English Metrical Research Articles

ОСОБЕННОСТИ УПОТРЕБЛЕНИЯ СТИЛИСТИЧЕСКИХ ПРИЕМОВ В ДРЕВНЕАНГЛИЙСКОЙ ПОЭЗИИ НА ОСНОВЕ ДРЕВНЕАНГЛИЙСКОГО ПИСЬМЕННОГО ПОЭТИЧЕСКОГО ПАМЯТНИКА «БЕОВУЛЬФ»

Statement of the problem. Learning the canons of the Old German art of poetry is the main instrument for forming the skills of poetic syllable as a source of new cultural information for the specialists in the field of the history of the Old English language and German Philology in general. The object for the analysis is the mythological praising epos with its strictly limited lexical models and metric rules. The Old English metrics is considered as a result of a linguistic experiment absolutizing the principal of conditional stylistic figures as language signs. Extraordinary stylistic devices such as hending, scothending, aldahending, and kenning present a great interest for understanding the opportunities in the old English poetry and demand a thorough textual analysis. The purpose of this article is to consider the canons of the old English poetry in the aspect of comparative historical language study for overcoming intercultural dissonance in the cognitive perception of the epos by a modern reader. The methodology of study is based on comprising the materials of the old English epos using the comparative historical method and the method of the purposeful search of examples of stylistic devices which are not typical for present day poetry. The method of their etymological analysis corrects the notion of the poetic form used in the literary creation. Research results. The textual material of the old English epos researched by the authors leads to the conclusion that a poetic form is shown in the diachronic interaction of a poetic word and old English culture. Conclusion. The methodology of the study allowed pointing out the main directions of using metric rules on the phonetic level and lexical patterns on the level of language usage. The research of extraordinary stylistic devices contributes to the development of methods for studying old English and old German poetry in general.

The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation ed. by Tamara Atkin, and Francis Leneghan

Reviewed by: The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation ed. by Tamara Atkin, and Francis Leneghan Emma Knowles Atkin, Tamara, and Francis Leneghan, eds, The Psalms and Medieval English Literature: From the Conversion to the Reformation, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. xviii, 344; 18 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US $99.00, £60.00; ISBN 9781843844358. In his introduction to this valuable collection of thirteen essays Francis Leneghan identifies the psalter as 'the most highly prized, frequently copied and widely used of all books of the Bible' (p. 1) for medieval Christians. Throughout the volume its foundational role in intellectual culture is emphasized as contributors examine how memorization of and repeated exposure to the Psalms impacted literature. This, alongside a recurrent interest in the varieties of voice present in the Psalms, creates an ongoing conversation which is one of the volume's great successes. A thematic structure assists the creation of connections between essays. This usefully destabilizes period boundaries and establishes links between [End Page 180] vernacular engagements with the psalter across the volume's roughly 800-year scope (c. 700–c. 1500). In making these associations it offers an important and necessary contribution to the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the Psalms by drawing together expert contributors from different periods and placing their work in dialogue. Leneghan's useful introductory essay traces the reception of Psalm 50.1–3 from the Vespasian Psalter to Thomas Brampton's fifteenth-century paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms, and highlights the constancies and differences present in approaches to the psalter over time. Opening the 'Translation' section, Jane Roberts's chapter examines the fifteen psalters with a vernacular gloss that survive from Anglo-Saxon England. She focuses on the relationship between gloss and manuscript, distinguishing between 'opportunistic' glosses at one end of the scale and 'integral' at the other (p. 40). Concentrating on one of the psalters Roberts discusses, Mark Faulkner argues persuasively that an archaic exemplar for the idiosyncratic Old English gloss found in the twelfth-century Eadwine Psalter was deliberately chosen. Annie Sutherland promotes the significance of the fourteenth-century Prose Psalter in her chapter. She demonstrates that the attitude to translation lying behind it, in which it 'translates not what the Psalter says but what the Psalter means' (p. 126), offers a different rhetorical approach to that found in more imitative translations. The consistent revision of vocabulary between the Earlier and Later Versions of the Psalms in the Wycliffite Bible leads Elizabeth Solopova to argue that these were texts created with different translation strategies in mind. She suggests that the revisions were part of an attempt to develop a 'standard terminology for theological and devotional discourse' (p. 145). The 'Translation' section ends with Katherine Zieman's chapter on Richard Rolle's English Psalter which carefully considers the stages of revision this text went through and the motivations that lay behind these. The 'Adaptation' section opens with Leneghan's compelling reading of the ornamental alliteration in the 'little admired' (p. 179) Old English Metrical Psalms. He argues, in perhaps the standout essay of the volume, that this created a musicality in the translation which aided memorization. Daniel Anlezark follows this with a discussion of the treatment of the Psalms in what he re-names the Old English Office (formerly the Old English Benedictine Office) and examines what this suggests about prayer in the Anglo-Saxon church. M. J. Toswell concludes a trio of chapters on Old English by demonstrating the ways in which the deep understanding of the Psalms in the period is reflected in syntactic and rhetorical parallels in a variety of Old English poetic genres. Completing the section Mike Rodman Jones demonstrates how certain disputational Psalms were deployed at 'distinct and specific textual moments' (p. 252) in Middle English alliterative poetry. The volume concludes with a section on 'Voice'. Lynn Staley opens this with an examination of the relationship between Richard Maidstone's Penitential Psalms and his Concordia that places them in their late fourteenth-century [End Page 181] political context. Vincent Gillespie surveys a series of classical and medieval sources to consider the connections between poetic theory and the interpretation...

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius Andrew Galloway ian cornelius, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. x, 219. isbn: 1–10715–410–3. $99. Ian Cornelius offers the ‘pursuit’ of a meter that, he claims, we can no longer properly hear, so completely did its elusive and complicated rules vanish beneath the influence of poetry driven by the patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables qua syllables, which had become (and remain) the only familiar building blocks of English meter. By the late sixteenth century, the venerable alliterative tradition had entirely dissolved into impersonations and reinterpretations, as if alliterative verse were merely an ornamentally distinct variety of iambic pentameter or anapests (Spenser’s ‘Some gan to gape for greedie gouernaunce’ or his ‘lovers of lordship and troublers of states’). Such an approach to metrical history may remind us of Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Not Knowing Greek,’ where ‘not knowing’ refers not to Woolf’s personal exile from the privileged world of male scholars but an insistence that neither she nor the scholars can actually capture a lost poetics, whose later echoes and reinterpretations pose as much hindrance as help. ‘We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we now do in English,’ Woolf observes—though she doesn’t hesitate to describe some features she discerns as that poetics’ original elements. Cornelius’ compressed and meticulous pursuit is equally cautious but ultimately extraordinarily ambitious: in finely argued chapters, it seeks to recover comprehensive rules of this terminally medieval meter, whose often dramatically changing phases are patchily preserved through half a millennium. Cornelius’ overarching point is not just that we mishear, but also that the meter itself changed by reinterpretations— mishearings—of its own traditions, some drastic. This adopts and builds on Geoffrey Russom’s important proposals for how late-medieval alliterative meter might be explained as ‘normalizing’ certain exceptional elements in Old English meter, as the language developed into a fundamentally different form; Cornelius manages the contiguous stages of this through the ‘new paradigm’ formulated by Nicolay Yakovlev in his (unpublished) 2008 dissertation, already applied by a few other scholars (notably Cornelius’ own student, Eric Weiskott). For all of his scholarly modesty, Cornelius is more Yakovlevian than Yakovlev: he intently tests and takes further the view that Old English metrics began not from ‘accentual’ principles but ‘morphological’ ones—that is, not syllable counts but classes of words that take or resist stress, with specific options for metrical resolution and stretches of unstressed syllables, a legacy shaping post-Conquest and later alliterative meter as it accommodated, with gradually [End Page 76] expanding consequences, the growing number of small function words required by English’s shift to an analytic language. This grants metrics itself a central role in metrical history, positing underlying poetic continuities in spite of the drastic changes and major gaps in the documented data. Cornelius shows both an unwavering commitment to this assumption and a vigorous interest in the exceptions and variations, while frequently chipping away at the long scholarly history that has led both toward and away from the claims Cornelius endorses. Lawman’s Brut remains, as usual, a hard case. One could choose almost any line from The Brut to retest and debate Cornelius’ multiple explanations for what amounts to that poet’s creative destruction of earlier alliterative verse along with its germination of features that would dominate later. But the alternatives to Cornelius’ view of a continuous ‘tradition’ briefly exposed by The Brut would be either viewing the looser prose rhythms of Ælfrician homily as bridging the general gap in written alliterative verse from 900 to 1350, leaving later alliterative verse a self-created thing (a view Cornelius demolishes), or—Russom’s easier stratagem—setting Lawman and his peculiarities aside, and conjecturing widespread orally sustained poetry marching steadily from the meter of Beowulf to that of William of Palerne. Like Yakovlev and Weiskott, Cornelius goes through not around Lawman, giving even more attention than either of those to the elements in The Brut that violate the norms of both Old and later Middle English alliterative...

Bliss’s Rule and Old English Metrics

Old English poetry is characterized by its varying and unpredictable number of syllables per verse. In Beowulf,1 for example, tetrasyllabic verses such as l. 42a, on flōdes ǣht, are very frequent, ...

The Ear, the Foot, the Gut: The Metaphoric Body of the Timer Tradition of Old English Metrics

The Ear, the Foot, the Gut:The Metaphoric Body of the Timer Tradition of Old English Metrics David O'Neil Though at first glance an unlikely topic for the current issue, metrical theory is deeply indebted to embodied experience. Poetic meter has often been described in terms of corporeal cadences such as the pulse, the breath, and the step, and technical terms such as arsis and thesis are based in corporeal metaphor. As a harnessing of our speech's inherent prosody, meter may even be felt to express the internal rhythms of our bodies, which, like the celestial bodies, are bound in regularly recurring natural cycles. This is not to say that metered language must be regular at every level of description, but rhythm implies regularity at some level. For example, while a line of ancient Greek dactylic hexameter may admit sixty-four unique sequences of twelve to seventeen heavy and light syllables, rhythmic performance may be inferred from its regular quantitative pattern of six tetramoraic feet. When a meter is described in such a way that it seems to lack any such regularity, we may perceive the apparent absence of rhythm as uncomfortably disembodied. This has sometimes been the case for students of the Anglo-Saxon alliterative tradition, who have identified over a hundred metrical subtypes in Beowulf alone,1 but no metrical generalization (or at least one that has been agreed on) that might provide a basis for rhythmic performance. Some degree of irregularity is apparent in syllable count, mora count, the position and number of syllables of primary and secondary stress, the position and number of unstressed syllables, and the occurrence of stress clash.2 While stress-based typologies such as Eduard Sievers's attain a kind of regularity, they generalize only halfway, leaving the impression that the meter is based not on a single system, but on a collection of systems that each features its own distinct prosodic contour.3 Such irregularities appear even greater when one considers how frequently syllables must be marked extrametrical due to anacrusis and resolution, operations which Chris Golston succinctly describes as [End Page 65] accommodations in which syllables are "split apart, joined together, or ignored,"4 and which Ian Cornelius includes among the "three salient problems" or "conceptual embarrassments" of stress-based theories.5 Even Geoffrey Russom's insight that the alliterative half-line is prosodically the equivalent of two OE words does not eliminate the appearance of unusual metrical complexity.6 Word-feet range in length from two to six syllables, are subject to strict combinatorial rules, and (like OE words) are structured in varied concatenations of heavy and light syllables at three distinct stress levels. The extent of this complexity is exceptional and contravenes what Golston calls the "basic tendency in language and meter to have one set of feet" ("Old English Feet," p. 112). The tolerance (or intolerance) of individual metrists for rhythmic irregularity accounts for important historic divisions in the field—most notably between the "stressers" and the "timers." The stressers accept metrical diversity as a simple fact that should be cataloged rather than regularized, while the timers prioritize rhythmic reconstruction as the fundamental objective of metrical theorization. As I will demonstrate in this essay, timer theory was an explicit reaction against the stressers' seeming lack of concern for rhythm, as inferred from analytic typologies that in their most extreme form might fairly be described as a kind of metrical "stamp collecting."7 Cornelius has recently interrogated stresser theories of OE meter, coining the term "the accentual paradigm" to describe the focus on stress that has predominated since the mid-nineteenth century.8 This essay complements that work, presenting a rhetorical analysis of the argumentation of the timers. In keeping with the theme of this issue, I am particularly interested in appeals to the body that function as a counter to the essentially cognitive (or "disembodied") analyses of the stressers. These appeals support claims that traditional Anglo-Saxon verse was musical ("the ear"), timed in isochronic units ("the foot"), and intuitive ("the gut"). In the conclusion, I consider a broader implication for the rift between the stressers and the timers, arguing that the persistent lack of...

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius

Reviewed by: Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter by Ian Cornelius Jordan Zweck Ian Cornelius. Reconstructing Alliterative Verse: The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 234. $99.99. Recent years have seen a flourishing of publications on the subject of medieval English metrics. The Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature series alone has produced, along with Ian Cornelius's Reconstructing Alliterative Verse, books by Geoffrey Russom (2017) and Eric Weiskott (2016) on medieval English alliterative poetry. Like these books, Reconstructing Alliterative Verse operates across a long temporal scale, from the seventh through sixteenth centuries, with occasional forays into comparisons with late antique Latin poetry. And like Weiskott and Russom, Cornelius rejects the idea of the so-called "Alliterative Revival" of the fourteenth century, arguing for a continuous tradition of alliterative meter spanning the English Middle Ages, despite the lack of written evidence of such poetry composed c. 1250–c. 1350. The book asks how alliterative meter arose; how it developed over time; and, finally, why it fell out of favor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In support of its claims, the book also offers a radical revision of how we theorize alliterative meter. Building on the 2008 dissertation of Nikolay Yakovlev, Cornelius describes a system of Old English alliterative meter constructed not around four stressed syllables per line (as in the Sievers five-type system), but rather around four metrical "positions" per line, which are filled by morphemes. Morphological units are not categorized as stressed and unstressed, but rather "strong" or "weak," depending on the part of speech to which they belong and their position in the line. In Cornelius's example, Beowulf, 54a—"leof leodcyning"—would be scanned according to Yakovlev's morphological system as SSSS, where "S" indicates a strong and "x" a weak position. In more traditional scansion, informed by phonological stress patterns, we would expect leodcyning to have primary stress on leod- and secondary stress on -cyn-, with the suffix -ing unstressed. Yakovlev's theory does away with the distinction between primary and secondary stress in polysyllabic Old English words; positions are strong or not, with no gradations between them. Half lines have a minimum of two strong positions but may have as many as four strong positions, and in some metrical types the number of morphemes in some weak positons can or must be more than one. Yakovlev's system results in eight possible types of meter (61). Stress (or [End Page 458] accent) remains possible in Old English verse (and existed phonologically in the spoken language), but is not the primary determiner of meter. Much of the book's argument about both Old English and Middle English meter relies on the reader accepting Yakovlev's ideas, as presented and retested by Cornelius. Not all will. Yakovlev's theory is gaining interest and attention among metrists—Weiskott and Russom also refer to his work, and it has been reviewed by Thomas Cable—but it is not necessarily widely accepted among early medievalists. Early English medievalists who study vernacular poetry but do not identify as metrists may be surprised to learn of its existence. Reconstructing Alliterative Verse is divided into an introduction, five chapters, and a brief epilogue on Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1578). Chapter 1 argues that even if an ars poetica for medieval English had survived, we would still need to turn to the poetry itself to recover a full understanding of alliterative verse. Not only does practice always deviate from theorized norms, but also the evidence we have for poetic theory from earlier Latin sources and from medieval Iceland demonstrates that medieval literary theory would not have had the vocabulary to address poetic form sufficiently. This is not a critique of medieval thinkers, but an acknowledgment that poetry is very difficult to write about. As Cornelius notes, "[t]he theorists are still playing catch-up today" (25). Moreover, medieval people did not inherit a useful set of terminology from Latin (or Greek) for alliteration, because alliteration would have functioned differently in English than in Latin and because many authors of Latin treatises either ignored alliteration or saw it as hopelessly old-fashioned. One...

The Ireland Prophecy: Text and Metrical Context

This essay introduces The Ireland Prophecy , a late fifteenth-century English alliterative poem extant in six manuscripts. The poem survives in three textual versions of different lengths, indicating rolling revision by many hands over a decade or more. It belongs to two written traditions: British political prophecy as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetie Merlini , and English alliterative verse. This essay discusses the manuscripts and textual history of The Ireland Prophecy , offers a first critical text, analyzes the poem’s meter in light of recent progress in Middle English alliterative metrics, and positions the poem as a case study in the cultural meaning of alliterative verse after 1450. The essay proposes to show how meter, literary history, and literary culture intersect and illuminate one another in and through a particular poetic composition.

Hateful Hills and Joyful Dread: Emotive “Filler Words” in the Old English Metrical Psalms

ABSTRACTThe poet-translator of the Old English Metrical Psalms is widely censured for (among other things) his allegedly mechanical use of filler-words to complete the metre in his lines. This article argues for a more positive purpose for many of these additions, especially those drawn from the semantic field of emotion. Additions to the poet's Latin source can function to reinforce for his Anglo-Saxon audience the theological sense of the psalms he translates, to add a degree of exegesis, and even (at times) to create a moment of poetic intensity. Such possibilities do not entirely acquit the poet of the charge of pedestrian verse production, but they do suggest that he has not always been given enough credit for his achievements. Within the context of his general approach to translation—which is sometimes thoughtful and always orthodox—this poet’s deployment of so-called filler words may frequently be defended as apt and occasionally as successful in its ambition.

Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Language. Donald S. Hair. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+301.

<i>Fresh Strange Music: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Language</i>. Donald S. Hair. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+301.

Kazutomo Karasawa, ed. and trans., The Old English Metrical Calendar (“Menologium”). (Anglo-Saxon Texts 12.) Cambridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Paper. Pp. xvi, 228. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84384-409-9.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsKazutomo Karasawa, ed. and trans., The Old English Metrical Calendar (“Menologium”). (Anglo-Saxon Texts 12.) Cambridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2015. Paper. Pp. xvi, 228. $99. ISBN: 978-1-84384-409-9.Francis LeneghanFrancis LeneghanUniversity of Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 91, Number 4October 2016 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/687914 Views: 43Total views on this site Copyright 2016 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

“The Infinite within the Finite”: Victorian Prosody and Orthodox Theories of Mind

Coventry Patmore, early in his Essay on English Metrical Law (1857), reaches for a telling metaphor to explain his prosodic theory: Art ... must have a body as well as a soul, he writes, the higher and purer the spiritual, the more powerful and unmistakable should be the corporeal element;--in other words, the more vigorous and various the life, the more stringent and elaborate must be the law, by obedience to which life expresses itself. (1) Versification, or the poet's peculiar mode of expression, stands in this figure as the body that gives form to the ideas, or the matter, of verse (Essay, p. 72). Yet in the pages that follow, Patmore's articulation of the distinction between rhythm and meter--a distinction that several critics have suggested was the first to describe--seems subtly to shift the tenor of this metaphor. (2) Meter, what calls the ictus or time-beater of verse, comes to sound very much like the immaterial soul: for Patmore, after it no material and external existence at all, but is instead a mental structure by which the corporealized rhythms of poetry may be measured. That is, meter in Patmore's essay becomes the inaudible and immaterial law that orders the rhythmically manifested life of poetry, or its actual words and sounds. But while commentators have often credited the Essay on English Metrical Law with giving rise to the New Prosody, Patmore's argument wasn't necessarily new: as T. S. Omond put it in 1921, Patmore voiced ideas that were in the air, and was sometimes less original than he fancied. (3) If anything, Patmore's essay constituted a defense of orthodoxy against the metrical experiments of those poets grouped by their critics into the Spasmodic School, as Jason R. Rudy has argued. (4) Patmore's essay has received considerable attention in recent years, but no one has yet adequately discussed the way that Patmore's prosodic conservatism is founded on another sort of orthodoxy, itself besieged in the middle of the nineteenth century: the dualist psychology that was under fire in the 1850s from new theories of mind. (5) Critics have instead been most interested in the bodily effects of poetry on its readers, in the connections between poetic rhythm and the rhythms of daily life; most inquiries into the links between prosody and Victorian mental science have connected midcentury physiological with new physicalist theories of mind. (6) But such psychophysiology was not, in the 1850s, the most common way in which the Victorians conceived of mental life. On the contrary, most midcentury psychologies still figured the mind as both immaterial and immortal, insistent that our mental and spiritual beings--the two entities are largely indistinguishable in such theories--would ultimately live on past the dissolution of the body. (7) This essay attempts to unpack this forgotten side of the connection between midcentury metrics and the field of mental science in two ways: by shifting attention from psychophysiology to the soul-based psychology that remained dominant at midcentury, and by turning from the poetic rhythms that have fascinated critics to the invisible and inaudible meters that, for many Victorians, gave those rhythms meaning. I focus in particular on a poet whose work always struck his contemporaries as deeply unorthodox: Robert Browning. Browning's Men and Women (1855) was published in the same year as two key psychophysiological works that powerfully challenged psychological orthodoxy; the collection also appeared in the wake of the Spasmodic controversy that made especially pressing the connections between prosody and psychology. As had become routine for Browning by the 1850s, reviewers complained about the volumes' obscure rhythms, finding in them echoes of the excesses of the Spasmodics. But I contend that Men and Women nevertheless represents a conservative response both to materialist science and to poetics, a response that in many ways anticipates (and illuminates the stakes of) the poetics articulated in Patmore's Essay. …

The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics

Research Article| October 01 2015 The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics Ian Cornelius Ian Cornelius Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (2015) 114 (4): 459–481. https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.114.4.0459 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ian Cornelius; The Accentual Paradigm in Early English Metrics. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 1 October 2015; 114 (4): 459–481. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jenglgermphil.114.4.0459 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressThe Journal of English and Germanic Philology Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Dating of Beowulf: a reassessment

This book will be a milestone, and deserves to be widely read. The early Beowulf that overwhelmingly emerges here asks hard questions, and the same strictly defined measures of metre, spelling, onomastics, semantics, genealogy, and historicity all cry out to be tested further and applied more broadly to the whole corpus of Old English verse. Andy Orchard, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford. The dating of Beowulf has been a central question in Anglo-Saxon studies for the past two centuries, since it affects not only the interpretation of Beowulf, but also the trajectory of early English literary history. By exploring evidence for the poem's date of composition, the essays in this volume contribute to a wide range of pertinent fields, including historical linguistics, Old English metrics, onomastics, and textual criticism. Many aspects of Anglo-Saxon literary culture are likewise examined, as contributors gauge the chronological significance of the monsters, heroes, history, and theology brought together in Beowulf. Discussions of methodology and the history of the discipline also figure prominently in this collection. Overall, the dating of Beowulf here provides a productive framework for evaluating evidence and drawing informed conclusions about its chronological significance. These conclusions enhance our appreciation of Beowulf and improve our understanding of the poem's place in literary history. Leonard Neidorf is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Contributors: Frederick M. Biggs, Thomas A. Bredehoft, George Clark, Dennis Cronan, Michael D.C. Drout, Allen J. Frantzen, R.D. Fulk, Megan E. Hartman, Joseph Harris, Thomas D. Hill, Leonard Neidorf, Rafael J. Pascual, Tom Shippey.

Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. Beth Quitslund. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x+322.

<i>Beth Quitslund</i>, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603<i>The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603</i>. Beth Quitslund. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. x+322.

Book Review: The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603

Book Review: The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603

Patmore, Hopkins, and the Problem of the English Metrical Law

Patmore, Hopkins, and the Problem of the English Metrical Law Joshua King Hopkins Quarterly, 38.1-2, published by agreement of the editors in conjunction with Victorian Poetry, 49, no.2, as sharing the common theme, “Prosody.” "I believe that I am now, for the first time, stating" the "great general law" of meter, Coventry Patmore proclaims in his influential "Essay on English Metrical Law," first published in 1857.1 "My Dear Mr. Patmore," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in 1887, "I believe that I can now set metre and music both of them on a scientific footing which will be final like the law of gravitation."2 Patmore and Hopkins adopt the excited tone that a writer today would use after fully unraveling the human genome. In the three decades between Patmore's "Essay" and Hopkins's letter, many Victorians joined in the hunt for the English metrical law: books and articles published on meter twice doubled in number, first in the 1860s, then again in the 1880s.3 Called the "New Prosody" by later scholars and early contributors,4 this take-off in prosody criticism was characterized by a search after the "primary laws of metrical expression" ("Essay," 6). Yet in their search, Hopkins and Patmore confronted the paradox that Yopie Prins has shown other Victorians sensed: meter was actually an "abstraction, a graphic pattern" on the page, never realized in a human voice.5 Building off Prins's insight, I argue that both men faced the ghostliness of metrical law precisely because they did not wish meter to transmit their personal voices and feelings. Both believed that poets' and readers' adherence to metrical law corrected subjectivism, activating transpersonal emotional structures in speech that confirmed the divine design of reality. The dilemma each encountered was not failure to revive his own voice in a reader's, but the possibility that his metrical law was like the canal system Percival Lowell would soon "discover" on Mars—a self-delusion. Three emphases, potentially contradictory, emerged in the New Prosody's quest for metrical laws. First was the widespread conviction that rhythmic variations upon a metrical pattern convey fundamental emotions from poets to readers. George Brimley [End Page 31] exemplifies this perspective in an 1855 article: "the various forms of metre … are all originally expressive … of emotion," so that modulations of rhythm provide "a medium through which the same heat of emotion" in the poet "is kindled in the reader."6 Patmore, who was probably influenced by Brimley, makes a similar statement in the "Essay," claiming that every "change" to an expected metrical pattern "is as real a mode of expressing emotion as words themselves are of expressing thoughts" ("Essay," 38).7 Second was the belief of many new prosodists that "[v]erse … is only verse on the condition of right reading" ("Essay," 11). The laws of meter, which made possible the rhythmic communication of emotions, were discernible only in a skilled vocal performance. Third, many late-Victorian prosodists followed E.S. Dallas and Patmore in describing metrical beats and rhythmic patterns as mental projections.8 Patmore's formulation of the idea was most influential: the beat of verse "for the most part, has no material and external existence at all, but has its place in the mind, which craves measure in everything" ("Essay," 15).9 Patmore and Hopkins diverged widely in their attempts to reconcile the trifold emphasis of New Prosody on innately affective rhythm, exacting vocal performance, and mentally projected meter. Yet Patmore agreed with Hopkins "that where there is much freedom of motion the laws which limit it should be strict" (LIII, 335). In his 1857 "Essay," Patmore claims that poets must strictly follow metrical laws, only violating these restraints for an easily discerned "emotional motive" ("Essay," 22). By the time Patmore wrote the "Essay," he had already promoted this view of lawful metrical liberty in print. Only when constrained by "the shackles" of meter, Patmore asserts in an 1850 discussion of Tennyson's In Memoriam in the North British Review, will the rhythms of emotional expression achieve their greatest intensity, purity, and communicability.10 In this review of In Memoriam, Patmore indicates what he thinks is at stake...

Materializing Meter: Physiology, Psychology, Prosody

A discernible strain of idealism runs through mid-Victorian prosody. In he 1850s, for instance, both E. S. Dallas and Coventry Patmore, whose treatises on versification would go on to influence later generations of metrists, emphasized the nature of the metrical modulus and its difference from, as well as its potential for interaction with, the real (e.g., voiced) rhythms of language. (1) In his 1852 book Poetics, Dallas conceives of meter as a mental phenomenon: it intended to produce pleasure in the reader's mind. (2) Patmore's 1857 Essay on English Metrical Law, first published in the North British Review, appears to take even more idealist position, setting out a decorporealized prosody founded upon ictus. This all-important time-beater of verse, claims Patmore, no material and external existence at all, but has its place in the mind, which craves measure in everything, and, wherever the idea of a measure uncontradicted, delights in it with imaginary 'beat. (3) Such mentalizing of as Adela Pinch has termed it, strives to divorce prosody from the body and abstract it. Meter becomes less a matter of what you actually hear or say aloud and more of an abstract idea in your against which you measure how the line would actually be spoken it were spoken. (4) What material existence meter has, argues Yopie Prins, readers encounter primarily in the act of marking verse on the page, as in the exercise of scanning. (5) Pointing to these idealist assertions about meter, scholars such as Dennis Taylor and more recently Pinch have plotted a move toward abstraction--what Taylor has labeled % growing consensus about the abstract nature of metrical form--in prosody of the second half of the nineteenth century. (6) What these readings underestimate, however, the materialist imperative that underlies not only the apparently idealist theories of Dallas and Patmore themselves but also late-nineteenth-century more generally. As Kirstie Blair and Jason R. Rudy have shown in two recent books, the materialities of human physiology and telegraphic communication technologies form important context for mid-century thinking about the nature of meter. (7) Patmore's insistence on meter's immateriality, as Rudy demonstrates in Electric Meters (2009), in part a response to the Spasmodic poets' celebration of the 'physical principles of sound' (p. 115). Dallas's meter, though nominally mental, nonetheless construed (by Dallas himself) as a vigorous roundelay brought about by centrifugal and centripetal forces (p. 171). While they are in the first place confined to one's head, the metrical acrobatics he theorizes may very well go on to inspire movement in the body: if [the reader's] thoughts are very livelily engaged, he will beat time with his fingers or with his feet (Dallas, p. 159). Fundamentally related to physical experience (such as the pulse), Dallas's meter, as Blair outlines in Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (2006), is connected to body as well as mind (p. 85). The complex interplay between metrical abstraction and embodiment can, in fact, be seen as central to much verse theory of the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it this dialectic--between the metrical modulus and the material properties of corporeal, voiced rhythms--that will be my focus here. Around the time that Dallas and Patmore were making their important contributions to Victorian metrics, developments were underway in the comparatively new sciences of physiology and psychology that would impact directly on late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century prosody. The turn toward experimental methodologies, in conjunction with pioneering work on measurement and recording technologies, played a significant role in the elaboration of empirical metrics that placed considerable emphasis on the vocal mechanism and the body; it thus part of the pervasive physiological poetics that Rudy and Blair have begun to historicize. …

Poetic Data and the News from Poems: A For Better for Verse Memoir

Poetic Data and the News from Poems:A For Better for Verse Memoir Herbert F. Tucker (bio) At first, it was all about the homework. In a course introducing poetry to students who had little if any disciplined exposure to English metrics, we would spend a Thursday going over the nuts and bolts of scansion. I would set a passage from Keats or Dickinson or Herrick for them to triple-space, scan, and submit at our next meeting the following Tuesday. I would mark up the submissions with grim despatch for return on Thursday, when we would have the best-humored time we could going over a range of problems the exercise had disclosed. At the top of the range were the subtleties of verbal and vocal interpretation that scansion underscores and that prosodic vocabulary makes efficiently available for analytic consideration and debate—in short, the matter I actually wanted the course to engage. But teaching at that level would nearly always mean teaching less engaging things for a while first. We had to bushwhack our way up to the top, over awkwardnesses of the sort any new learner of an unfamiliar skill has to get past: how to work a trochaic or anapestic substitution, or balance the books with spondee-pyrrhic pairing—ropes that one learns to handle by practice.1 Practice took the form of group work in class on given poems, and of the aforementioned homework; and right there was the rub. The lapse of a week between receiving an assignment and getting it back corrected, a long span by any pedagogical measure, can be aeonically long within the embattled field of undergraduate attention. For all but the most gifted or eager learners, the procedures of scansion were so non-intuitive, and the associated prosodical vocabulary so arcane, that the return of an assignment often found my charges discouragingly close to the point where they had been when the assignment was made to begin with. The time lag was killing us. So it had gone with me, three decades more or less, plugging away with indifferent results at the transmission of skills that I persisted in teaching because even my mediocre rate of success fed cherished interlocking convictions: [End Page 267] that scansion takes a reader further than any comparable practice can into the formal life of metered verse; and that the very clunkiness of scansion's apparatus bids fairest to free students of the complementary fetters they tend to drag across the classroom threshold: on one hand the despotic grip of school-bred hermeneutic expectation (libido interpretandi, as Augustine should have called what Whitman did call the lust to "get at the meaning of poems"),2 and on the other hand the no-account slumber of a generalized expectation about verbal beauty that, having mumbled something about "sing-song" or "flow," lapses into aphasia. Scansion's wake-up call to the educable ear, its analytic mapping of structure and proportion, and its invitation to reconnect these formal first-derivative digital abstractions to the analog rhythms of breath and pulse, put students' birthright of what Blake called the "improvement of sensual enjoyment" back within intellectual reach.3 So I believe; so I believed; so I slogged on. I doubt the word "digital" would have come so pat into those last sentences had not the practical frustration of a pedagogical conviction driven me a couple of years ago into the arms of Charles Babbage & Co. Enlightened souls within my university's computational wing had for some time practiced affirmative action among the humanities faculty, tempting us with offers of course relief and funded technical support to submit proposals for digital projects with an application to teaching. I had applauded this summons, but only from the sidelines. Then one day it occurred to me, having drummed out pentameters with digits left and right on more desktops than I could remember, that poets with good reason called versification "numbers," that meter was a counting device of a quite mechanical sort, and indeed that computation and prosody rode alike on a binary system with a remarkable capacity to extract the most complex functions from a sequence of the simplest elements: ones...

Beth Quitslund. The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. Reprint. x + 322 pp. index. append. tbls. bibl. $114.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6326–3.

Beth Quitslund. The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2008. Reprint. x + 322 pp. index. append. tbls. bibl. $114.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–6326–3.

The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. By Beth Quisland. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. x + 329 pp. $114.95 cloth.

The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter, 1547–1603. By Beth Quisland. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. x + 329 pp. $114.95 cloth.