Prosodic Aspects of German Hexameter Verse

Abstract

Within the context of prosodic feature analysis, this essay discusses some German manifestations of hexameter verse from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Samples of hexameters by seven German poets-Johann Heinrich Voss, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Eduard Morike, Friedrich Hebbel, Thomas Mann, and Bertolt Brecht-are compared on both the metrical and the prosodic level of analysis. The metrical pattern for the German hexameter line allows for sixteen distinct line-types based solely on the distribution of syllables in nonprominent positions of the meter, and the data show that most poets favored certain line-types and tended to avoid others. Voss, Goethe, Schiller, and Hebbel, for example, favored line-types that begin with the configuration xoxoox (where x and o represent syllables in prominent and nonprominent positions, respectively), while Brecht preferred lines that are dactylic throughout, and Mann displayed no clear preference for any particular line-type. The data for the metrical configurations also reveal a strong similarity between the hexameters favored by Goethe and Hebbel, despite the fact that Hebbel's were written about sixty years after Goethe's. On the prosodic level, there are striking differences between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and the twentieth-century poets (i.e., Mann and Brecht). For example, compound words containing contiguous stressed syllables, which occur only rarely in hexameter verse by Goethe, Schiller, and Hebbel, were consistently used in the same metrical relation by other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets; Mann was inconsistent in his use of this word-type; and Brecht almost always placed it precisely in a metrical relation which the earlier poets invari- ably avoided. Among other things, Brecht's prosodic style is marked by the This essay is based in part on a paper presented at the Berkeley-Michigan Germanic