Early English Meter as a Way of Thinking (original) (raw)
Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021
What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, “medieval” or “modern,” though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland’s Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time. contents Introduction. Modernity: The Problem of a History Part I. Alliterative Meter, Tetrameter, Political Prophecy 1 English Political Prophecy: Coordinates of Form and History 2 The Age of Prophecy 3 The Ireland Prophecy and the Future of Alliterative Verse 4 Tetrameter: The Future of Alliterative Verse 5 Where Have All the Pentameter Prophecies Gone? Part II. Alliterative Meter, Pentameter, Langland 6 Alliterative Meter and Blank Verse, 1540–1667 7 The Rhymelessness of Piers Plowman 8 Langland’s Meter and Blank Verse, 1700–2000 Part III. Tetrameter, Pentameter, Chaucer 9 Chaucer and the Problem of Modernity 10 Chaucer’s English Metrical Phonology: Tetrameter to Pentameter 11 The Age of Pentameter Conclusion. From Archive to Canon Appendix A. English Prophecy Books Appendix B. Some Texts of English Verse Prophecies Not Noted in NIMEV Appendix C. Compilers, Scribes, and Owners of Manuscripts Containing Political Prophecy Appendix D. The Ireland Prophecy
A short overview of Old English metre and metrical theories, presented at the Oxford Philology Seminar, 30 January 2018.
The Measure of Time: Rising and Falling in Victorian Meters
Literature Compass, 2007
In the Victorian period, metrical experiments and prosodical treatises proliferated to impressive proportions and stirred intricate controversies in poetics. In a necessary resurgence of scholarly interest in this body of work, some recent critics of Victorian meter privilege an account of it that favors either accentualism, organicism, and the body, or temporal measurement, the abstract, and the purely mental. Victorian poets and prosodists, however, did not divide along these poles but aimed to connect them within their own work. Focusing in part on blank verse, I argue that their attempt to unite the organic and the abstract in concepts of meter articulated ideals of English national identity and served as a means for the expression of social and cultural ideals. I explore how poets and prosodists connect their concepts of metrical time to the experience of the passage of time, both as a sense of progress and one of nostalgia.
Nicolay Yakovlev’s Theory of Old English Meter: A Reply
ANQ, 2022
A short essay responding to Leonard Neidorf and Rafael J. Pascual’s recent criticism of Nicolay Yakovlev’s theory of Old English meter, reaffirming its valuable difference from traditional understandings of this meter.