Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott

Abstract

Reviewed by: Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650 by Eric Weiskott Nicholas Myklebust eric weiskott, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 297. isbn: 978–0–8122–5264–4. $79.95. Scholarly books on metrics rarely see the trees in the forest, let alone the forest. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, Eric Weiskott offers a stunning example of metrical inquiry at its finest in a study of a neglected genre that, from its modest corner of the literary world, poses daring and difficult questions about how we organize knowledge in a 'virtual field of play both constraining and responsive to the continuous history of cultural decision-making' (p. 10). In the process, Weiskott presents an alternative history of literature free from the warping effects of periodization. Gracefully blending Bourdieuan theory with linguistic and archival evidence, Weiskott recenters a marginalized genre—the political prophecy—among intersecting metrical cultures in England from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Exquisite codicological analysis complements precise philological reasoning in a probing audit of the methods of historical-literary scholarship. Through three parts and eleven chapters, Weiskott mounts an erudite, even soulful interrogation of the limitations of periodization on our understanding of, and relationship to and with, the dynamic practices of early English metrical communities. His project aims to 'renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history between roughly 1350 and 1650' (p. 3) as it tracks '[p]atterns of metrical affiliation and metrical avoidance' (p. 58) in which 'competing meters stake out different futures for the English metrical line' (p. 197), each encoding 'a distinct experience of historical time' (p. 206). At the core of his inquiry lies political prophecy, a 'future-oriented genre spanning the twelfth to the seventeenth century in multiple forms' (p. 4). As Weiskott observes, 'political prophecy had a differential effect on the English literary field according to metrical tradition' (p. 58). In Part One, Weiskott uses political prophecy to model the historical relations between two metrical cultures, the alliterative line and the tetrameter. A poem such as the Ireland Prophecy (1452–1453) offers insight into early English metrical thinking, as the choice to write in alliterative meter intimates 'a different modernity . . . from the one we now know to have transpired' (p. 68) and 'recommends . . . a metrical future that is only contrafactual for belated readers like us' [End Page 103] (p. 71). Moreover, shorter lyrics such as 'A windy summer a wet harvest' and 'When Father Blithe the beggar can say two Creeds' that take earlier alliterative works (Vision of William Banastre and Piers Plowman, respectively) and translate the source meters into tetrameters yield 'direct evidence of cross-pollination' (p. 78). Weiskott also deftly considers the paucity of prophecies written in pentameter, noting that 'the pentameter tradition and the prophecy tradition had little literary-cultural common ground on which to meet in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' and therefore 'appeared largely incompatible to writers, readers, and compilers' (p. 95). In Part Two, Weiskott traces 'multiple sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manifestations of the perception that [William] Langland practiced blank verse' (p. 106) and mines undervalued sources, such as George Gascoigne's Steele Glas, to show that although 'historians have nearly always understood early blank verse as the beginning of the metrical future . . . its first practitioners and readers understood it as the recovery of the metrical past' (p. 149). The decision to compose prophecies in unrhymed pentameter reveals 'a historically specific point of crossing between English metrical traditions' (p. 106) precipitated, in part, by manuals of versification entering the literary field and aligning grammatical paradigms of Greek and Latin with emerging metrical canons in the sixteenth century. Part Three 'queries the teleology that leads from Chaucer to modernism by reorienting his literary practice toward the past' with compelling evidence that the model for Chaucer's metrical line lies less with French or Italian influences than the English tetrameter (p. 153). This is a marvelous reconfiguration of metrical categories that explains how 'Chaucer's meter gradually withdrew from active negotiations in the English literary field and became the field itself' (p. 193). Through this prism, Weiskott refracts the decussate cultures of alliterative...