Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden

Abstract

42BOOK REVIEWS Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden. San Marino, California: Huntington Library Press, 1985. xiii + 310 pp. $22. by Martin Elsky In an overview of almost the entirety of pre-eighteenthcentury English verse, Woods presents a largely technical history of the contour of the metrical line in English, though George Herbert figures in only a small way in this account. There are perhaps two broad approaches one may take to the subject of versification. One seeks the systematic linguistic rules that account for the regular alternation of stress with little regard for meaning or poetic context (see Halle and Keyser, English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth and Its Role in Verso [New York: Harper and Row, 1971]). Another approach uses the Aristotelian literary tradition to explain how poets use meter to make language into an art imitating meaning or the spoken voice (see John Thompson, The Founding of English Meter [New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1966]). In her Introduction Woods gestures in the Aristotelian direction (pp. 12-13), and the most interesting parts of her book are about the technical means of expressing voice, but her treatment of verse, with significant differences, is largely in the tradition of Halle and Keyser's technical approach, though she does not use their specific linguistic model. For example, Woods credits Surrey with the invention of the iambic pentameter line by "solving the problem of where to place the caesura in a decasyllabic line" (pp. 85-86). (Throughout the book Woods shows special sensitivity to the metrical effects of the mid-line pause.) Her explanation of so important an event in the history of verse is intriguing and original, but it is purely technical, and is characteristic of a nominalism that often eschews larger literary and theoretical issues underlying metrical change, preferring instead to deal with specific metrical features of lines. Interesting literary matters are frequently raised, but left undeveloped. Nevertheless, the core of this book does trace a literary history beginning with Chaucer's five-stress line ("not, strictly speaking, . . . iambic pentameter" [p. 47]), which in the BOOK REVIEWS43 sixteenth century developed into two verse patterns, one generated by Wyatt, the other by Surrey, one a verse of personal reflection, the other of public statement. The line of Wyatt leads to Sidney and Donne, the line of Surrey to Spenser and Jonson. Retaining the dual track model of Renaissance verse, Woods replaces Yvor Winters' and CS. Lewis' division of plain and eloquent styles with metrical and rhythmic criteria. "The formal essence" of the distinction between these two kinds of verse "lies in the choice of metrical styles" (p. 94), she explains, and with these criteria she places Jonson with Spenser rather than with Donne and other plain stylists. This is Woods's most interesting and original argument, the main argument that holds her material together, though it sometimes gets lost in her discussion of details. The verse model established by Wyatt cannot be accounted for by iambic movement, or by accentual-syllabic meter in general, Woods argues, but instead is based on the rhythmic movement of phrases whose shapes are determined by line endings and mid-line pauses, a mode which acts as the vehicle of "rhythms mimetic of voice or content" (p. 74), particularly personal emotion. In effect, Woods describes here the design of a rhythmic apparatus that imitates speech. On the other hand, Surrey's adoption of true iambic accentual-syllabic verse serves "to generalize and make memorable essentially public statements" rather than express private feeling, and "establish[es] emotion by subtle contrasts" (p. 94) between meter and rhythm. This verse pattern tends to be "aesthetic" rather than "mimetic"; it uses "rhythms which are themselves pleasurable . . . but which do not directly imitate . . . either the effect of the speaking voice or the lexical meaning of the poem's statement" (p. 1 5), as the mimetic does. The distinction, however, is incomplete: aesthetic rhythms that convey public statement or express emotion must also have speakers and must also be the product of voice, albeit a different kind of voice from that conveyed by "mimetic" rhythms. Woods's most interesting discussion of this difference between phrasal ands truly metrical...