The Italian line in English after Chaucer

In an earlier article ( Language and Literature, 11(4)) the author argued that Hanson and Kiparsky's parametric theory failed to account for some statistically verifiable features of the English iambic pentameter, in particular, the far from random distribution of mid-line word boundaries in this metre. The present article argues that there are a series of other features of English binary metres that can only be identified and explained if parametric theory is supplemented by quantitative techniques borrowed from Russian linguistic metrics. It analyses samples of verse in various binary metres by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Longfellow, and Browning, and identifies some peculiar properties of each poet's use of tension. It measures inversion and erosion in iambic pentameters, and in iambic, trochaic and mixed tetrameters, and concludes that: (1) more than 85 percent of strong positions in the English iambic pentameter contain a stressed syllable; (2) English iambic verse contains a constraint against two consecutive strong positions lacking stress; (3) the tetrameter is more regularly iambic than the pentameter; (4) the English trochaic tetrameter allows up to half of its lines to have a non-trochaic opening; and (4) Milton's `L'Allegro' and `Il Penseroso' contain a balanced mixture of the metrical features of iambic and trochaic verse.

More fundamentally, why is bracketing, both in the linguistic representation and in the metrical pattern, a necessary ingredient of metrical form? The answer to this question, if ever found, will form a central part of the theory of universal metrics. Bruce Hayes (1989: 258) French and Italian decasyllabic meters include obligatory constraints on the placement of caesuras. The English iambic pentameter is historically modeled on these meters, but does not overtly share these constraints. However, choices about caesura placement do have profound aesthetic effects in English poetry, and conformity to the Romance constraints is statistically significant (Duffell 2000). Here I suggest that properly formalizing the Romance constraints illuminates their formal role in English. First, I propose that the universal theory of poetic meter in Hanson & Kiparsky (1996) incorporate a family of metrical constraints parallel to the general alignment constraints which have been posited for grammar (McCarthy & Prince 1993). Then I revisit the longstanding question of why English poets allow exceptions to their meter’s cardinal rule on stress placement specifically for initial syllables, and suggest that the Romance constraints persist covertly as the conditions licencing these exceptions, precisely because the exceptions and the constraints accomplish a common end of signalling metrical boundaries. In this way, exceptions Hayes (1989) attributes to a general aesthetic tendency to allow beginnings to be lax may be grounded more directly in grammar.

Fulfilling a central goal of a generation of Elizabethan English metrical theory often referred to as the ‘quantitative movement’, Thomas Campion succeeded in demonstrating the role of syllable quantity, or phonological weight, in Elizabethan iambic pentameter. Following Kristin Hanson (2001, 2006), this article parses Campion’s scansions of Early Modern English syllables, according to moraic theory, into resolved moraic trochees. The analysis demonstrates that (1) Campion distinguished between syllable weight (syllable quantity) and stress or strength (accent) in Early Modern English; (2) Campion prohibited syllabic consonants in English iambic pentameter, despite the fact that they were attested in Early Modern English as a whole; (3) in a successful adaptation of the Latin rule of ‘position’, as described by William Lily and John Colet’s Short Introduction of Grammar (1567), Campion re-syllabified coda consonants followed by vowels; and (4) Campion employed syllabic elision as a means of avoiding pyrrhic syllable combinations that resulted in non-maximal filling of long positions in a line of English iambic pentameter. His two iambic pentameters – the ‘pure’ and the ‘licentiate’ – are both accentual and quantitative meters that, in accordance with moraic theory, integrate stress and strength with syllable weight. He contrasted stress and weight in the quantitative Sapphic lyric ‘Come let us sound with melodie’ (Campion, 1601). Hanson’s (2001, 2006) reconsideration of the role of syllable quantity in Elizabethan metrical theory and Elizabethan poetry should be continued.

English iambic pentameter allows rhythmical deviations that occupy three (seldom four, more often two) adjacent metrical positions. These deviations, though metrical, are noticed by the listener or reader. Starting from the first quarter of the 16th century, poets (Surrey) have used rhythmical deviations to emphasize ("italicize") semantically important segments in the line. Such rhythmical deviations have become part of the English poetic traditions. It has turned out that rhythmical deviations used to italicize meaning are filled with recurring rhythmical and grammatical structures and repeated lexicon. M. L. Gasparov used a special term to denote the recurring rhythmicalgrammatical structures: "clichés"; while calling clichés incorporating recurrent lexicon "formulas". I have discovered that formulas are part of the English poetic tradition: the same formulas recur in poetic texts of the 16th–20th cc. They are not plagiarisms, allusions or reminiscences; they are a common basket of goods that belong to all English poets, used by all and owned by none. The recurrent deviations usually occur on metrical positions "weak-strong-weak-strong" and as a rule contain a monosyllabic (rarely – disyllabic) verbpredicate followed by a monosyllabic grammatical word (e.g. an article), an adjectiveattribute and a noun – a direct object to the verb. The recurring lexicon includes verbs of motion, particularly verbs of fast, aggressive motion, an action directed downwards or causing an injury or death, and recurring nouns referring to moving objects or agents (hands, arms, wings; spear, sword). I term such recurring formulas "rhythmical italics".

The Early New English iambic pentameter was re-created by Wyatt and Surrey in the first half of the 16th c. Surrey introduced blank iambic pentameter into English poetry, and the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, was written in this versification form. Early New English playwrights were feeling their way into the iambic meter, and wrote “by the foot”: the mean stressing on even syllables reached 90 percent, while on the odd syllables it fell to 5 percent. The authors of first new English tragedies were members of the parliament or the gentlemen of the City Inns, and they wrote for the aristocratic audience and the Court. Their subject matter and their characters matched the verse form: they were stiff and stilted.Marlowe and Kyd represented a new generation of playwrights who wrote for the commercial stage patronized by commoners. Marlowe and Kyd created different sets of plots and personages and a different versification style. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy had a powerful impact on generations of English playwrights, from Shakespeare to Shirley. The particulars of the Earlier New English versification style compared to later Elizabethan dramaturgy are discussed in the presentation.

Nonlexical Word Stress in the English Iambic Pentameter: A Study of John Donne

Nonlexical Word Stress in the English Iambic Pentameter: A Study of John Donne

This study aims to analyse the aesthetic dimension of Komi rural archi tecture through the last couple of centuries. It focuses primarily on con temporary developments and the role of the local community in shaping shared ideas of house design. Over the last few decades, building dec oration has developed strongly in the Komi countryside. This dynamic change makes the topic of exterior design intriguing enough for closer examination. The research involves firstly an overview of ethnographic descriptions of the Komi rural architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors of the era published their ethnographic notes in travel reports, popular descriptions of the region, and even in the form of fiction. Secondly, I explore how the professional ethnographers of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries depicted Komi rural dwellings in scholarly literature. The most important contribution of this study is based on my ethnographic field experience from recent decades, as I visited the region annually from 1996 until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of my ethnographic investigations indicate that historically rural Komi have not paid close attention to decorating their houses. However, one must recognise exceptions from this overall development, such as some examples of outstanding house decoration that originated in the 19th century. Contemporary ethnographic evidence confirms that the Komi think through the aesthetic choices when decorating their buildings and intend to remain in concord with modern design ideas circulating inside a community. However, particular space for individual choice and improvisation also remains available. As a result of my analysis, the aesthetic design of Komi rural buildings depends on the economic situation, community standards, and individual selection. These circumstances and influences function in combination, with most dominant among them being the culturally recognised requirements and people’s desire to follow and conform to the community trends. However, when observing the overall mode of contemporary house design among the Komi, one can easily observe that individual preference plays a significant role in architectural decision-making despite the fact that the Komi prefer to explain their design decisions as primarily depending on community preference. Keywords: Komi, village, dwelling, architecture, ethnograph

The eminence as neo-Latin epigrammists of John Owen, Thomas Campion, Sir John Stradling and Charles Fitzgeoffrey has made them essential to any comprehensive understanding of literary satire in the early-seventeenth century.1 Through their use of an international language, they may well have reached a larger readership than most other verse written in Britain at that time. Yet, for the Restoration period, neo-Latin satire seems to be regarded by most present-day scholars as an insignificant pastime of dons and eruditi. University burlesque orations in the 'Terrae filius' tradition were quite widely circulated in manuscript and Richard Braithwaite's Barnabae Itinerarium (London, 1636) still has readers, at least for the engaging English parallel text added in 1638, but Henry Bold's Latine Songs with their English and Poems (London, 1685) was found of so little interest that the LION archive omits the Latin entirely, retaining only the English parallel versions, many of which are not by Bold.2 Insofar as any serious scholarly attention is now given to post-Owen neo-Latin verse satire, it is to the occasional efforts in quantitative metres of poets who were also prominent in the vernacular, and even this interest peters out after 1660. The reason is that no major poet in English during the half-century following Milton, Cowley and Marvell has left a substantial body of Latin verse. Dryden contributed only minor examples and Rochester's one student effort was probably ghosted.3 Anthony Alsop and Vincent Bourne in the eighteenth century were not significant writers in their native language.Yet study of the contents of the manuscript anthologies and personal miscellanies that are our principal sources for Restoration clandestine satire suggests that Latin satirical verse continued to be collected and written not only by dons but by university educated state functionaries, and that its exchange was a significant means by which friendships and alliances were maintained at court, in the law, in the church, and in parliament. Henry Bold, a Chancery official, is himself an example. The personal miscellanies of the courtier Sir William Haward, the Cambridge don John Watson, and the Non-conformist baronet, Sir John Pye, discussed in my English Clandestine Satire 1660-1702, all contain a good representation of neo-Latin verse of a predominantly social nature.4 The more widely circulated examples listed in the first-line index published with that study are mostly epigrams, partly of native and partly foreign origin.5 The most copied foreign items arise from entries written for a competition sponsored by Louis XIV for a distich to be inscribed over the entrance to the Louvre colonnade brought to completion by Perrault in 1671. The winning entry, by George Gordon, fourth Marquis of Huntly and later Duke of Gordon, circulated in the form:Non orbis gentem non urbem gens habet ullaUrbsve domum Dominum vel domus ulla parem.6[The world has no comparable people, no people such a city, no city such a palace, nor any palace such a master.]This soon attracted a motley appendix of other entries, additional poems praising Louis XIV, and Latin and English parodies and responses, which crop up in varying combinations. Marvell and Rochester both contri buted to this corpus. Marvell has left us six entries for the prize, grouped as 'Inscribenda Luparae'.7 Rochester's contribution was an English version of a Latin response to a distich praising the rapidity of Louis' conquests in the campaigns of 1670-72:You Lorraine stole; by fraud you gott Burgundy,And Holland bought by God you'l pay for't one day.8Accumulations of Luparan satire are to be found in Bodleian MS Additional B 106, fols 7v-9r and Bodleian Library, MS Smith 27, pp. 47-48a, and lesser ones in British Library Additional MS 18,220, fols 74r, 91r; Bodleian MS Sancroft 18, p. 4; and Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 69, fol. 57. A second continental current transmitted anti-Papal epigrams originally posted on the statues of Pasquin and Marforio in Rome. …

Rembrandt has been characterized as "the master of the passions of the soul". His painting production has always elicited the viewers' strong emotional responses. Τhese responses raise the question regarding why Rembrandt's work has been singled out as the quintessential example of the expression of emotions both during the 17th century, as well as in recent times. I will try to approach the issue through two different yet interconnected routes. First, I will explore the tools and terms through which the question of the expression of emotions in Rembrandt's oeuvre can be approached. Ancient rhetorical topoi, as well as ideas stemming from Dutch theater writers, drama and art theorists, scholars and art connoisseurs on the rendition of the emotions provide useful points of view. Secondly, I will approach the question by addressing certain stylistic and compositional solutions that Rembrandt suggested, which can be tied to current notions about lifelikeness and the beholder's empathy. Foremost among Rembrandt's aesthetic choices was his handling of light and of paint which accounts for a great deal of unfavorable criticism to his work during the 17th century. I would like to suggest that this handling of light and paint serves as Rembrandt's most important emotive vehicle and furthermore that it introduces us to the idea of wonder and the concept of the sublime in terms of which his depiction of emotions may be understood. Accordingly, I will try to establish an intellectual network in the 17th-century Netherlands for the sublime.

Eco-criticism emerged in the 1990’s and the critics changed their angles of vision and examined the works of art by focusing on the relationship between man and Nature. William Words worth, in particular, became the key icons of eco-critical studies. Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who has beenconsidered as a forerunner of English Romanticism. His views towards Nature and man’s treatment of Nature have supported his position as an important icon of eco-critical studies. His fame lies in the general belief that he has been viewed as a Nature poet who viewed Nature superior to humans. In other words, his views about Nature and his poems seek to heal the long-forgotten wounds of Nature in the hope of reaching unification between man and Nature. With the emergence of Eco-criticism as a new critical approach in the 1990’s, Romantic poetry, in general, and William Wordsworth, in particular, became the icons of eco-critical studies. He was the foremost Romantic poet who cared for the creation of symbiosis between man and Nature. William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who is considered as a forerunner of English Romanticism. His contributions to the repository of English literature are undoubtedly a token of hisgreatness among his contemporaries. His views towards Nature and man’s treatment of Nature have supported his position as an important icon of eco-critical studies. His fame lies in the general belief that he has been viewed as England’s greatest Nature poet who viewed Nature superior to human being whosesurvival is dependent upon Nature. Wordsworth intends to show the value of survival of human being in Nature. Though literary critics talked about the eco-critical concepts in the past, the present paper highlights a recent literary approach to Eco-criticism studies, “the relationship between literature and physicalenvironment” in the poems of William Wordsworth.

AS THE OF THE NAME OF THE AUTHOR PUTS IT IN THE FINAL commentary on a recent group of articles on anonymity, question What matters who's speaking? cannot of course be answered by the author himself (as Barthes reminds us), nor by the writer's own contemporaries (as Foucault reminds us), nor by literary theory (as we ought to remind ourselves). Questions of meaning and value can be answered only provisionally, each time a text is read by close readers like you and me. Still, he maintains, when we read a text that really matters, it will matter who's speaking. (1) We think so too. In our case, who is speaking an English poem and the name behind it and who is translating them into another language, French. Lord[s] of the senses five (The Palace of Art, 1. 180), but especially the sense of sound, Alfred early in life pondered the mystery of his name's sound, and Stephane Mallarme, the elliptical suggestor, found the epitome of the admired English poet's meaning in the reverberation of that sound through posterity. We thus explore, at the center of Symbolist links between the two major poets, the problem of what and who is named, what and who is not, and what is actually suppressed: sonorous naming, then, and refusing to name, in the name of poetry itself. I. Becoming A Name Since the first half of our collaboration will eventually be about authorial achievement of impersonality, about the disappearance of the speaker within the poet's name, (2) let us open, by contrast, with the resonance of a personal anecdote. Many years ago one of us (Joseph) in a graduate seminar on Victorian poetry heard its teacher, G. Robert Stange, make the offhanded judgment that an Edinburgh newspaper article by Mallarme some two weeks after Tennyson's death in 1892, vu d'ici, (that is, Tennyson, seen from France), was the most astute contemporary estimate of the English poet's qualities. Since that time, aside from a brief summary in Marjorie Bowden's study of Tennyson's French reputation and influence, (3) we have never run across any critical allusion to, much less an evidentiary consideration of, that article's putative importance. If such neglect within Anglo-American criticism be indeed the case, (4) perhaps one reason for the silence is the absence recently of an English version of the article. Originally published in French in the National Observer of Edinburgh on October 29, 1892, (5) reprinted in the Revue Blanche of December 1892, and collected in Mallarme's Divagations of 1897 and thereafter in his Oeuvres computes (pp. 527-531; notes 1590), (6) the essay was not translated into English, as Seen from Here, until 2001 by the other collaborator in this essay (Caws), in Mallarme in Prose. (7) Since vu d'ici is now readily available in English for the first time, perhaps this might be the moment to look at it in detail, but to do so within the larger context of Tennyson's impact upon Mallarme and upon the nineteenth-century French poetic tradition more generally. The fact that Tennyson's early work contributed to the evolution of a Symbolist aesthetic has been something of a critical truism for some time now, at least since H. M. McLuhan's Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry. Spelling out that connection, McLuhan's essay was given a wide circulation in John Killham's groundbreaking collection of essays in 1960, Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, (8) that was instrumental to Tennyson's modern critical recuperation. What drew Mallarme, as well as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and other Symbolists to Tennyson, was a melopoetic tendency he attributed specifically to the English tongue, a musicalite inteieure, in Mallarme's phrase, that they prized in Anglo-American lyricism, preeminently in the linked poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Tennyson. For, following what Baudelaire read as a quasi-fraternal [mutual] admiration of the two poets, (9) the French themselves persistently connected with his sound-intoxicated American equivalent and devotee. …

This collection aims to bring out the continuity between major poets in Latin and English, presenting to a wider audience papers previously published only in academic periodicals along with a number of unpublished pieces. It contains essays on Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, which are intended for the reader with a genuine but not necessarily specialised interest in Latin poetry. Corresponding papers on English poets, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift and Tennyson, emphasise the debt owed to their Roman predecessors. Two more general pieces, on the poetry of romantic love and on classical humanism, further underline the continuity between past and present. It is a collection of essays written over a period of time (1996-2000), some previously published, but collected here for the first time with some new pieces

Al-Qur’an was revealed by Arabic which was commonly used in the 7th century. As the spread of Islam to many countries, language transfer of the Qur’an becomes a necessity. In Indonesia, translation began with Tarjuman al-Mustafid in the 17th century. Translation became lively in the 20th century. In addition to translation, poetry translations have also emerged. This study reviews the work of Mohammad Diponegoro, Kabar Wigati dan Kerajaan: Puitisasi Terjemahan Al-Qur’an Juz ke-29 dan ke-30, which was originally published in 1977. This work is in the form of lyric poetry and is classified as a new type of poetry. Diponegoro called his work: the poetic translation of the Qur’an, not the poetic translation as HB Jassin’s work. Mukti Ali called this work as art that was born from the Qur’an. In poetry, words are the key, which connects the reader to the poet’s ideas and intuition. Diponegoro arranges linguistic elements and diction choices like poetry in general. Understanding a poem requires an intensification process. This library research will review the poetry of Diponegoro’s translation of the Qur’an with a historical, literary, hermeneutical-interpretative approach.

The Alliterative Verse of The Fall of Arthur T. S. Sudell (bio) 1.0. Introduction In a letter to Tolkien, written on December 9, 1934, R. W. Chambers declared himself convinced that “the Beowulf meter can be used in modern English” (FA 10). The claim is a bold one, though not without foundation since it was made upon reading Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur (now recently published), a long alliterative poem that adapts the meter of Old English verse to the modern English language. So impressed was Chambers that he exhorted Tolkien to complete the work. Unfortunately, despite the praise of Chambers and the success that Tolkien achieved in adapting alliterative meter to the modern language, the work remained unfinished. Nevertheless, Tolkien’s work represents a milestone in a twentieth-century revival of Old English meter that was later built on by poets such as Seamus Heaney and W. H. Auden. To evaluate Tolkien’s success in this endeavor requires a thorough metrical analysis of his work and an understanding of the tradition from which it emerged. Despite being neither the only nor the longest composition by Tolkien in Old English meter, The Fall of Arthur is the ideal subject for such an analysis as, through its Arthurian subject matter, it constitutes a continuation of a medieval alliterative tradition. Alliterative Old English verse finds its roots in a common Germanic oral tradition existing early in the migration period. With the subsequent divergence of Germanic peoples, this tradition diverged also, resulting in the related, though distinct, alliterative meters belonging to Old Norse, Old English, and Continental Germanic languages. Perhaps the oldest written example of specifically Old English verse is to be found in the engravings on the Franks Casket, a small chest of whalebone dating to the early seventh century. Most, however, of the Old English verse surviving today is preserved in four manuscripts, all of which were made in the 10th century. The dates of composition of these poems are, however, far more broadly spread than the age of their manuscripts might suggest, and there survive early preclassical poems such as Widsith, classical poems of which Beowulf is by far the best known, and late poems such as Durham, with each period displaying its own characteristic features within the larger [End Page 71] field of Old English meter.1 Despite variations in the meter between these periods, the most distinguishing features remained constant, and it can be generally said of Old English verse that it displays a long line that is divided into two half-lines by a strong caesura and that these two halves are linked to each other by the alliteration of stressed elements. This is only a very simplistic description of the meter, and theories regarding the correct way to scan Old English verse have been many and various; but the most generally accepted method of scanning Old English meter remains that of Eduard Sievers. Sievers proposed that all half-lines could be described as one of five verse types, which are as follows, with Old English examples from Beowulf and modern English examples by Tolkien from “On Translating Beowulf ” (M&C 62). All stress marks are my own: (As can be seen in the preceding example, a dip may consist of more than one unstressed syllable.) [End Page 72] The first lift of each half-line is generally obliged to participate in alliteration, and the second lift of the a-verse may participate while the second lift of the b-verse may not. Tolkien, then, favored the scansion of Old English verse according to Sievers’s five types, as can be seen from the preceding quoted examples, and consequently applied this system to his creation of modern English verse in the alliterative meter. It therefore seems logical also to apply the system to our analysis of The Fall of Arthur. Any detailed study of the meter of The Fall of Arthur requires first an awareness of post-Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in order to place the work in context. There have been two major periods of alliterative revival in the past millennium. The first of these is the postconquest revival, and the second is...