MacArthur, I like the way you talk about meter, and I think there is a lot of truth in the way you associate differences in metrical technique with different periods, groups of poets, and even topics. It is probably easier to associate differences of metrical technique with differences of style (grand, middle, plain, etc.), but since all but the greatest poets have a limited range of style, your approach can be enlightening, as well.
Clive, thanks for suggesting the John Thompson book, which sounds like something I should have read a long time ago. Although I'm very ignorant about the development of English pentameter, I do still find persuasive the view that it originates in the Latin hendecasyllable. The average length of Shakespeare's pentameter is 11 syllables and, well, one could go on from there.
As for Shakespeare's and Chaucer's technical understanding of prosody, there can be no doubt that Chaucer had the most thorough understanding of Latin meters, and Shakespeare must have been very familiar with the rules of the elegiac, the hendecasyllable, iambic, and hexameter. Milton was a good Latin poet and wrote some fairly competent Greek hexameters. I don't see how we could regard their prosodic notions as inadequate, but I may think this because it doesn't seem to me that modern linguistics has had much effect on our practical understanding of prosody. Renaissance writers may have been influenced by subsitution rules for iambic verse in Greek and Latin which would yield a pretty wild line in English, but I don't think of the analogy that brings one from alternating quantities to alternating stresses as much of an obstacle, since all med. and renaissance readers would have been substituting stress for quantity anyway.
As Clive suggested in his first posting, it would be fun and more efficient to do this in person. Alan reminded us on another thread of the Westchester conference, and I am hoping to read some sort of paper there, but I haven't found on their website any information on the sessions or panel topics.
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