[Tim Murphy]

This is a fascinating thread, which I've not read in its entirety. I never read a prosody until about 1994, when I finally devoured Fussell's. But Dick Davis once quipped, "What are the pagan poets arguing about in the Outer Circle? Why, prosody of course!" I think Clive has given us elegant examples of demotion and promotion, and we owe him our thanks for his erudite labors on this thread. In my own case, I think I first performed the role of Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eleven, but my mother had been reading us or having us read Shakespeare from a far earlier age. And before that, Milne, Dodgson, Mother Goose, and Lear. So I'm with Richard: for me it is almost entirely aural and/or oral. I love accentual meters and think the studies arguing that the Beowulf poet learned much of anything from Vergil are just plain silly. I also love studying and contemplating the beginning of accentual/syllabic. "Whoso list to hount, I know where is an hynde." Try making that fit the rules. And consider the extremes of elision in Donne. When I die and go to hell, I want to sit on the back bench and hear Wyatt, Shakespeare and Donne recite from memory.

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Tim

Thank you for your comments. Let me add this.

One of my reasons for wanting to emphasise, as far as IP is concerned, four basic principles - ten syllables, with alternating metrical stresses on the even syllables, and the related concepts of demotion and promotion - was to secure the identity and fundamental importance of the measured line, as opposed to any supposed metrical units within the line.

A second, equally fundamental principle concerns the dynamics of the English sentence, the often subtle pressures of expectation, deferment,fulfilment and release inherent in its syntax.

In a prefatory note to Paradise Lost, Milton describes his blank verse as consisting "only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another". It is this last, the artful management of the interplay between the line as a unit and the sentence as a unit, which I so much admire in writers as diverse as - yes - Milton, Herbert, Keats, Frost, Edward Thomas, Auden, E. J. Scovell, Geoffrey Hill and Richard Wilbur.

Clive Watkins


[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited February 24, 2002).]

[Richard Wakefield]

At the risk of rehashing some of what's already been said, although maybe from a slightly different angle, I want to recall the origins of poetry in music -- hence the double meaning of "lyric." The Beowulf poet, already mentioned, sang his compositions. Music is, among other things, inherently rhythmic, or western music is, at least. Fitting words to music inevitably becomes a task of matching word stresses to the accented notes. The number of accents per line (and line was as much a melodic unit as a verbal one, I suppose) varies, but beyond five they begin to tax the singer's and listeners' memories; seven or so "things" seems to be toward the maximum number we can easily commit to memory as "one." But we can have fewer for the sake of the specific melody.
Free verse is often accused to not being musical, but those who make the accusation might not realize that they're speaking more than figuratively. I like good free verse, but to my ear its music is sporadic, like the little snatches of coherence you get in Stravinsky. And as in Stravinsky, that swirl of change can be very expressive, but expressive of something very different from what metrical verse expresses. (I have a pet theory that metrical verse almost always expresses a poet's perhaps unconscious assumptions about the orderliness of the world, but that theory would drag us back to the debate about whether formal poets are generally more conservative than free versers, and as a long-time weak-kneed liberal, I don't want to go there!)
So to me it's music. If you have the music deeply enough embedded in your bones, don't waste money on a book on prosody. If you need a little help now and then, get one. By the way, John Hollander's little "Rhyme's Reason" is a delight for the way it gives its definitions in the verse form being defined -- even if you don't need the help with prosody, it's great fun.
RPW

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Clive,

I find your consideration of the line's importance to be very helpful, considering recent discussions on indentions & line breaks; the way that lines play off of other lines is important in both metrical verse and free verse, IMO. The way this works, relative to each method, is an important consideration.

Curtis.

[Roger Slater]

Richard, your remarks about free verse versus metrical verse are quite interesting and (I think) even handed.

You wrote "that swirl of change [in fee verse]can be very expressive, but expressive of something very different from what metrical verse expresses."

I'm not sure, but I assume you mean to be speaking about form rather than substance. In terms of the actual content of a poem, its arguments, metaphors, images, etc., I'd say that formal verse and free verse (for the most part) can express pretty much the same range of thoughts and emotions. The manner of expression may be very different, but the actual meaning that gets expressed can be very similar.

If we valued expression only in terms of "the more music, the better," then we'd probably have to decide that fine songs are superior even to metrical verse for their expressive qualities. (I'm not saying that you said "the more music, the better," by the way. I'm speaking generally). And in some limited ways we would be right. Many people (myself included) find that songs more reliably produce a visceral reaction and are more automatically committed to memory than even formal poetry. Almost everyone can recognize countless hundreds of songs on the radio and sing along to a certain extent, even songs they don't care for or enjoy.

So any attempt (not by you, but by others) to argue that metrical verse is superior to free verse because it is more "musical" would fall into a trap that would force them to concede that just about any halfway decent song is superior to just about any formal verse.

It seems to me that poems need "just enough" music, not a maximum amount of music, and that we often come across free verse poems that manage to create sufficient music to accompany their substance and create a profound poetic experience.

There's nothing particularly reactionary or conservative about preferring to write metrical verse rather than free verse, any more than it's reactionary or conservative to try to express oneself with music and song. What I do think of as reactionary and conservative, however, is the attitude that some people have that free verse is some kind of innately inferior endeavor produced by bad ears that cannot hear or appreciate the beauty of meter. I think it's the people who take this point of view who are the ones with the ears that need training.