Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century

295 Pages·2011·1.615 MB·English

by  Jason David Hall

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me ter mat ters
• •
Verse Cultures of the
Long Nineteenth Century
e d i t e d b y
J a s o N
d a V i d
H a L L
meter matters

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me ter mat ters
• •
Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century
edited by jason david hall
Ohio University Press
Athens
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
ohioswallow.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meter matters : verse cultures of the long nineteenth century / edited by Jason David
Hall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-1968-7 (hc : alk. paper)
1. English language—Versification. 2. English language—Rhythm. 3. English
poetry—19th century—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Hall, Jason David,
1975–
PE1505.M485 2011
821'.809—dc23
2011031205
Contents
List of Illustrations
vii
Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
xv
introduCtion A Great Multiplication of Meters
jason david hall
1
one Meter and Meaning
isobel armstrong
26
two Romantic Measures
Stressing the Sound of Sound
susan j. wolfson
53
three Byron’s Feet
matthew bevis
78
four “Break, Break, Break” into Song
yopie prins
105
five Material Patmore
jason r. rudy
135
v
vi Contents
six “For the Inscape’s Sake”
Sounding the Self in the Meters of Gerard Manley Hopkins
summer j. star
154
seven “But the Law Must Itself Be Poetic”
Swinburne, Omond, and the New Prosody
yisrael levin
178
eight Popular Ballads
Rhythmic Remediations in the Nineteenth Century
michael cohen
196
nine Blank Verse and the Expansion of England
The Meter of Tennyson’s Demeter
cornelia pearsall
217
ten Prosody Wars
meredith martin
237
Select Bibliography
263
Notes on Contributors
269
Index
273
illustrations
figure 1 “Meredith Destroying Literary Form,” an illustration by
E. T. Reed, from Punch, 28 July 1894
3
figure 2 “Ending Every Line with a Full Stop,” from Wilkie
Collins, Man and Wife (1870)
5
figure 3 Front cover of J. F. W. Herschel’s Schillers Spaziergang,
Translated into Latin Verse (1867)
11
figure 4 “Long Metre,” illustration from Funny Folks,
18 February 1893
18
figure 5 Max Beerbohm, “Lord Byron, Shaking the Dust of
England from His Shoes” (1904)
84
figure 6 Musical notation for “Break, Break, Break” (lines 1–2)
from John Ruskin, Elements of English Prosody (1880)
111
figure 7 Musical notation for “Break, Break, Break” (lines 1–2)
from William Thomson, The Basis of English Rhythm
(1904)
113
figure 8 Musical notation for “Break, Break, Break” (stanza 1)
from Sidney Lanier, The Science of English Verse (1880)
115
vii
viii Illustrations
figure 9 Discussion of rhythmic scheme for line 4 of “Break,
Break, Break” from Lanier, Science of English Verse
116
figure 10 Alternative musical notation for “Break, Break, Break”
(stanza 1) from Lanier, Science of English Verse
117
figure 11 Musical notation for “Break, Break, Break” (stanza 1)
from Julia Dabney, The Musical Basis of Verse (1901)
119
figure 12 Conclusion of “Break, Break, Break,” music composed
by Sidney Lanier (ca. 1870)
123
figure 13 Front cover of “Break Break Break, Poetry by Alfred
Tennyson, Music by William R. Dempster” (1864)
124
figure 14 First four measures of “Break, Break, Break,” music
composed by William R. Dempster (1864)
125
figure 15 Introduction to “Break, Break, Break,” music composed
by George Henschel (1880)
128
Preface
The contributors to Meter Matters have new things to tell us about a roughly
hundred-year period during which writing in meter and theories about it pro-
liferated. Their essays showcase not only the diversity of nineteenth-century
metrical practice but also the richness of twenty-first-century metrical schol-
arship. In particular, this compilation emphasizes the imperative to contextu-
alize and historicize versification—a defining feature of much recent critical
work on Romantic and Victorian meters. The chapters in this volume expli-
cate for us the particularity and peculiarity of nineteenth-century metrical
discourse, its multiple sounds and settings, and the plurality of its timings
and taxonomies. Some of the discussed terms and topics may be unfamiliar
to readers, particularly those of us trained in the vocabulary of accentual-
syllabic prosody, the default metrics in English departments for much of the
twentieth century. The metrical matters scrutinized here do not necessarily
take syllables, accents, and feet as their starting point—indeed, the foot was,
for many of the poets and metrists discussed below, a contested unit of mea-
surement, not a prosodic given. No single definition of meter or system for
representing its patterns accounts for the multiplicity of nineteenth-century
prosody. In fact, a competition among patterns and systems—a dialectic
process—may be what distinguishes the meters surveyed in the book’s in-
troduction and the ten chapters that follow.
Constitutive oppositions and tensions are very much central to the proso-
dies that Isobel Armstrong examines in chapter 1. Taking the multiplicity of
meter as her starting point, Armstrong asks how and what nineteenth-century
meter means. This question is as much epistemological as it is technical, and
in answering it, Armstrong’s chapter provides a conceptual contour map
for much of the territory covered elsewhere in the book. In the interplay
between semantic and sound patterns, in the tensions between speech and
silence, and in the torsion of abstraction and embodiment—all structurally
central to nineteenth-century poetics—we can glimpse a polyrhythmia (“the
multiplicity of rhythms interacting with one another”) that not only informs
ix