[Alan Sullivan]

Just when I was trying to dissuade Andrew from his third category, along you come, Curtis, with those spiky, dissonant lines. It would be easy to carry the "ghost" idea to excess. The ghosts need to be audible, if not visible, before I would care to acknowledge their presence.

I do not think your lines can reasonably be called examples of accentual-syllabic verse. The stress placement is so irregular that I would dub them syllabic. And I've always questioned whether syllabic verse is audibly metrical at all. When lines are sharply enjambed and caesuras erratically placed, syllabic verse sounds indistinguishable from free verse, to my ear.

I didn't comment on the poem before, but I'll venture a word or two now: I thought that it was thematically interesting and that it benefited from lots of lively words, but (as you can guess by now) I disliked the meter.

A.S.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

*double posting; sorry*

[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 01, 2002).]

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Alan,

It's certainly irregular meter, in places, but mostly iambic...

You've motivated me to revisit the description of that third category, from which I've plucked this line:

(Anybody who was a real prick seems to have an affinity for this approach.)

...Which seems worthy of reflection; hmmm...

I sense a discussion brewing, on the relative merits of these styles; but I've never been much interested in strictly regular meters, with exceptions, so I'm thinking we would fall on opposite sides of the coin, stubbornly.

Curtis.

P.S. Your statement, "The stress placement is so irregular that I would dub them syllabic," introduces another angle to the discussion: BANNED POSTwhy should a regularity of stress-placement between lines be a prerequisite for accentual/syllabic verse?



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 01, 2002).]

[MacArthur]

Alan, I think the third category exist more in Modern times, but was inspired by admiration for early 17th-Century poetry...it wouldn't be the first time a movement saw more in it's heroes than was really there. Of course, the meter of Donne and Herbert (and even, believe it or not, Hopkins) was mostly more regular than say Robert Lowell, or Howard Nemerov when he was into this kind of thing.
I was actually inspired to add that category to your original remarks beacause of the controversy over "bear"'s posts. His poems clearly fall in that style, along with others you see on the board from time to time. It seemed only fair to deal with that approach on it's own terms.
(and remember how hard you were on my "Shark's head/Totem Pole post? I looked at that again recently...it's not that bad)

I've thought more about the second style. It isn't that there are more feminine endings in the lilting style, but a certain kind-- involving a demotion:

he spied a boat off lands-end.

he rode there on a white horse.

in the two examples, "end" and "horse" might scan as extra un-accented syllables. That's the point , I now think. It might also scan as a concluding anapest. You see a lot of these in late Shakespeare, and especially in John Webster. Later critics deplored the practice. (of course, this is mostly in Blank Verse).

[MacArthur]

But my real point was something else. Why do you think it's easier to acquire a strict style, just because it has a certain logical simplicity. I doubt whether it is in fact easier, unless it is the particular rhythm the beginner is naturally drawn to.

By the way...welcome back, and glad you had a rewarding vacation.

[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited February 01, 2002).]

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Andrew,

If you post examples of Style 2 and Style 3, I might be able to distinguish them better.

For Style 3, you mention "deleting unaccented syllables almost anywhere in the line can be done-- producing 'clipped' and 'broken-backed' pentameters", which is something I've noticed at other sites dominated by free verse poets who occasionally think they're writing good metrical poems (and, at this site sometimes.) Would it be something like: "I stepped through door and welcomed sun," which would be better phrased, "I stepped through the door and welcomed the sun," if both "the's" weren't deleted?

I've always thought such constructions were rather disgusting...They seem "metaphysical;" i.e., in the example above, "door" and "sun" are being used as grand "forms" a la Plato, as if Writer X were trying to make those things into something more than the actual, concrete objects they are.

Curtis.

[MacArthur]

Curtis, you are thinking of poetry that omits parts of normal syntax...whicn is a cliche in certain kinds of free-verse, and disgusting. But I'm talking about syntactically complete statements where the meter in the line is missing an off-beat.

The bottle summer held spills today.

The spring my mother died tropic storms...

In both lines the fourth foot is missing an unaccented syllable. Both could be corrected so:

The bottle summer held to spills today.

The spring my mother died tropical storms...
(reversing the 4th foot, but restoring the missing syllable)

It can be done smoothly, as in the above examples. Most common is to omit a syllable at the beginning of line...almost common practice in contemporary formal verse.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Originally posted by MacArthur:

The bottle summer held spills today.

The spring my mother died tropic storms...

In both lines the fourth foot is missing an unaccented syllable. Both could be corrected so:

The bottle summer held to spills today.

The spring my mother died tropical storms...
(reversing the 4th foot, but restoring the missing syllable)

It can be done smoothly, as in the above examples. Most common is to omit a syllable at the beginning of line...almost common practice in contemporary formal verse.

So, for Style #3, you are saying that such ommissions tend to occur within the lines rather than the common practice of using headless iambs?

Thanks for posting the clarification.

Curtis.

[Anthony Lombardy]

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.

[Clive Watkins]

Here I am again, picking up on another thread I started last month and which I did not have time to get back to. Thank you to everyone for your wide-ranging and interesting thoughts.

Allow me to restate what I was after: a "small number of key ideas, a kind of irreducible minimum, which those setting out on the accentual-syllabic road would be well to grasp as intimately as possible".

If I can turn, first, to Mac and your extended and intriguing four-fold exposition of possible metrical styles. As a descriptive account, I think there is much of merit in your ideas (developed, as you say they were, from some thinking by Alan), but it is an approach I am wary of for my purposes, because I suspect its very complexity is likely to confuse and mislead a beginner. Also, I think at several points that what you say is open to challenge. For instance, to lump together Donne, Herbert and Milton as working in the same prosodic mine suggests - to my ears - a misreading of their metrical practice. There are special problems about Donne both because of the aberrant nature of many of his verses and also because of the almost total absence of reliable source texts. That he took liberties is to be inferred from Jonson’s remark as reported by Drummond that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging" (assuming, that is, we can trust Drummond’s recollection); but though it is open to anyone to build a prosodic theory on the basis of Donne’s lines as we have them, it would be unwise to regard such a theory as having some kind of historically sanctioned authority.

Also, I want to suggest that your account sometimes seems to confuse a discussion of prosodic issues with questions of subject matter and with lexical concerns - that is, choices of diction and syntax: more broadly, with choices of idiom. Historically, there are certainly useful things to say, from the point of view both of style and of metre, about the nature of genres, but this is a complex and much debated issue its own right, and I think that, for the rather narrower purpose I have in mind here, it is perhaps better to keep them separate.

There are several smaller points of detail where I might want to argue the toss with you, but that would seem churlish, given the thoughtfulness of your remarks, and would in any case be irrelevant to my main concern.

For me, Alan and Bob Clawson come nearest. Bob writes as follows: "I think we have to take from the label accentual, and assume that a line will contain a certain number of accents, i.e., pentameter, tetrameter, etc. It should also contain a certain number of syllables corresponding to the normal two-syllable per foot expectation, i.e., eight syllables in tetrameter." And Alan comments: "Beginners need to identify and count stresses. It's not at all hard to do. They just have to listen to words, instead of looking at them. Of course this goes contrary to the early training in sight-reading that we all experience. That's why it's hard for some."

To confine my discussion to IP, with Bob and Alan I would first of all want to teach beginners the following points:

A standard IP line has ten syllables.

Within those ten syllables, there will be an alternating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, beginning with an unstressed syllable.

While the first of these is easy to learn, the second, in my experience, can give rise to real difficulties, difficulties I believe I sometimes detect in our discussions at Eratosphere. What, to put the matter plainly, counts as a stressed syllable?

To make an obvious point, it is necessary to grasp that, in words of two syllables, one syllable is, in natural enunciation, more accented than another. (Two-syllabled words are good to start with because the accentual pattern is always clear, whereas with words of three or more syllables the question of subsidiary accents arises.) I would want to use the term "accent" here, rather than "stress", to allow the distinction between the alternating metrical pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables and normal enunciation. (I recognize that some use these terms in the opposite way: this is how I shall use them here, however.) It is also necessary to grasp that, for monosyllables, the nature of both accent and metrical stress is determined by context - both the context set up by the metre and the context of meaning.

A further distinction I have found useful (though it is not one which students of linguistics will necessarily recognize) is between "content words" (nouns and pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), which seem strongly referential in the contribution they make to an utterance, and "form words" (such as prepositions and conjunctions), whose contribution seems more to do with the inter-relationship of units of meaning (that is, of "content words") within the utterance.

The usefulness of this rough-and-ready distinction for the present purpose is that it touches on the tendency of some readers (and therefore of some writers) to count as metrically stressed all words (and word-parts) which seem to carry content, regardless of the surrounding pattern of syllables. Typically such readers find themselves in a quandary when encountering lines such as this famous one from Paradise Lost: "Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death" (II.621); or this, by George Gasgoigne: "Who not content with harts, hinds, bucks, roes, goats" (from "The Hare, to the Hunter"). Both lines occur in contexts which seem indubitably intended as accentual-syllabic IP (ten syllables of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables). Yet some readers I have known want to argue that Milton’s line has seven metrically stressed syllables and Gascoigne’s seven or eight (counting both "Who" and "not" as stressed) and that in these lines the poets have suspended the alternating pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables which is normative for IP.

Milton’s and Gascoigne’s lines may be metrical tours de force, but altogether less startling IP lines can give rise to the same difficulty - these, for instance:

"Counts Death kind Nature’s Signal of Retreat" (Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes", 364)

"Beneath that large old Oak, which near their door" (Wordsworth, "Michael", 175)

"And one low piping sound more sweet than all" (Coleridge, "The Nightingale", 61)

"Black, glossy, curl’d, the fleece of Kara-Kul" (Arnold, "Sohrab and Rustum", 98)

"But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by" (A. E. Housman, "Easter Hymn")

"Tail, claws and all of him; for I had stung" (Robinson, "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford", 349)

What these examples suggest, of course, is the fundamental importance of the principle of metrical demotion in IP. It is fundamental because it affects a core principle of accentual-syllabic metres: the nature and incidence of metrical stresses. Demotion, therefore, would be the third key principle I would commend to those learning to write IP. I would want to illustrate it by reading aloud - and by encouraging the learner to read aloud - many lines and passages where this phenomenon occurred. It gives rise to some of the loveliest effects in English verse.

If metrical demotion is fundamental, so is its inverse, metrical promotion. The importance of this struck me anew at Tim Murphy’s recent reading at Grasmere. In the brief question-and-answer session at the end, one member of the audience asked Tim whether he thought that in Milton’s blank verse some lines had in reality only four "beats". (I hope I am recalling this exchange correctly, Tim.) The mistake which in my view underlay the question was a failure to understand (to seize with the ear) the nature and importance of promotion and a countervailing instinct to regard "form words" as the only words in a line which can carry metrical stress: a confusion, in fact, of metrical stress and enunciatory accent. (At this point it is only fair to record that the question raised here about Milton’s prosody has a long history; but despite its scholarly credentials, much of the discussion I have seen fails in the same way in which the assertion behind the question put to Tim fails - in not grasping the nature of metrical promotion.)

I imagine Tim’s questioner had in mind such lines as these (it is easy to multiply examples):

"And choral symphonies, day without night" (V.162)

"Of angels by imperial summons called" (V.584)

"This friendly condescension to relate" (VIII.9)

"In eminence and obstacle find none" (VIII.624)

To my ear, all these lines have five stresses, "form-words" and "minor" syllables being metrically promoted. What is more, all four lines can and should be read as having five stresses, something which can be done in a perfectly easy way and without recourse to a crude, "rum-te-tum-te-tum" manner of delivery. (Tim’s delivery of metrical verse, both his own and that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, is an excellent model in this regard.)

These four principles - ten syllables, with alternating metrical stresses on the even syllables, together with the related concepts of demotion and promotion - seem to me the beginning of wisdom, though they are obviously not the end. These principles need to be internalized, to become easy and natural to the inward ear of the reader-writer, something best achieved, as everyone has acknowledged, by listening to good readers, by much reading aloud and by learning by heart. Alan used a musical analogy for this learning process - "The ones who listen more easily are often the musically-inclined, who already know how to sing" - and I think there is something in this. I would want to suggest a different analogy, however. The talent required is akin to the talent for mimicry, that knack of catching the intonation and speech rhythms of the people we are with.

What needs to be established, then, is the alternating pulse of the line and a sense of it as a ten-syllabled unit. Once a secure sense of the normative line has been established, variations in the alternating pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables can be considered, variations which do not, however, increase or decrease the syllable count. Following common practice, I should call such variations either reversals or inversions. Some prosodists have analysed whereabouts in the line such reversals have historically occurred; others have argued that such accounts should be regarded as setting rules for composition. While the first approach is perfectly valid, to then prescribe where in the line such reversals may or may not occur can, in my view, give rise to unnecessary problems. The key point is that such reversals must not throw into doubt the defining pulse of the line in the context of the surrounding lines: its aural shape as consisting of ten syllables with five stresses in a predominantly alternating pattern.

So far, I have not had recourse to the concept of the foot. Useful as the concept of the foot can sometimes be in describing clusters of words and syllables, I do not believe the foot has any audible presence in a poem, either when read aloud or on the page. One of my main objections to it from a pedagogical point of view is that it takes attention away from the line as the unit of verse and can seduce the unwary into an exotic terrain teeming with all manner of alien, prosodic chimera. To say it again: what is fundamental is the pulse of the line in the context of the surrounding lines, its aural shape as consisting of ten syllables with five stresses in a predominantly alternating pattern.

The same point underpins my feelings about the question of including in a line of IP additional unstressed syllables. (In practical terms, this has to come after demotion-promotion because of the way in which, in some circumstances, additional unstressed syllables may be also read as the subject of promotion.)

While analysis can (and so often does) unfold further and subtler layers of metrical lore, I wonder if these few points might serve as a sufficient, practical basis on which to learn to write IP.

Enough! More than enough!

Clive Watkins