Meter In Poetry Research Articles

On the Difference between Rhythm and Meter in Poetry: Beowulf as a Case in Point

On the Difference between Rhythm and Meter in Poetry: <i>Beowulf</i> as a Case in Point

Unexplored tone of human emotions: Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens

This paper aims to analyze the approach that went through the pioneers of narrative poets, Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. They lived in an era of great poets who advocated for rhyme, rhythm and meter in poetry. We shall see how narrative poems, despite being described as inappropriate and absurd, still attracted their creativity and motivated them to sail against the wind. I have analyzed their poems not only on the criteria of words or the underlying emotions but also on the basis of grammar, sentence structure, syntax and punctuation. We come to realize that it's the essence and soul of the language that causes great minds like Whitman and Stevens to explore the unfathomable aspects of human existence.

Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle (2008). Meter in poetry: a new theory (with a chapter on Southern Romance meters by Carlos Piera). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. x+297.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Meter in poetry: A new theory (review)

Reviewed by: Meter in poetry: A new theory Paul Kiparsky Meter in poetry: A new theory. By Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 312. ISBN 0521713250. $45. The publication of this joint book by the founder of generative metrics and a distinguished literary linguist is a major event.1 Fabb and Halle take a fresh look at much familiar material, and introduce an eye-opening collection of metrical systems from world literature into the theoretical discourse. The complex analyses are clearly presented, and illustrated with detailed derivations. A guest chapter by Carlos Piera offers an insightful survey of Southern Romance metrics. Like almost all versions of generative metrics, F&H adopt the three-way distinction between what Roman Jakobson called verse design, verse instance, and delivery instance.2 F&H’s theory maps abstract grid patterns onto the linguistically determined properties of texts. The mapping imposes constraints on texts, which define their metrical form. In that sense, it is a kind of template-matching theory. Recitation may or may not reflect meter, according to conventional stylized norms, but the meter of a text itself is invariant, however it is pronounced or sung. Where F&H differ from everyone else is in denying the centrality of rhythm in meter, and characterizing the abstract templates and their relationship to the text by a combination of constraints and processes modeled on Morris Halle/William Idsardi-style metrical phonology. F&H say that lineation and length restrictions are the primary properties of verse, and rhythm is epiphenomenal, ‘a property of the way a sequence of words is read or performed’ (242). This seems inconsistent with their use of bracketed grids to characterize metrical patterns and stress, for bracketed grids represent—indeed are designed to represent—rhythm as periodic alternation of prominence at a hierarchy of levels. F&H’s point is probably that metrical rhythm and textual rhythm are not necessarily articulated in recitation, since meters constrain texts, not performance. [End Page 923] The thesis of the primacy of lineation leads F&H to suggest that rhythm arises as a by-product of counting syllables to fix the length of lines. Traditional doctrine conversely derives lineation and line length from constraints on the hierarchical rhythmic structure that meter imposes on texts (Chen 1980, Kiparsky 2006).3 An argument for the latter view is that it explains the conventional character of lineation. Any place where an obligatory major prosodic break in the verse design divides equivalent units may be a line break, by convenience or tradition. F&H themselves illustrate this point nicely by splitting the half-lines of Arabic verse into separate ‘lines’ forming a ‘couplet’,4 likewise Sanskrit ślokas (222). 4343 ballad quatrains can be printed as fourteener distichs and vice versa, and similarly 3343 quatrains are interchangeable with poulter’s measure. Some editions of the Kalevala print its eight-syllable parallel couplets as single sixteen-syllable lines, and nobody minds.5 Another argument for the primacy of rhythm is that meters constrain only those categories that are prominence-defining in language. For example, meters may require that syllables in certain positions must be stressed or heavy, never that they must have onsets. The idea that meter regulates rhythmic patterns of prominence explains this, for (as we know independently from phonology) onsets are not prominence-bearing. More interestingly, consider empty positions (catalexis). Quatrains typically combine four-and three-foot lines in 4343, 4443, or 3343 patterns, not in 3434 or 3334 patterns. The short lines can be perceived as metrical realizations of four-foot lines with a missing final beat. In songs and other isochronous performance styles, they are typically realized by lengthening the last word, producing a saliency effect characteristic of terminal elements (Kiparsky 2006). F&H’s theory cannot explain the perception of 4343 and 4443 stanzas, and the preference for them, in this way, because it does not assign gridmarks to empty positions. The second leading idea of the book is that the abstract templates are constructed by a bottom-up parsing procedure, from the smallest groupings to the biggest, and that template-to-text mapping is governed by a combination of rules...

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Linguistics in the Study and Teaching of Literature

Linguistics can provide a technical vocabulary for talking about language, and an understanding of how everyday language is structured and functions. Literary texts are made from language, and although the relation between language in literature and language in general is not fully understood, linguistics can help theorize literary language, and suggest ways of thinking about literary form, and the relation between form and meaning in literature.

Review Article: Meter in poetry

Review Article: Meter in poetry

Coleridge, Scott, and "This Mescolanza of Measures"

Coleridge was always intrigued by the power of sound, particularly by the effects of meter in poetry. He considered himself one of those poets who few or no proper pictures, but a magnificent mirage of words instead--and gives you the subjective associations of the Poet instead of the external object. (1) His delight in sound arranged metrically for its own sake is shown in verses he wrote for young Derwent Coleridge in 1807, beginning: Trochee / trips from / long to / short: From long / to long / in sol/emn sort Slow SPONDEE stalks--strong Foot! yet ill able Ever to / come up with / DACTYL tri/syllable. IAMBICS march from short to long: With a Leap / and a Bound the swift ANAPESTS throng! (2) In his serious poetry, Coleridge was a master of musicality, and usually he achieved his tonal effects in the traditional English manner of exploiting the interplay of meter, rhythm, and phrasing. However, he also experimented metrically, and the most ambitious of these experiments was Christabel, in the preface to which he declared: ... The metre of the Christabel is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion. (3) As is well known, Coleridge and some of his friends believed that the meter of Christabel had been appropriated (at least in part) by Walter Scott for The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a poem published in 1805 while Coleridge's was still in manuscript, where it would remain for eleven more years. There have been excellent articles on the meter of Christabel, on what Scott derived from it, and on the legal and philosophical aspects of Scott's supposed appropriation. (4) Here I want to discuss Coleridge's attitude(s) toward Scott's metrical borrowing. Briefly, Coleridge habitually circulated manuscripts of his poems among his friends, and recited them whether or not they were in print. In 1800, he is thought to have given a (now lost) holograph of Christabel to his friend John Stoddart, who in 1802 recited it to Scott. (5) Scott enjoyed memorizing and reciting poems that he liked--at a literary gathering in 1803 Coleridge was startled to hear Scott recite Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, which Coleridge had published under a pseudonym some four years earlier. (6) Also, in 1803, Dorothy and William Wordsworth heard Scott recite part of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, then in progress. Dorothy Wordsworth later wrote to Lady Beaumont: He [Scott} said to us that at that time he had begun his poem and was much delighted to meet with so happy a specimen of the same kind of irregular metre which he had adopted. This was when we were in Scotland and he recited to us a part of the Poem which he was then composing. We were struck with the resemblance yet we were both equally convinced from the frankness of Walter Scott's manner that it was an unconscious imitation. Since The Lay of the last Minstrel has been published, William has blamed himself exceedingly for not having mentioned to Walter Scott the apprehension that he had that the style of his Poem had been, and would be in its future progress influenced by his acquaintance with Christabel, and also that he did not point out one expression which was the same. (7) She continued: For my part I do not think the Imitations are of so much importance, Coleridge's poem bearing upon its face so bold a character of origi[nality], and I cannot but add being so very much superior to the other, but my Brother and Sister think that the Lay being published first it will tarnish the freshness of Christabel and considerably injure the first effect of it. …