eBook

The rise and fall of meter

Martin, Meredith

2012

Overview

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, \"English meter\" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline.The Rise and Fall of Metertells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: 19th century / 1DBKE / 20th century / Accentual verse / Alice Meynell / Allegory / Allusion / Anthem for Doomed Youth / Assonance / Barrack-Room Ballads / Blank verse / Bodleian Library / Caesura / Cambridge University Press / Classical language / Coventry Patmore / Culture and Anarchy / Dulce et Decorum est / Elizabethan literature / Elocution / English language / English language -- Versification / English literature / English poetry / English poetry -- 19th century -- History and criticism / English poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / European / Ezra Pound / Foot (prosody) / Free verse / George Saintsbury / Gerard Manley Hopkins / Grammar / Handbook / Harold Monro / Henry Newbolt / Hexameter / History / History and criticism / Iambic pentameter / Jon Stallworthy / Lament / Language & Literature / Leitmotif / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry / Literature / Metre (poetry) / Misery (novel) / Modernism / Narrative / National characteristics, English, in literature / Old English literature / On Translating Homer / Oxford University Press / Pararhyme / Pentameter / Poet laureate / Poetics / Poetics -- History -- 19th century / Poetics -- History -- 20th century / Poetry / Preface / Pronunciation / Prose / Pun / Rhetoric / Rhyme / Rhythm / Robert Bridges / Samson Agonistes / Scansion / Sestet / Sonnet / Stanza / Strange Meeting (poem) / Suggestion / The Various / The Wreck of the Deutschland / To Helen / Trochee / Versification / War poet / Wilfred Owen / Writer / Writing
• ISBN: 0691155127, 9780691155128, 9780691152738, 069115273X, 9781400842193, 1400842190