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The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

W. K. Wimsatt Jr.  and
Monroe C. Beardsley
W. K. Wimsatt Jr.
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Conn
Monroe C. Beardsley
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
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Extract

Let us first of all confess that it is not as if we were writing under the persuasion that we have a novel view to proclaim. It is true that the view which we believe to be correct is often under attack today and is sometimes supposed to be outmoded by recent refinements. Its proponents too are often not sure enough of its actual character to defend it with accuracy. At the same time, a look into some of the most recent handbooks and critical essays reveals that there are some teachers and writers on our subject today who expound this view in a perfectly clear and accurate way. We have in mind, for instance, A Glossary of Literary Terms revised by Meyer Abrams for Rinehart in 1957 from the earlier work by Norton and Rushton, or the handbook by Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, published in 1956 by Harcourt, Brace. In the lengthy Kenyon Review symposium on English verse, Summer 1956, we admire the niceties of Mr. Arnold Stein's traditionally oriented discussion of Donne and Milton. There is also Mr. Stein's earlier PMLA article (lix [1944], 393–397) on “Donne's Prosody.” In the Kenyon symposium there is, furthermore, Mr. Ransom. It would be difficult to frame a more politely telling, persuasive, accurate retort than his to the more extravagant claims of the linguists.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 5 , December 1959 , pp. 585 - 598
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 Harold Whitehall, Seymour Chatman, Arnold Stein, John Crowe Ransom, “English Verse and What It Sounds Like,” The Kenyon Review, xviii, 411—477.

2 Mr. Chatman, in a paper subsequently prepared for a Conference on Style held at Indiana University in April 1958, has made it clear that his views on meter actually differ very little from those of the present writers. Our purpose here is only to use Mr. Chatman's text of 1956 as a point of departure for the exposition of an issue.

3 “Linguistics, Poetics, and Interpretation: The Phonemic Dimension,” QJS, xliii (Oct. 1957), 254. Cf. Ronald Sutherland, “Structural Linguistics and English Prosody,” College English, xx (Oct. 1958), 12–17. Despite a generally superior attitude toward “conventional metrics,” Mr. Sutherland reaches the correct conclusion “that much of the information accumulated by the new science is inconsequential to English prosody.”

4 The question is, of course, a psychological one, but the psychologists have not dealt much with it. A search of Psychological Abstracts for the last twenty years turns up (xxi, [Sept. 1947], 387) one article (abstract 3211): Marguerite Durand, “Perception de durée dans les phrases rhythmées,” Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, xxxix (1946), 305–321. But Mlle. Durand apparently took iso-chronism for granted and had her passages (French and Czech) spoken to the beats of a metronome. Albert R. Chandler, Beauty and Human Nature (New York, 1934), pp. 244–256, gives a good account of some earlier investigations, of which the most interesting is that by J. E. W. Wallin. Wallin began with E. W. Scripture's concept of strong stresses, or “regions of strength,” which Scripture called “centroids”; but in a careful investigation Wallin found no fixed length for intervals between centroids; “the longest observed was seven times the shortest when there was no intervening pause, and fourteen times the shortest when pauses occurred” (Chandler, p. 250). Ada L. F. Snell, “An Objective Study of Syllabic Quantity in English Verse,” PMLA, xxxiii (1918), 396–408; xxxiv (1919), 416–435, presents experimental evidence against the assumption that readers of English verse observe any kind of “equal time intervals.”

5 A kind of middle or double service is performed by traditional marks of prosodie scansion—which in part, in large part, call attention to objective features of linguistic structure, but to some extent also are used for “promoting” or “suppressing” (or indicating the promotion or suppression of) such features in favor of a certain pattern. This double character of scansion marks has perhaps caused much of the difficulty in metrical theory.

6 We take this term from Leonard B. Meyer's excellent discussion of musical rhythm in Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago, 1956), pp. 102–103. Pulse is the division of time into “regularly recurring, equally accented beats.” What Meyer calls “meter” in music depends on pulse; but in this respect it is different from meter in verse. What he calls “rhythm”—e.g., the difference between an iambic and an anapestic or trochaic pattern—can occur without pulse and meter, he holds; as in plain chant or recitative secco.

7 The same can be said for the shorter nursery-rhyme type of dummy employed by George R. Stewart, Jr., The Technique of English Verse (New York, 1930), p. 3: “Fol-de-riddle, fol-de-riddle, hi-dee-doo.”

8 Practical Criticism (New York, 1935), p. 232.

9 Elizabeth Wright, Metaphor, Sound and Meaning in Bridges' “The Testament of Beauty” (Philadelphia, 1951), p. 26, says that Bridges' lines are to be timed equally, with the help of pauses at the ends of the lines.

10 Yvor Winters, The Function of Criticism (Denver, 1957), pp. 79–100, 109–123, expresses a view of English meter in general and of Hopkins which we take to be substantially in accord with our own.

11 Alexander J. Ellis, “Remarks on Professor Mayor's Two Papers on Rhythm,” Transactions of the Philological Society 1875–1876 (Strasburg, 1877), p. 442, distinguished “nine degrees” of “force” or stress in English and likewise nine degrees of “length,” “pitch,” “weight,” and “silence.” Cf. R. M. Alden, English Verse (New York, 1904), p. 4 n.

12 The problem of “rising” and “falling” meters is one which we are content to touch lightly. Temporal theorists, working on the analogy of the musical downbeat, tend of course to make all meters falling. George R. Stewart, Jr., a moderate timer, makes the following revelatory statement: “If a person comes upon a road and walks a few rods before arriving at the first milestone, he will have to pass five milestones, counting the first, before he has walked four measured miles; in other words, since the start and the finish must be shown, five markers are necessary to establish four units. In verse the stresses are the markers, and the feet are the units. Five stresses can mark off only four intervals, so that what we ordinarily call a five-foot line might be more properly described as a four-foot line with a little left over at beginning and end” (The Technique of English Verse, p. 42). (For Mr. Stewart “rising” and “falling” are qualities of phrasing, not of meter, p. 37.) Suppose, however, that we are counting not “measured miles” but precisely milestones—not equal times but precisely stresses. And suppose that a man walks not a “few rods” but a full mile before reaching the first milestone. The first slack syllable of the iambic line is as much a mile as any other slack syllable. The line begins at the beginning of that syllable. The iambic line which starts with a strong and then one weak syllable is a more difficult matter. But many such lines, like the one from Shelley's “Skylark” which we discuss above, can be shown in one way or another to be in fact iambic. The shape of the phrases is likely to have much to do with it. Other lines of this sort, such as some in Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott,” may in fact be ambiguous—that is, they may be susceptible of being satisfactorily read either as iambic or as trochaic.