Tennyson’s ‘metre of Catullus’: The ambivalent hendecasyllable

Abstract

This article argues that quantitative verse can be no more than an intellectual exercise in English because of the language’s strong dynamic accent and tendency towards stress-timing. The case focuses on Tennyson’s experiment entitled ‘Hendecasyllabics’, which he described as being ‘in a metre of Catullus’. The article offers a detailed comparison of the supra-segmental features of Tennyson’s poem and its model and concludes that the English poem lacks an essential component of the Latin metre: a variable relationship between ictus and accent. As a result, Tennyson unwittingly composed lines with a regular accentual configuration, one that English poets had been studiously avoiding for 500 years. In contrast, poets of the Southern Romance languages have cultivated this type of line assiduously, and the article pursues the historical reasons for the divergence. It concludes that the difference is almost entirely due to individual aesthetic choices, and that this line structure, known as the endecasílabo melódico, is a viable option as a verse design for English poets.