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 Seth Lerer Eric Weiskott. Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. xviii, 297. $79.95 cloth. This smart, inventive, and fastidiously researched book makes a case for a new relationship among meter, genre, and literary periodization in English poetry. Its central argument is that metrical choice and literary form go hand in hand. In particular, it offers a new taxonomy of English verse, where three major periods can be defined by their formal choices. These are, first, the age of tetrameter: a period, early in the history of the English vernacular, when four-stress, eight-syllable lines were used for romance, lyric, debate, vision, and satire. This is the age of the earliest English verse, from The Owl and the Nightingale through King Horn, from the most famous of the Harley Lyrics through Sir Orfeo. Chaucer’s choice [End Page 355] of tetrameter in his early dream poems, Weiskott further suggests, is a way of engaging with this literary tradition and, in the process, affiliating these narrative poems (for all their Gallic source material) with a distinctively English inheritance. Second, Weiskott proposes an age of political prophecy distinctively associated with the alliterative long line. Here, from the fourteenth through the early sixteenth century, the social and political function of literary writing was to deploy biblical narrative, religious idiom, and social critique to make claims about how future systems of power might succeed or fail. This is the age of Langland’s Piers Plowman, of Wynnere and Wastoure, and of the Pearl-poet. It is a practice through which the purpose of poetry was to instruct most pointedly in virtues and vices, to comment most explicitly on the excesses of court and Church, and to foster a poetic persona that was pedagogical. We have long been taught that the “alliterative tradition” was something archaic and regional: a poetry of the provinces, of the North and West, of dialects that died out. Weiskott, however, seems to share the position of Ralph Hanna, among others, that alliterative poetry of the fourteenth century can be very much a metropolitan form: that Langland was a London poet and, furthermore, that the reprinting of Piers Plowman by Robert Crowley in the 1550s reinvigorated the practice of political prophesy and the reading of unrhymed, alliterative verse in the later sixteenth century. An implication of this revival, according to Weiskott, is the acceptance and development of unrhymed verse as a medium for “serious” poetry; thus, there is a relationship between the alliterative tradition and blank verse that grows out of this sense of moral purpose and formal practice. Third, and finally, Weiskott proposes an age of pentameter, a period running from late Chaucer through the middle of the twentieth century, when the ten-syllable, five-beat iambic line became the norm for poetry that aspired to literary value. Chaucer’s “invention” of pentameter—or, more accurately, his synthesis of continental verse forms into a lithe and flexible pattern that fit the rhythms of late Middle English stress—contributed not only to the affirmation of this verse form as a norm. It contributed to English literary history’s claim on Chaucer as the father of English poetry: the argument that a through-line runs, effectively from his Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde all the way to, say, Robert Lowell. Furthermore, the anthologization of the English literary tradition could include non-pentameter poetry (selections from Old English, tetrameter lyrics and ballads, alliterative specimens) as highlighted exceptions or [End Page 356] byways to this linear development (indeed, my very word “specimen” connotes the sense that examples of the non-pentameter have the status of the curio, the scientific slide, or the antiquarian fetish). In this framework, the book offers an argument for a new kind of formalism. Rather than making a claim for a New Critical autonomy of the aesthetic object, Weiskott recognizes that formal choices are, in themselves, historically contingent. A history of meter is, therefore, a history of styles, a history of the social function of literature, and a history of how literary writers implicate...