both the general phonetic aspects ofEnglish hexameters (accent must be entirely disregarded) and also Bridges'modifications of his Latin prosodic models. The correspondents are of mixedopinions, several of them thinking "the metre is really hopeless in English," butthe last two adduce modern parallels in Indian and Arabic, where the quantita-tive meter is successfully preserved apart from any accentual articulation.

E177 Hollander, John. Introduction to Selected Songs of Thomas Campion. Boston: DavidR. Godine, 1973. pp. 15-27; revised and expanded into chapter 4 of his Visionand Resonance (A13), pp. 71-90. Cf. E114.

E178 -----. "Observations in the Art of English Quantity." In his Vision and Resonance(A13), pp. 59-70.A lucid short account of the nature of quantitative verse in classical Greek andLatin and "the two different ways that 'quantity' could be used, both metaphori-cally, in English verse," i.e. in a stress-analogue meter (the stress pattern identi-cal to what the quantitative pattern would have been in Latin, the quantitiesbeing ignored in the English) and in the Renaissance experiments, a kind of"written code" meter (where the quantities of the English syllables are deter-mined by applying the Latin rules to the English orthography, the sounds andstressing of the line being ignored altogether). Hollander thinks Tennyson's re-mark about "scissors" a joke and some of his verses a "burlesque" revealing his"contempt" for the whole business.

E179 Holowell, B. M. "The Elizabethan Hexametrists." PQ 3 (1924): 51- 57.We do tend to forget how very easy it is to demonstrate (as H.does here) thecontemporanious legitimacy, respectablity, and rationality of the Elizabethanquantitative experiments. The paltry vernacular poetry looked trivial in com-parison with the great monuments of the classics, and since the metricalschemes of the two verse-systems were so obviously different, perhaps that wasthe problem! The schoolmen took the Latin system, "transplanted it bodily toEnglish verse and proceeded to cultivate it." How else find out?


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E180 Holman, C. Hugh. "The 'Hiawatha' Meter in The Yenassee.” MLN 67 (1952): 418-19.The lyrics in Simms's novel are in Longfellow's hexameters. Cf. Larrabee(E193), Hardy (E170), Moyne and Mustanoja (E205), and Kunze (E189).

E181 "Homeric Translators and Critics." Saturday Review 12 (1861): 95-96.A review of the dispute between Arnold and Francis Newman, partial to thelatter.

E182 Humphries, Rolfe. "Latin and English Verse--Some Practical Considerations." OnTranslation. Ed. Reuben Brower. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.pp. 57-66."The difficulty of converting quantitative to accentual meters. . . . is greatly ex-aggerated." The Latin shows accentual effects, and quantitative effects cannotbe avoided in English (examples). The real problems in translation are the greatvariety of feet in classical meters, the dissimilarity of conventional line-lengths,the immense resources of word-order denied to English, and the preservationof some modicum of the sound-structure of Latin.

E183 Inge, W. R. "Classical Metres in English Poetry." Essays by Divers Hands(Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature) n.s. 2 (1922): 131-51.

E184 An Introduction of the ancient Greek and Latin measures into British poetry. London: T.Cooper, 1737.The Preface, pp. xiii-xvii, gives rules for quantitative verse.

E185 Jury, Charles R. Well-Measur'd Song: Quantitative and Quasi-quantitative Verse inEnglish. Ed. Barbara Wall and D. C.Muecke. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire,1968. 67 pp.The posthumous treatise of an Australian poet on the possibilities for meteringsyllabic duration in English poetry. Jury observes, sensibly, that stress is thedominant characteristic of our language, but that quantity exists as well, andthat major English poets (e.g. Pope in the Essay on Criticism) have sometimesemployed syllable-length very successfully in English verse. The poet whowishes to imitate classical verse in English may do so in one of five ways: (1)substitution of stress in the (quantitative) metrical patterns, ignoring quantityaltogether (Clough, Longfellow); (2) occasional foregrounding of quantity inaccentual verse for sharp effects (Pope); (3) a serious attempt to order quantitiesin the English syllables on the classical model, which yet is willing to yield tothe native stress-patterns wherever the verse becomes strained (Swinburne)--Jury terms this verse quasi-quantitative; (4) rigorous quantitative meter regardlessof stress (Bridges); and (5) both a correct quantitative pattern and a natural,correct, and corresponding stress pattern (Tennyson). Rules are given for thequantity of English syllables.

E186 Kenner, Hugh. "The Muse in Tatters." Agenda 6 (1968): 43-61.On Pound's translations--and transformations--of the Sapphic fragments.

E187 Khanna, Ravindra. "Sri Aurobindo's Contribution to English Prosody" CulturalForum (New Delhi) 14, 3-4 (1972): 88-92.This Indian poet has written English poems in both stress verse and quantitativeverse. Rules for the latter, summarized here, are said to be taken from Auro-bindo's long essay on the subject in vol. 30 of the Complete Works.

E188 Koschat, Erna. Versuche in antiken Metren bei R. S. Bridges. Diss., Vienna, 1929.


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E189 Kunze, Erich. "Zur Metrik des 'Kalevala-Verses' bei Freiligrath und Longfellow."Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Ernst Mortiz Arndt-Universität Griefswald 11 (1962):249-53.Cf. Hardy (E170), Larrabee (E193), Moyne and Mustanoja (E205), and Hol-man (E180).

E190 Lancaster, H. Carrington. "Classical Versification in English Poetry of the SixteenthCentury." Sewannee Review 11 (1903): 467- 73."Had there been an English Ennuis to express the theories of Harvey and otherpedants of his kind in some great poem, the verse of the Elizabethan Age, if notof succeeding periods, would be very different from what it really is." Shortviews of the major metrists and their opinions on the subject.

E191 Landor, Walter Savage. "English Hexameters" and "German Hexameters." The LastFruit off an Old Tree. London, 1853;the first of these is rpt in The Poems ofWalter Savage Landor. Ed. Geoffrey Grigson. London: Centaur Press, 1964. pp.178-79. See also "On English Hexameters" on pp. 308-9 there, rpt from the1863 Heroic Idylls.

E192 Larminie, William. "The Development of English Metres."Contemporary Review 66(1894): 717-36. May also have been reprinted separately.English meter, Larmine opines, is based on not two but four quantities, thoughstress "greatly helps out the quantitative deficiencies." Rhyme is and "unneces-sary burden" to be got rid of (in English; L. admits in a long digression its im-portance in the other languages). Assonance, however, can be valuable supportto English verse. Swinburne is praised for the wide use of feet of three or moresyllables, and the rhythms of the Authorized Version are upheld as exemplary.

E193 Larrabee, Stephen A. "Brougham, Longfellow, and Kalevala." NeuphilologischeMitteilungen 56 (1955): 258-59.The original charge of plagiarism (of meter) was levelled by W.C. Porter in theMercersbury Review for November 1855. Cf. Moyne and Mustanoja (E205) andHardy (E170), Kunze (E189), also Holman (E180).

E194 Lefevere, André. Translating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint. Assen, TheNetherlands: Van Gorcum, 1975. See section 1.2.3, "Metrical Translation," pp.57-76. The book discusses English translations of the 64th poem in Catullusfrom 1870-1970.

E195 Lindsay, Alexander William Crawford, Lord. Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. Onthe Theory of the English Hexameter, and its applicability to the Translation of Homer.A Letter to William John Hamilton. London: John Murray, 1862. 31 pp.A tract. His explanation of the deliquescence of the hexameter line in Englishpoetry is that modern poets have ignored the rules, while adopting the metricalform, of classical Greek versification. Thereafter follow Rules (they are accen-tually based), long exemplary translations from Homer and Schiller, and notes.

E196 Loane, George G. "The Fourteener in Translation." Notes and Queries 188 (1945):200-2.The critics have generally panned this meter as a medium for translation ofclassical hexameter; the translators themselves have been more receptive. Sam-ples.

E197 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline [1847]. In The Writings of HenryWadsworth Longfellow. 11 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1886. Vol. 4,pp. 19-106.Written in accentual (dactylic) hexameters, though the rhythm is much more


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supple than many people think. Longfellow had tried this meter earlier in his"The Children of the Lord's Supper" and "To a Driving Cloud," but it was thediscovery of a translation of Homer of Blackwood's Magazine that fixed himupon it. The poem is also famous for inspiring Clough to write his Bothie(E140). See Sieper (K350) for more details. See also p. 240 of the review inNorth American Review 66 (1848). See also E235 and E242.

E198 Mackay, H. W. Boyd. "English Hexameter." Poet-Lore 23 (1912): 139- 44.Eschewing accentual hexameters, Mackay sets forth the metrical form for thehexameter line in any language, the rules for quantity in English (the ear mustbe the absolute judge; no length by rule or position is to be allowed), and thespecial difficulties of writing the true quantitative line in our language.

E199 McKerrow, R. B. "The Use of So-Called Classical Metres in Elizabethan Verse."MLQ 4 (1901): 172-80;5 (1902): 5-13,148-49.Cogently, McKerrow classes "practically all verse that has ever been called clas-sical" as (1) verse called quantitative but in fact accentual and nothing else; (2)verse adopting the abstract pattern of classical verse but substituting accent forquantity; (3) "quantitative" verse in which the quantities are determined bynatural English pronunciation; or (4) "quantitative verse which adopts, at leastin part, the true classical rules, such as length by position. In general the devel-opment was from the fourth type to the second. McKerrow observes quitecorrectly that, as for judgments on the whole enterprise, "to accuse such menof simple folly were surely a still more simple presumption in ourselves." Giventhe authoritative status of the classics and the wretchedness of vernacular poetryat the time, it would be surprising if no classical-imitative verses had been at-tempted. As for quantity, the determination of the length of the syllable had-nothing to do with (1) whether or not the length of the vowel was noted, (2)pronunciation, or (3) actual duration of time.It was entirely conventional;scansion was divorced from pronunciation. Nothing else explains the theorists'concern with orthography. McKerrow assays separately the contribution ofeach of the known figures of the movement--Drant, Dyer, Sidney, Harvey (thedisparity between his theory and practice is noted), Stanyhurst, Webbe,Fraunce, Puttenham, Sabie, Dickinson, the anonymous author of The FirstBooke of the Preservation of King Henry VII, Campion, and Sandford [in the sup-plementary note; chronologically he comes first]. A wellspring essay: McKer-row's immense bibiographical knowledge enabled him to make many sugges-tions here that had never been made previously and even now have not beenpursued. See also:

E200 Dibelius, Wilhelm. "Über die Verwendung klassischer Versmassee in der englishenRenaissance." Shakespeare Jahrbuch 39 (1903): 325-26.

E201 Maynadier, Howard. "The Areopagus of Sidney and Spenser."MLR 4 (1909): 289-301Discusses, inter alia, the Harvey-Spenser correspondence (E172-3). The firstknown reference to the Areopagus per se is in the late nineteenth century,hardly early enough to be reliable evidence.

E202 Milham, Mary-Ella. "Arcady on the Atlantic." Humanities Association Bulletin 19(1968): 42-51.Close analysis of quantitative poetry by Longfellow, Bliss Carman, and C. G.D. Roberts, with some wider remarks on the Victorian penchant for classicalmeters in English verse.Carman's translations of Sappho evidence particularmetrical variety.


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E203 Monro, C[harles] J[ames]. "Latin Metres in English, After Sidney, Tennyson, andMr. Ellis." Journal of Philology 4 (1872): 223-30.A skeptical assessment of Ellis's (E148) two rules for quantitative verse in Eng-lish, namely, that (1) syllables otherwise short may count for metrical purposesas long if accented, and (2) the syllable under the ictus must be accented.Hence Monro concludes that by not allowing long by unstressed syllables inictic position Ellis is writing only "a metre and a half"--a fully accentual meterbut only partly a true quantitative meter. Praises Sidney's quantitative work.

E204 Montgomery, Robert L., Jr. Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney.Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961.The first chapter examines Sidney's technical development; see esp. the sectionof his classical meters on pp. 13-19.

E205 Moyne, Ernest J., and Tauno F. Mustanoja. "Longfellow's 'Song of Hiawatha' andKalevala." American Literature 25 (1953):87-89Longfellow adopted the hexameter meter he found in Anton Schiefer's transla-tion. Cf. Hardy (E170), Larrabee (E193), Kunze (E189), and Holman (E180).

E206 Murray, Gilbert. "What English Poetry May Still Learn from Greek." Essays andStudies 3 (1912): 7-31.It may learn three things: religion, architecture, and texture.The third of theseoccupies most of the article, beginning on p. 15. Murray gives detailed atten-tion to the English meters appropriate for translation as well as the nature andstrengths of the Greek meters in epic, dramatic, and lyric poetry.

E207 Murray, L[indley]. English Grammar, adapted to the different classes of learners. York:Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1795.The fourth part, "Prosody," (pp. 146-59)discusses versification only on pp. 155-59, since in this author's view,"prosody" consists of both the rules for pronunciation in English and also thelaws of versification.

E208 Nares, Robert. Elements of Orthoepy, containing a distinct view of the whole analogy of theEnglish Language, so far as it relates to Pronunciation, Accent, and Quantity. London:T. Tayne and Son, 1784; facsimile reprint: Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press,1968.Founder of the Royal Society of Literature, Nares produced a book on pro-nunciation that was authoritative in its time and influential on Walker's Dic-tionary. Part 2 treats accent, Part 3 quantity. Accent he calls "a species of em-phasis," distinguishing it from the Greek pitch-accent. Quantity he admits isvariable in English, though the gradations can all be grouped as simply short orlong. Rules for quantity, pp. 216- 18. Nares refuses to let accent determinesyllables as long, yet he also insists that modern meters are deficient in com-parison with classical ones (pp. 211, 219-21). Chapter 10 of Part 3 sanctionselision and diaeresis in verse. For a fuller account of the laws of versification thereader is referred to Mitford (p. 142).

There is a full-scale study of Nares' treatise by Claus-dirk PollnerE209 (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1976).

E210 Newman, Francis W[illiam]. Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice. A Reply toMatthew Arnold, Esq. London: Francis and Norgate, 1861. 104 pp.A wincing response to Arnold's severe censures of Newman's translation ofHomer; Newman replies by condemning the hexameter translation by Arnoldas unfit for the common, unscholarly reader. Written while its author still feltthe sting of the wound, the book is a close rejoinder to both accusations andphrases, and so has little of independent value. Arnold replied the following


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year in his Last Words lecture (E108).

E211 Nowell-Smith, Simon. "Bridges' Classical Prosody: New Versions and Variants."TLS, 28 August 1943, p. 420. See also the earlier essay on p. 415, and aconfirmatory addendum on p. 444.Nowell-Smith catalogues and analyzes the manscripts of the poems in Bridges'quantitative period, here dated 1901-3, in disagreement with Gu|'erard.

E212 Omond. T. S. "Accent and Quantity." The Academy 76 (1909): 798-800.A response to Bridges' hexameters in the 1909 New Quarterly, attacking theLaureate's complete rejection of accent (in favor of quantity) as the basis forEnglish meter.

E213 -----. "Arnold and Homer." Essays and Studies 3 (1912): 71-91.All discussions of translating Homer eventually come to the question of an ap-propriate meter. This one does, too, in the midst of a helpful review of the en-tire subject. Illuminating comparisons of translations. Arnold himself, it hap-pens, preferred the Hexameter above Blank Verse and all other English metersas the best form for rendering Homer. Omond sketches the history of hex-ameters beginning on p. 84; This essay might be read most profitably just afterreading Arnold's lectures directly; no study of English quantitative verse isneeded.

E214 -----. English Hexameter Verse: with a Specimen. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1897. 48pp.Omond's earliest work on the classical meters; his continued research allowedhim to expand this essay in both scope and detail into the 1903 English Metrists,all of this work being finally superceded by the 1921 edition (A5). See alsoE310. Here Omond rough-sketches the Elizabethan efforts to reproduce quan-tity in English verse, the nineteenth-century German and English efforts toimitate the quantitative pattern in accent, and Omond's own approach, theview that "the true unit of English verse is not the foot, nor even the accent, butsimply a period of time," so that the hexameter becomes "simply a verse of sixperiods" (italics original). The essay concludes with a free translation of Book 5of the Odyssey.

E215 Omond, T. S., and John Sargeaunt. "These Lame Hexameters."Letters to TLS,1920, pp. 456, 472, 488, 504, 520, 536, 552.Bickering over Tennyson's hexameters, whether accentual or quantitative.

E216 Oxenford, John. "The Practice of Writing English in Classical Metres." ClassicalMuseum 3 (1846): 279-83.Urges the use of authentic "classical metres" in translating Greek verse: Oxen-ford is emphatic that the position of the ictus must be preserved (by accent, inEnglish), and he seems to think that the classical pattern of quantities can bepreserved as well, albeit with "much greater latitude," given the nature of ourlanguage.

E217 Palmer, George Herbert. "Hexameters and Rhythmic Prose." The Atlantic Monthly66 (1890): 526-34.Palmer finds the former of these unsuited for translation of Homer (on thegrounds that English is weak in dactylic words) and recommends instead thelatter, or an "iambic recitative,"subjoining his translation of Book 23 of TheOdyssey as example.

E218 Park, B. A. "Milton and Classical Meters." Milton Quarterly 6 (1972): 75-77.Milton's imitation of the classical meter (the fourth Asclepiadean) of Horace's


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Carm. I.5 in his translation of it ("What slender Youth bedew'd") is intelligibleonly if we postulate that he took for the final syllable in the English line whatwas the final accented syllable in the Latin line (thereby shortening the syllablecount for all the lines in the translation). In other words, Milton took over theaccentual pattern which is formed as a by-product of the quantitative meter inthe Latin. The same stanza-form is used by Collins for the "Ode to Evening,"by Southey for "To Hymen" and "Written on the First of January," and (withrhyme added) by Marvell for the "Horatian Ode."

E219 Poirier, Michel. Sir Philip Sidney and English Quantitative Verse. Diss., Paris, 1944.

E220 Redesdale, John Thomas Freeman Mitford, Lord. Thoughts on English Prosody andTranslations from Horace. And

E221 Further Thoughts on English Prosody. Oxford and London: J.H. and James Parker,1859. 16 pp and 15 pp. (Tracts). The author is the nephew of William Mitford(E599).Established quantitative rules based on his earlier translation of several HoratianOdes. "When quantity is governed by fixed rule, the strongest emphasis may beplaced on a short syllable without injury to the metre, and reading is carried onwithout regard to anything but the sense of the passage." The second essay,written a month later, defends this position against some intervening criticisms.

E222 Review of Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems. North American Review 55 (1842):114-44.The review turns into a history of the hexameters in Greek, Latin, Spanish,German, and English.

E223 "Rhymed Hexameters and Pentameters." Blackwood's Magazine 59 (1846): 496.Four poems in the mixed meter, with a headnote.

E224 Ringler, William. "Master Drant's Rules." PQ 29 (1950): 70-74.Prints three corrected texts containing all of Sidney's known statements on therules for making quantitative verses. No explication, however. See Sidney(E234).

E225 Sandford, James. Houres of Recreation . . . done first out of Italian into English. 2nd ed.London: Henry Binneman, 1576.It was McKerrow who first noticed that one of the poems appended to this lit-tle book is in five languages--Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and English--and inthe Classical "elegaic couplet" metre, thus representing the second known in-stance of quantitative verse printed in English (after Ascham's). The verses donot appear in the first edition (1573), which was entitled The Garden of Pleasure.

E226 Sayers, F[rank]. "Of English Metres." In his Disquisitions Metaphysical and Literary.London: J. Crouse and W.Stevenson, 1793; rpt in his Works. London, 1830;rpt New York: Garland, 1971. pp. 129-37.Since English syllables may be denominated long or short, as in every otherlanguage, "it is difficult to assign a cause why the same arrangement of Englishsyllables [as that in classical verse] should not be pleasing also." Notes instancesin the Renaissance and by Milton; is hopeful of more to come.

E227 Schelling, Felix E. "The Inventor of the English Hexameter."MLN 5 (1890): 212-14.Those scholars who have impugned Harvey's character for his having said thathe wished to be remembered as The Inventor of the English Hexameter havetaken the sentence out of a sensitive context and thereby misconstrued it. It


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would seem that Greene had taunted Harvey with that epithet and worse, andHarvey, replying in his Fowre Letters, naturally would prefer the best of them.For references see the citation data at E173 and also E174.

E228 -----. Poetic and Verse Criticism of the Reign of Elizabeth. University of PennsylvaniaPublications in Philology, Literature, and Archaeology, series 9, vol. 1, no.1.Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1891. 97 pp.Unjustly neglected: this dissertation provides commentary on all the majorRenaissance prosodists embroiled in the quantitative controversy--Ascham,Gascoigne, James VI, Blenerhasset, Harvey and Spenser, Stanyhurst, Nashe,Webbe, Puttenham, Sidney (Gosson and Lodge), Harington, Campion, andDaniel--commentary more extensive than most available elsewhere. Non-technical literary history.

E229 Schuman, Sharon. "Sixteenth Century English Quantitative Verse: Its Ends, Means,and Products." MP 74 (1977): 335-49.Attempting to ferret out the elusive definition of "quantity"used by the Eliza-bethans and also a legitimate rationale they could have held for their poeticpractice, Schuman examines (1) the "aesthetic assumptions" made by the Eliza-bethan poets, (2) their conception of Latin versification, and (3) the principleswhich they seem to have used in constructing their quantitative verses. Herconclusion is that the Elizabethan poets scanned a syllable as long or short bytwo rules, operating sequentially, the first mandatory and the second optional: ifa syllable was not long by (positional) definition in the Latin system, then itmight be by accentuation in the English one.That is, the English poets wrotequantitative verse which was to be scanned according to the Latin rules but read(stressed) according to the regular English pronunciation. The first system wasvisual, the second aural.

Astoundingly, the author seems totally unaware of the work of Attridge(E112), but nevertheless the article is closely argued and offers a useful com-parison of the work of Willcock and Hendrickson (E265 and E175).

E230 Shadwell, Lancelot. The Iliad of Homer, Faithfully Rendered in Homeric Verse from theOriginal Greek. London: William Pickering, 1844.Pure text; no Preface or notes.

E231 Shawcross, John T. "The Prosody of Milton's Translation of Horace's Fifth Ode."Tennesee Studies in Literature 13 (1968): 81-89.Noticing that Sprott's accentual-syllabic scansion of the Ode left numerous ir-regularities, Shawcross scans it by quantities, but the numerous irregularitiesthen left force him to conclude that Milton freqently reduced (1) two short syl-lables to one long and (2) a trochee to a stressed monosyllable.Choruses fromSamson Agonistes are likewise scanned.

E232 Shipley, Joseph. "The Problems of the Elizabethan Poets."Poet-Lore 38 (1927): 358-72.Surveys the opinions of all the major Elizabethan metrists on the issues of (1)the use of rime and (2) accent vs. quantity.The general problem for the poets ofcourse was to discover and legitimize a model for the new poetry.

E233 Short, R. W. "The Metrical Theory and Practice of Thomas Campion." PMLA 59(1944): 1003-18.Campion's theory of English meter can be properly appraised only by settingaside altogether his interest in music (and musical settings) and by understand-ing his beliefs about accent and quantity. Short, claiming [without any furtherexplanation] that English has "four classes of syllables" differentiated by stress,


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pitch, and length, argues (1) that Campion was interested not in classical met-rics but in the quantities (and accents) properly a part of English meter, whenthe classical rules are reconciled to the vagaries of English pronunciation, andalso (2) that Campion sought to write verse having lines comprising equal peri-ods of time regardless of their syllabic filling. Such a theory with such a practiceShort has understandable difficulty reconciling; he therefore argues that theproper illustrations of Campion's position in the Observations are not the exam-ples given therein but Campion's own poems published the year before in ABook of Ayres. These latter are then compared to verses by Greene and Dekker.A patchwork explanation, of thin and motley material erratically stiched.

E234 Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia. London, 1590, 1593, etc.A number of the verses in the Arcadia are frankly experimental, including imi-tations of quantitative meters.There is no full- scale essay on this matter, so thereader will have to consult: (1) The Index, s.v. "Versification," in Jean Rob-ertson's edition of the Old Arcadia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 513,though the references lead only to her Commentary, which is heavily reliantupon (2) The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1962. Ringler's invaluable edition offers both Commentary(see pp. 385-86, 390-93 (above all), and 402-3) and a Table of Verse Forms(pp. 569-72). See also Maynadier (E201), Underdown (E259), Applegate(E106), Hanssen (E169), Poirier (E219), and Ringler (E224).

E235 Smith, Albert. "Syringaline: A Myth, by Professor Long- and-short-fellow." TheMonth, 1851, pp. 192-96.A parody of Longfellow's hexameters.

E236 Sonnenschein, E. A. What is Rhythm? Accompanied by an Appendix on ExperimentalSyllable Measurement. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1925. 228 pp.Rev: in TLS, 10 September 1925, pp. 573-74 (leading article) with reply by S.on 17 September, p. 600; in The Dial 80 (1926): 316-22; in MLR 23 (1928):483-85; in American Journal of Philology 47 (1926): 187-91.See the critique by MacColl at E369.

Sonnenschein's treatise on rhythm contains three general chapters--"Rhythm Defined," "Rhythm and Music," "Music and Verse,"--three chapterson Rhythm in Isosyllabic [Vedic], Greek, and Latin Verse, and four chapterson quantity--"Rhythm in English Verse: The Ratio of Foot to Foot," "SyllableMeasurement in English," "Quantity in English Verse: The Ratio of Rise toFall," and "English Experiments in Classical Metres."

His definition: "Rhythm is that property of a sequence of events in timewhich produces on the mind of the observer the impression of proportion be-tween the durations of the several events or groups of events of which the se-quence is composed."

"My own proposed system of scansion may be described as an attempt toreinstate the foot (in the ancient sense of the term) as a unit of measurement."That is, he believes that English is exactly like Greek and Latin in that two"short"syllables may stand for one "long" and so receive metrical ictus, and alsoin that accent and quantity are inseparable.Chapter 8 gives Rules for theQuantity of every English syllable, based on the kymography measurements inthe Appendix.

E237 Southey, Robert. Preface to A Vision of Judgment [1821]. In The Poetical Works ofRobert Southey. 10 vols. London:Longman, Orme, Brown, Greer, & Longmans,1838. Vol. 10, pp. 195-212. For the collected edition Southey added anadditional Preface (pp. vii-xxi) in response to Tillbrook (E257).Rev: in the Edinburgh Review 35 (1821): 422-36.


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With this poem Southey initiated the vogue of accentual hexameters in Englishin the nineteenth-century--a classical-imitative meter substituting stress forlength. Southey's hexameter line contains six feet, the first four of which maybe either dactyls or trochees, the fifth being always a dactyl and the sixth a tro-chee. In this practice he follows the Germans, substituting trochees in the mod-ern verse for spondees in the classical, since he agrees that the true spondee is sorare a species in modern speech as to be scarcely ever seen.

E238 Spedding, James. "Arnold on Translating Homer." Fraser's Magazine 63 (1861): 703-14; rpt as "On English Hexameters" in his Reviews and Discussions: Literary,Political, and Historical, not relating to Bacon. London: Kegan Paul, 1879.pp. 316-43.Reviews Arnold (E107), squarely objecting to his argument that the hexameteris the best meter for rendering Homer in English;in a closely reasoned andtechnical counterargument, Spedding examines the nature of accent and quan-tity in both Greek and English, and the rules for the hexameter in each, in or-der to show that the effect of the English hexameter line on the Englishmanwho knows no Greek is not the same as the effect of Homer's lines on a Greek;it is that man whom Spedding claims is the proper judge of a translation, notthe scholar fluent in both languages. The 1879 volume adds "corrections andexplanations." Munro (M140) disagrees sharply.

E239 Spingarn, J. E. "Classical Metres." A History of Literary Criticism in the Renais-sance.New York: Columbia University Press, 1899; 2nd rev. ed. 1908. pp. 298-304.A short account of the theories of the major Renaissance prosodists. Not en-tirely reliable, as subsequent scholarship has shown.

E240 Standop, Ewald. "Zur Beurteilung der Elisabethanischen Hexameter." Studien zurenglischen und amerikanischen Sprache und Literatur: Festschrift für HelmutPapajewski. Ed. Paul G. Buchloh et al. Neumünster: Wacholtz, 1974. pp. 350-62.A long, close review of Hendrickson (E175), generally approbatory. Standopreminds us that the classical-imitative phenomenon is not restricted to theRenaissance, and that we still cannot judge very well the aesthetic (metrical)value of the experiments. The Renaissance read such verse with normal proseaccents, not with a melodic accent, though perhaps both systems were heardsimultaneously (Standop). Thus our reading or quantitative verse by accent maynot be so unrealistic; the Renaissance poets generally avoid congruence of ac-cent and ictus, and it may be that counterpointing of stress and ictus is the bestcompromise solution, as we see in the "thin"spondees of Voss with their "free-floating' stress. The ultimate question in these matters is whether English sylla-bles are long and short; the answer must be No. Conclusion: the nature ofquantitative verse arises not from the hypothetical pattern but from the real ac-centual pattern, whether intended or not. A balanced theory will pay attentionto both.

E241 Stanyhurst, Richard. Preface "Too thee Learned Reader." In The first foure books ofVirgil his Aeneis translated intoo English verse by Richard Stanyhurst, with otherPoetical Devises theretoo annexed. London. 1582. Rpt in Smith (A26), vol. 1, pp.135- 47.Praised by Harvey but treated cooly by some others (who were put off both byhis language and by his uncompromising classicism, probably), Stanyhurstseems to have the strongest effort of any of the Renaissance quantivists to ad-here to the Latin metrical system. Not only does he follow the quantitativestructure of the Latin line strictly, he also adheres to the accentual structure ofits last two feet, and he even conforms to the morphological structure of the


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meter as well. Observing that the stress-rules for English are radically differentfrom those for Latin, Stanyhurst concludes that the strictest application of theLatin rules to English will be disastrous, so that he is willing to scan sometimesstrictly by syllabic quantity (as for words of Latin etymology) and sometimes byletting the accent qualify the syllable as long. He speaks much of sounds, but itis clearly the orthography that is the actual determinant in practice, as can beseen in his selection between variant spellings of a word so as to fit the quanti-tative rules for length by position (which were visual rules anyway). But sincethe Preface to his Aeneis is very short and sketchy, and since his verse is in-tended to be read as anything but accentual-syllabic English meter, it is verydifficult to have a clear grasp of his entire position.Attridge is helpful here; hedevotes a short chapter to Stanyhurst.

E242 Steele, R. B. "The Meter of Evangeline. MLN 9 (1894):cols. 413- 16.Cf. E197. The accentual hexameter may be compared to the classical quantita-tive hexameter by examining the three main characteristics of the latter in theformer--the proportion of dactyls to spondees, monosyllables at line-end, andcaesura- placement. The same features are also treated in the subsequent

E243 -----. "The Meter of Miles Standish." MLN 9 (1894): cols.476- 79.

E244 Stephens, W. H. Elements of English Verse as a Science and an Art. London:Macmillan, 1933. 118 pp.An extravagant system of new terminology and convoluted scansion operationsbased on Quantity. Every syllable in English is said to have a quantity fixed byusage, and which depends on "texture," "metrical stress" (?), and "incidentalemphasis." A numerical score for each of these three factors is tallied, givingthe "scansion feet of sound." This metrical tally may then be set against the"spans of thought or emotion"(the line divided syntactically and marked fornatural speech-stresses). Conflict between these two systems is called a "cross-draw"; the classical longs and shorts are renamed "strokes" and "flicks," and anymonosyllable which can be either is called a "rover." Arf.

The rules for assigning quantity, besides being garbled, vague, and ludi-crous, are actually based on accent, as is this entire misconceived system. Sub-sequent essays written by this author:

E245 -----. "The Stroke-Flick Structure of English Verse." Poetry Review 26 (1935): 23-28.

E246 -----. "The Stroke-Flick Rhythm in Canadian Verse." Poetry Review 26 (1935):471-75.

E247 -----. "Stroke-Flick Tendencies in Australian Verse." Poetry Review 26 (1935): 383-86.

E248 -----. "Discipline in Pattern for English Verse." Poetry Review 26 (1935): 139-42.

E249 -----. "New Measures in English Verse." Poetry Review 26 (1935): 213-17.

E250 -----. "Four-Time in English Verse." Poetry Review 28 (1937): 297- 99, 381-84.Doubtless Stephens would have both been and not been, had he had his prefer-ence. He speaks here of strokes as "the stressed syllable in the word," yet "theMetrical Quantity" of both monosyllables and polysyllables is "invariable," eventhough the influence of Classical Prosody on English has been pernicious;worse, there are "Seven Dominant Rhythms or Measures (or Metres)" such as"Two-Time," etc. This is lunatic.


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E251 Stone, William Johnson. On the Use of Classical Metres in English. London: HenryFrowde, 1898. 59 pp. [Omond and Bridges cite this date; BMC cites 1899.]Posthumously published (with some revisions (by Bridges?)) as Classical Metresin English Verse, the second part of Bridges' 1901 edition of Milton's Prosody(E495).Omond thought that had Stone lived longer (he died at 26) his judgments, par-ticularly phonetic, would have been sounder. In any event the substance of histheory--and it is a significant statement--would not have changed. Part I of histreatise give a short history of previous attempts at quantitative verse and theoryin the Renaissance and Nineteenth Century; Part II presents his argument.Stone believes that classical verse was just the reverse of the modern: Greekmeter was quantitative but "combated" by speech-accents, while English meteris accentual but opposed by quantities. Hence a truly quantitative verse must bemetered by quantities with combative(counterpoised) accents. Such a versemust be written with strict attention to quantity ("any compromise is fa-tal");accent and quantity are not to coincide, as in Tennyson, and accentualimitation of quantitative structure is deplorable.Accent in English does notlengthen the syllable, Stone thinks, nor do double consonants lengthen thevowel--there is no length by position for us. Accent in the modern languages isprecisely the same as it was in Greek--a rise in pitch.

E252 Swanson, Roy A. "Classical Meters in Modern Languages." Princeton (A18), pp.126-28.See also s.v. "Hexameter." Not as systematic as it might be, but cogent andreasonably accurate.

E253 Swinburne, Algernon Charles. "Choriambics," "Hendecasyllabics,"and "Sapphics."Poems and Ballads. First Series and Second Series. London, 1866, 1878; rpt inThe Bonchurch Edition of The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne.Ed. Edmund Gosse and T. J. Wise. 20 vols. London: William Heinemann,1925.Vol. 3, pp. 88-89; vol. 1, pp. 331-35.

E254 [Taylor, William.] "English Hexameter Exemplified." The Monthly Magazine 1(1796): 404-5.Omond (A5) identifies this "transversion" of 19 lines from Macpherson's Ossianas the first specimen of accentual hexameters in English on the German model;after this first dislodgement, the avalanche soon followed.

E255 Tennyson, Alfred Lord. "Attempts at Classical Metres in Quantity." CornhillMagazine, 1863, pp. 707-9. Four samples of classical-imitative verse:"Hexameters and Pentameters,""Alcaics," "Endecasyllabics," and "Specimen ofa Translation of the Iliad in Blank Verse." The latter three, along with"Boadicea," were reprinted under the heading "Experiments in Quantity" inEnoch Arden and other poems (1864), and thereafter, with the first samplerestored, in The Eversley edition of The Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. EdHallam Tennyson. 9 vols. London: Macmillan, 1907-8. Vol. 2, pp. 295- 306.The most authoritative edition is The Poems of Tennyson, ed. ChristopherRicks, London: Longmans, 1969, where the five poems appear as nos. 325 and332-35, pp. 1118- 23, 1153-57. Lord Tennyson's attitude toward writingquantitative verse in English was commensurate with his attitudes toward othertechnical matters: he chose the high and rocky way. He wrote to satisfy boththe classical and the modern systems simultaneously; accent and quantity aremeant to coincide throughout.

E256 Tennyson, Hallam, Lord. Jack and the Beanstalk: English Hexameters. London:Macmillan, 1886; rpt in The Eversley edition of The Works of Alfred, Lord


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Tennyson. Ed. Hallam Tennyson. 9 vols. London: Macmillan, 1907-8. Vol. 2,pp. 329-31; rpt in The Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks.London:Longmans 1969. pp. 1799-81.Two fragments of experiments in quantitative-imitation written by Hallamwith some assistance by his father; accent and quantity are intended to coincide.The "Bluebeard" first appeared in 1874.

E257 Tillbrook, S[amuel]. Historical and Critical Remarks Upon the Modern Hexametrists, andUpon Mr. Southey's "Vision of Judgment." Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1822. 84 pp. + fold-out comparative charts.A valuable study for its particular subject: Tillbrook gives a very widely in-formed historical survey of hexameter verse both in other languages and (espe-cially and preponderantly) in English Renaissance verse. His view of the Ger-man accentual hexameters is deprecatory, apparently assuming that all properclassical- imitative verse must be essentially quantitative;indeed there is very lit-tle discussion of theory, but see pp.62-63.

E258 Trevelyan, R. C. "Classical and English Verse Structure." Essays and Studies 16(1930): 7-25.Trevelyan essays to explain why the English meters never could (and never can)equal the mellifluousness, grace, and complexity of the Classical meters of Vir-gil, Horace, Pindar, Sappho, etc. His view of our prosody is a Temporalist one:English has only "duple time" and "triple time" meters of isochronous bars al-ways beginning on a stress. And the fact, in his view, is the explanation: InEnglish the bars must always be equal in duration, but the constituent syllablesmay vary greatly in number or length in order that the bar-lengths come outequal. In Classical verse, on the other hand, each syllable has a fixed proportionrelative to the others, and the lengths of the bars do not matter. The result isregularity for our verse but variety for ancient verse. He reviews the variousEnglish efforts at imitation, especially those of Bridges, and offers his owntranslation, thinking that any successful modern imitation of the classical pat-terns "would have to be mainly indicated and expressed by accent."

E259 Underdown, Mary E. I. "Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadian' Eclogues: A Study of HisQuantitative Verse." DA 25 (1964): 1222A (Yale, 1961).The nature of Sidney's early education in Latin enabled him to apply the rulesfor Latin verse, including the all-important "position" rule, to English versewhile still preserving the distinction between accent and quantity. Underdownexplicates the mechanism whereby "the quantitative structure of [Sidney's]verse regulates its phrasing, which in turn forms the basis of rhythmical organi-zation," the word-group replacing the Latin polysyllable for purposes of avoid-ing metrical diaeresis.

E260 Van De Vender, George W. "The Prosody of Milton's Sampson Agonistes." DAI 34(1974): 5209A (Mississippi).Milton uses accentual equivalents to the classical quantitative meters in the play,dividing them into stichic meters (dialogue) and lyric meters (choral odes). Mil-ton's meters in general parallel the Greek dramatic verseforms very closely.

E261 Webbe, William. A Discourse of English Poetrie, Together with the Author's judgmenttouching the reformation of out English Verse. London: John Charlewood forRobert Walley, 1586. Ed.Edward Arber. English Reprints series, no. 26.London, 1869.Rpt in Smith (A26), vol. 1, pp. 226-302.The student may begin at p. 266 in Smith. The first twenty or so pages (up top. 247) trace the history of poetry from classical times through Middle English(Webbe notices Gower, Chaucer, and the author of Pierce Ploghman, who he


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says was the first to observe quantity without rhyme in English) up to his con-temporaries, Webbe dispensing praise for many but condemning the "uncount-able rabble of ryming Ballet makers."The next twenty pages discuss the genres,subjects, and moral ends of poetry.

The common English verse Webbe observes is based upon counting ofsyllables and rhyme and has three requirements: equivalence of line-lengths (thelines must be "answerable" to each other in syllables or feet), observance ofnatural stressing (i.e. an ordering of words such that none are "wrested contraryto the natural inclination or affection of the same"), and rhymes which do notwrench violently syntax or sense. Diversity of line and stanza is illustrated fromthe Shepheardes Calendar. Webbe notes that the "naturall course"of Englishverse seems to be iambic, and if the "right quantitie" of the words be followedthe line will turn out properly as an iamb. But the scansions show that this"quantitie" means stress and nothing else. Rhymes and various sorts of acrosticsare noticed; Webbe then turns (p. 278) to classical-imitative verses, arguing (alittle opaquely but shrewdly) that even if the languages are dissimilar Englishshould be able to adjust its rules to Latin even as Latin did to Greek. He admitsthat length by position will have to be abandoned, he cites twelve types ofmetrical feet, and he complains that monosyllables naturally long in English hewas forced to treat as short in his own quantitative verses so as to supply theserious deficiency of short syllables in English, under the Latin rules. His actualstatements about quantity in English are confused and his practice is inconsis-tent: his scansions ignore accent altogether yet length by position is admitted atpoints. Examples of Hexameters, Sapphics, and other meters conclude the trea-tise. In large part derivative and on the whole unexceptional, Webbe's prosodiais something of an anomaly: it seems scarcely to have been noticed by his con-temporaries. Its chief characteristic is conservatism.

E262 Whalley, George. "Coleridge on Classical Prosody: An Unidentified Review of1797." Review of English Studies n.s. 2 (1951): 238-47.Reprints the text of a review of Bishop Horsley's On the Prosodies of the Greekand Latin Languages which Coleridge wrote for the February 1797 number ofthe Critical Review, at a time which his views of versification were beingformed. Horsley is cited at M104; see also Patterson at E845.

E263 W[helpley], J. D. "The Art of Measuring Verses." American Review. A Whig Journal7 (1848): 484-92.Ostensibly a review of Everett (E531), but the reviewer repudiates those prin-ciples in preference to his own--scanning English verse literally by syllabicquantity--which he promotes here.

E264 [Whewell, W.] "Dialogue on English Hexameters." Frazer's Magazine 36 (1845):665-70.Attribution given by Omond (A5).Defends accentually based hexameters on the grounds that even recitation ofLatin verses uses stress as a marker. Trochees will be allowed to substitute fordactyls (the time being equal), though spondees in English verse are claimed.

E265 Willcock, G[ladys] D. "'Passing Pitefull Hexameters': A Study of Quantity andAccent in English Renaissance Verse." MLR 29 (1934): 1-19.A general review of the whole Elizabethan quantitative movement which isconstrained, by the very scope and difficulty of its subject-matter, into a terse,generalizing style. A number of the author's judgments have been subsequentlyrefined or reversed, but it is to her credit that she recognizes the absolutelycentral position of orthography (so seemingly superficial) in the whole problemof writing and reading quantitative verses correctly: "the conclusion is forced


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upon one that when Elizabethans . . . talk about quantity and so on, they arespeaking of something visible rather than audible."Otherwise not entirely reli-able. Cf. Hendrickson (E175).

E266 Wilson, John. "Homer and His Translators." Blackwood's Magazine, April 1831-February 1834. Rpt in his Essays Critical and Imaginative. Ed. J. F. Ferrier.Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1856-57. Vol. 4, pp. 1-389.

E267 Wölk, Konrad. Geschichte und Kritik des englischen Hexameters. Normannia:Germanisch-Romanische Bücherei, vol.3. Berlin: Emil Felber, 1909. 146 pp.This is the most extensive review of the subject available, even though it rep-resents little advance upon the studies of Elze (E149) and the bibliographicspadework of Omond (E214).Usefully, Wölk devides his attention between thequantitative hexameters of the Renaissance and after (50 pages) and the accen-tual-imitative hexameters mainly of the nineteenth century, up to Stone andBridges (60 pages). This distinction, along with the diachronic organization,makes for great clarity, and there are frequent long extracts, though unfortu-nately without scansions (who will ever be as assiduous as Omond?).

E268 Young, G. M. "A Word for Gabriel Harvey." Life and Letters, 1930; rpt in EnglishCritical Essays: Twentieth Century. Ed. Phyllis M. Jones. London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1933;rpt 1947. pp. 284-90.Defends Harvey's good judgment on the classical hexameter in talking Spenserout of using the meter for The Faerie Queene. (Cf. E172-73).

See also: C227, C322, E7, E280, E373, E376, E471, E574, E632, E692, E758-59, E977, E1192, E1227, E1241, E1456, E1518, G77, L115, L176-78, L295, L521,L807, L1112, L1596-1600, L1692, M106, M140, N50, N72, N125.

the poem meter: pp. 141-192

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