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Meter and Meaning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Most contemporary students of the subject seem to agree with Wellek and Warren's view that “the meaning of verse simply cannot be ignored in a theory of metrics,” and that “sound and meter must be studied as elements of the totality of a work of art, not in isolation from meaning.” The notorious exception is no doubt John Crowe Ransom's forthright theory which makes of the meters simply sound textures irrelevant to the meaning. Yvor Winters's well-known critique of Ransom's argument disposes of the latter's general thesis convincingly, it seems to me. The story does not, however, end there.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1949), pp. 172, 176.
2 The New Criticism (New Directions, 1941), pp. 279 ff.
3 “Meter and the Theory of Irrelevance,” in In Defense of Reason (New York, 1947), pp. 542 ff. After stating Ransom's two chief propositions—(1) “that meter is not a means of expressing any part of the meaning or feeling of the poem, but that it offers an independent phonetic pleasure of its own,” and (2) “that such independent activity must interfere with the statement of the meaning as the meaning must interfere with the meter, with the result that irrelevancies are forced upon both in the course of this conflict”— Winters points out that “Ransom at no point explains why we take pleasure in the irrelevancies of meter; he merely states it as axiomatic that we do so… . Ransom apparently assumes that we take pleasure in metrical irregularities for their own sake, as we might take pleasure (if we were so constituted) in the bumps and holes in a concrete sidewalk” (p. 543). He then indicates the inconsistencies in Ransom's theory, notably the fact that “Ransom objects to relatively regular meter because it is mechanically easy; yet he recommends a mechanical roughening which is purely an end in itself” (p. 545). “As to the notion that meter interferes with meaning, and meaning with meter, whether to the advantage or to the disadvantage of the poem, I should like again to object. If the phonetic value of metrical language is expressive of emotion, or better, is capable of qualifying the expression of emotion, even though most of the time very slightly, then the value of any word in metrical language will differ from its value in unmetered language; and the value of the same word will never be quite the same in any two metrical passages, for the precise nature of its sound and its relationship to the context of sound will vary with each passage” (p. 550).
4 D. W. Prall's analysis of meter in his Aesthetic Analysis (New York, 1936), Ch. iv (“Temporal Patterns”), is excellent, yet even he oversimplifies the problem, leaning too heavily on Patmore's “English Metrical Law” when he comes to examine English verse itself. What we have in English poetry are several principles of rhythm, due in part to the ambivalent character of the language (Teutonic and Romance), in part to the influence of French and Classical prosody. Native English (“Anglo-Saxon”) meter, according to Pope (The Rhythm of “Beowulf”), is a falling rhythm of dipodies mensurable in 4/8 musical time. With the changes in the language and the influence of Romance versification during the Middle English period, this native rhythm was lost. Yet, rooted as it was in the stress-accentual character of the language, it led a sort of subterranean existence, cropping out from time to time (cf. p. 704 below). Coleridge articulated the principle anew in his Preface to “Christabel,” and G. M. Hopkins reasserted it in theory and practice (cf. Walter Ong, “Hopkins's Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry,” in Immortal Diamond, ed. N. Weyand, New York, 1949, pp. 93 ff.). The sources of the living tradition of English verse from Chaucer to the present, however, are medieval Latin and Romance, based on the principle of what Hopkins called “running rhythm,” syllabic yet accentual as well. However some of us may deplore the fact that the native English rhythm was lost, it still remains true that the major English poets have composed in the later tradition.
5 Paul Henry Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941), p. 3.
6 Abrégé de l'art poétique, tr. J. H. Smith, in The Great Critics, 3rd ed. (New York, 1951), p. 181.
7 The New Criticism, 298 ff.
8 W. L. Renwick, Edmund Spenser (London, 1925), p. 100.
9 “Perhaps the conditions of modern life (think how large a part is now played in our sensory life by the internal-combustion engine!) have altered our perception of rhythms.” Cited by F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (London, 1935), pp. 88-89.
10 Claude André Strauss, “Origine et Sens du Vers Claudelien,” PMLA, lxiv (March 1949), 23 (I English the original). The entire essay is an illuminating study of the development of French prosody before Claudel, as well as of Claudel's own contribution.
11 M. C. Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review, liv (Summer 1946), 468-488.
12 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York, 1929), p. 181.
13 John Manifold, “A Hat in the Ring,” Selected Verse (New York, 1946), pp. 42-43.
14 A. W. Verrall, Lectures on Dryden (Cambridge, 1914), p. 83.
15 Richards, p. 181.
16 “The Poetry of G. M. Hopkins,” Hudson Review, i (Winter 1948), 456-457. Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Ch. xviii), notes that meter is founded on “the balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion,” and describes the effect of meter “in and for itself” as tending “to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention.”
17 Le vers français (Paris, 1913).
18 Cf., e.g., D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Analysis, pp. 123 ff., and n. 4 above.
19 Evelyn H. Scholl, “English Metre Once More,” PMLA, lxiii (March 1948), pp. 293 ff.
20 Stewart Holmes, “Browning: Semantic Stutterer,” PMLA, lx (March 1945), 231-255.
21 Article cited, Hudson Review, i, 466.
22 Such a suggestion has been made by Ransom with respect to a similar phenomenon—the “grossly unequal and unlike” stanzas, as he calls them, and the ten unrhymed lines, of Milton's Lycidas (“A Poem Nearly Anonymous,” in The World's Body, New York, 1938, pp. 1-28). Milton, argues Ransom, thus makes a gesture of rebellion against the formalism of his art; his verses are “defiances, showing the man unwilling to give way to the poet.”
23 Henry Lanz (The Physical Basis of Rime, Stanford Univ. Press, 1931, pp. 335-336) asks whether the periodic revivals of protest against rhyme and meter coincide only by accident with great social upheavals: “The Miltonian controversy took place right in the middle of the English revolution… . It is highly significant that the other ardent advocate of blank verse in Europe, Fabre d'Olivet (1768-1825), lived at the time of the great revolution in France… . Together with the growing practice of imperfect rimes … we find among the modern Russian poets a profound interest in free verse.”
24 Mark Van Doren, The Poetry of John Dryden, 3rd ed. (New York, 1946), p. 195, says that Cowley wrote “and taught others to write what metrically was nonsense.”
25 A. Dwight Culler, “Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook,” PMLA, lxiii (Sept. 1948), 858-885.
26 Claude Lancelot, Quatre Traitez de Poesies, Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole (1663).
27 James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford, 1948), p. 137.
28 Practical Criticism, p. 206.
29 H. W. Garrod (“A Note on the Composition of Gray's Elegy,” in Essays on the Eighteenth Century, Presented to David Nichol Smith, Oxford, 1945, pp. 111-116) cites a letter from Horace Walpole to Wm. Mason, dated Dec. 1773, in which, responding to Mason's statement that he (Mason) “inclined to believe” that the Elegy was “begun, if not concluded,” in 1742 (the year of West's death), Walpole writes: “The Churchyard was, I am persuaded, posterior to West's death at least three or four years… . I am sure that I had the twelve or more first lines from himself above three years after that period, and it was long before he finished it.” If the earlier part of the poem actually dates from a time long anterior to the rest, that fact might account for the character of the lines I quote and deform. Students of the Elegy will find, I believe, that integral pentameters are more frequent in the latter parts of the poem. The most memorable lines (particularly the stanzas embracing ll. 33-36, 41-44, 53-56, and the Epitaph) cannot be reduced to tetrameters in the way I have shown the early stanzas can.