No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The poets and the audiences of 1590 and 1600 were in love with the unrhymed pentameters. To us familiar; to them a Newfoundland. They ran riot with the discovery, as an age does when a new creative medium falls to its portion. They heard the beat with rapture. Even when the poets and players subtilised the beat, it must have been still a more powerful presence and a greater source of positive, conscious enjoyment than we in our sophistication will usually let it be. Herbert Howarth (225) 1 Prosody, as Alan Holder suggests in his effort at Rethinking Meter, is a hotbed of confusion, double-talk, inaccurate analysis, and extravagant claims. The nature of rhythm, and the kind of life it assumes in poetry, are explained or perceived differently by different readers, and as everything else has multiplied in our time, so have theories that try to account for the movement of sound in poems. Stressers and timers, as George Saintsbury called them, have perhaps always been with us, and new perspectives on language and literature - Russian Formalism, structural linguistics, Chomskyan generative theory, New Criticism, free verse, and New Historicism, to mention a few - have spawned approaches to prosody so specialized that their adherents find it increasingly difficult to learn from one another, a condition exacerbated by the habit of dogmatic belief in the rightness of their own views and the inadequacy or absurdity of others'. That seems particularly natural to experts in this field. When I first ventured into this kind of study, coming to it as a teacher of literature, I remember being surprised to find that the books on meter were shelved in the library under Language, not Literature, and my surprise was a sign of my readiness to understand meter as an instrument of aesthetic effect rather than as a feature of language (though now I think of it as both). But the question arises constantly as to whether prosody is 'essentially' or primarily a matter of linguistics or aesthetics, of rhythmic sound or of syntax, of dramatic speech in performance, or of the allocation of major and minor words to strong or weak positions in metrical lines. Without agreement on such topics, and starting from different sets of assumptions, the different schools have developed remarkably different methodologies and, for the most part, regard their rivals with varying mixtures of indifference, hostility, and contempt. A critic like Holder, whose book should probably be entitled Rejecting Meter, has little difficulty in making the internecine wars between and within these schools (especially within the 'classical,foot-bound' approach to meter) an object of ridicule. Holder's position, nevertheless, is hardly a serious one, because his amusement at the antics of prosodists in distress is apparently based on the view that they really have nothing to study, that the very notion of meter as a recurrent rhythmic pattern is a delusion, and that the hundreds of scholars and critics who have, over several centuries, made it their study have been occupied with nothing more substantial than the crazy scientists of Laputa whom Swift so effectively satirized in Gulliver's Travels. Much nonsense, though, and equally unbecoming disputes have scarred the history of law, religion, politics, philosophy, and literary criticism, to go no further, but they do no! often lead to the conclusion that the objects of these inquiries do not exist. That informed and intelligent debaters may sometimes express foolish views on a subject does not vaporize the subject. For readers of poetry (students, scholars, critics, actors), but not necessarily for linguists, whose interest is likely to be more theoretical, the main point of metrical study is to provide coherent and consistent guidelines for following, by ear or voice or eye, the rhythmic patterns that poets have composed in their poems. Traditional English prosody has usually described these patterns in terms borrowed from ancient poetry written in quantitative meters, which are very different from the accentual or strong-stress meters common in English verse. …
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.