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 Ben Glaser Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. By Eric Weiskott. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2021. xviii+297 pp. £64. ISBN 978–0–8122–5264–4. Eric Weiskott's second monograph continues to reimagine a non-teleological history of English metre. Amid extensive archival research, two major methodological [End Page 478] concerns surface: a running critique of periodization that centres on modernity, and an expansion of historical prosody. Working against a false symmetry between metrical and social history, Weiskott dislodges the attribution to Chaucer of a break between earlier metrical traditions and pentameter. Before the modern 'break' with pentameter there was a retroprojected 'break' into it that left behind a large corpus and above all Langland. Weiskott brings decades of medieval scholarship on prosody into focus to demystify pentameter's prestige. With deep linguistic and archival knowledge, his book writes new plural histories of English verse forms for early periods in which there is little explicit poetics or meta-prosodic reflection. To overemphasize the latter threatens to reproduce a periodization in which the premodern is the untheorized and therefore untheorizable. Weiskott thus successfully historicizes historical prosody, building bridges backward from its 'Victorianist incarnation' (p. 17). His book answers the pressing need for poetics to find rigorous methods for moving between time periods with truly divergent and non-'modern' literary cultures. The first five chapters establish a corpus of prophetic texts which develop their own historiography and serve to 'think the ideal social arrangement' (p. 42). Prophecy dynamically conserves metrical pasts and lets that pastness infuse prophecy. The scholarship is impressive throughout, delineating an unfamiliar genre in full historical breadth. It was not entirely clear, however, which decisions about metre mattered to authors and scribes, why pentameter was unsuited or deselected for prophecy, or how tetrameter creates 'rhythmical dimensionality' so as to constitute a 'program of literary modernization' (pp. 83–84). To Weiskott's credit, he admits elements that might reinforce narratives of modernization, such as the force of the Chaucerian 'metrical avant-garde' or the Faerie Queene's treatment of prophecy as atavistic and alliteration as mere 'prosodic dried spice' (p. 69). Chapters 6–8 surprisingly reconnect blank and alliterative verse through their classicizing 'avoidance of rhyme' (p. 106). The lack of real intersection in composition, however unsatisfying from a technical perspective, is a necessary concession and indeed part of the book's new metrical history. The mid-sixteenth-century Scottish court—hardly the gravitational centre of our nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary historiographies—is the exception that proves the non-intersection. That said, Weiskott's analysis of George Gascoigne's Steele Glas cleverly shows how poetry assessed and valued alliterative verse in ways absent from that author's foundational prosodic treatise Certayne Notes of Instruction. As in his first book (English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016)), Weiskott sharply reassesses what he calls the 'language–meter dialectic' and its 'epistemological feedback loops between meter and language' (p. 169). Once we see language and metre as two distinct and internally diverse systems, we can recognize how, for example, Piers Plowman 'devises exceptionally difficult choices between innovative metrical phonology and asystematic metrical patterns' (p. 125). We then achieve a sense of Langland's innovative skill in using macaronic verse to 'bring form to consciousness' by contrasting alliterative metrics with London's rhyming forms (p. 130). The [End Page 479] two central chapters, on Langland (7) and Chaucer (10), achieve the methodological goal of a stylistics without explicit prosody. Each of these chapters is followed by rather melancholic but useful tales of how verse style got misrecognized thanks to prosodic ideologies. Langland's alliterative verse, for example, was taken up in an exaggerated 'accentual paradigm' after the seventeenth-century canonization of blank verse. C. S. Lewis's strenuous periodization gives a fair picture of the 'post-enlightenment literary historiography' as well as the simplified and abstract modern scansions Weiskott wishes to revise (p. 145). A third section productively disarticulates two Chaucers: one the inventor of pentameter as an English outcrop of continental decasyllabics, yet influenced by a...