An Eighteenth-Century Origin of Modern Metrical Studies? – or – Robert Lowth as a Pioneer of Ethnopoetics (original) (raw)
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Early English Meter as a Way of Thinking
Studia Metrica et Poetica, 2017
An article framing metrical variety and literary experimentation in late fourteenth-century England as an opportunity for intellectual history.
Gunkel, Dieter and Olav Hackstein. 2018. Language and Meter (Brill's Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics 18). Leiden: Brill., 2018
In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Ṛgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetic form, and how they change over time.
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
On The Diachronic Analysis of Old English Metre
International Journal of Language & Linguistics, 2018
The article is devoted to the diachronic analysis of Old English metre, based on the study of changes in the metrical structure of lines, modification of laws governing the placement of a caesura and the sound structure of alliteration, as well as transformations of the phonetic organisation of verse (the loss of certain types of sound devices, the appearance and spreading of others). As is shown in the article, the most important criteria for the diachronic analysis of Old English metre appear to be deviations from the canons governing the quantitative structure of alliteration (alliteration including palatal [g'] and velar [g]; alliteration of voiceless consonants [hl-, hn-, hr-, hw-]; alliteration of consonant clusters [st, sp-, sl-, sn-, sw-]) as well as the use of double alliteration, studied with special reference to skaldic runhent. The main focus of the article is on the study of the sound organisation of half-and long lines. In nearly a third of the extant lines of Old English poetry, alliteration is enriched by additional sound devices, whose structure and function appear to be crucial for the diachronic study of Old English metre. In discussion of these in Old English verse not only full repetitions of vowels and consonants of root morphemes are considered, but also consonances, as these were canonised in other Germanic poetic traditions (i.e. Old Norse), preserving the skaldic system of internal rhyme (skothendingarconsonances used in odd lines, and aðalhendingarfull rhymes used in even lines). The distribution of full rhymes and consonances involving root morphemes is analysed in opposition to the sound repetitions of inflectional and suffixational morphemes. Inflectional rhymes resulting from rhythmic-syntactic parallelisms are taken into account, if they occur in isosyllabic units constituting rhythmic groups and in the same function as the rhymes of root morphemes. The function of consonances and full rhymes is studied not only in the units of poetic speech, such as compound words, lexical repetitions, repetitions of genetically related words and formulas, but also in the metrical units of verse. The change in the distribution of different types of full rhymes and consonances within half-lines and long lines can be accounted for by the changes taking place in the metrical organisation of alliterative verse.
A short overview of Old English metre and metrical theories, presented at the Oxford Philology Seminar, 30 January 2018.