Metrics Today I: An Introduction

Abstract

Almost thirty years ago Morris Halle and Samuel Keyser (1966) published their seminal article on Chaucer's prosody, thereby laying the foundation for generative metrics, which was to dominate the study of versification for over a quarter of a century. However, this is not to say that all metrical studies issued during this period followed the generative model. Rather, as in the field of linguistics, while followers of this tradition were extremely prolific, they did tend to ignore other, nongenerative approaches. So, if anyone interested in metrics happened to come across (or deliberately looked up) one of the articles on metrics in College English, Poetics, Language, or Linguistics Inquiry, s/he would no doubt have thought that this was the only kind of metrics that flourished. Besides raising many new questions, generative metrics also came up with numerous answers to long-standing questions. As most of the scholars working in the field were linguists, metrics benefited from the new insights of generative phonology, above all, from the famous SPE (Sound Pattern of English) model of Chomsky and Halle (1968), the most explicit formulation of a theory of linear phonology. Since this type of phonology originated in the framework of generative grammar, it is not surprising that some of the basic claims of generative grammar were also postulated by generative metrics. It should be remembered that the first formulation of generative metrics appeared only a year after the 1965 publication of Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, a cornerstone of modern linguistics. Although some critics maintain