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A Proposed Compromise in Metrics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles E. Whitmore
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Extract

If I were optimistically inclined, I might call this paper “A Ready and Easy Way to Establish Harmony among Metricians.” Being aware, however, that the establishing of such harmony is about as probable as was the establishment of a republic in England on the eve of the Restoration, I shall be content with the more modest course of pointing out certain confusions which mark current controversy, and proposing certain simple remedies for them. Like most compromises suggested by onlookers, this one will doubtless fail to win the approval of extreme partisans on either side; but I hope that it is not wholly destitute of features which may commend it to those of more moderate leanings.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 1926 , pp. 1024 - 1143
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1926

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References

1 “Feet are not organic elements of rhythm. . . . . Analysis of verse by feet is like analysis of pictures by square inches. . . . . Such an index-method is a labor-saving convenience”—C. M. Lewis, The Principles of English Verse, p. 39.

2 See, e.g., Baum, Principles of English Versification, p. 51.

3 Mr. D. S. MacColl, in an otherwise very sensible paper (“Rhythm in English Verse, Prose and Speech,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, V, 1914) succeeds in convincing himself (p. 20) that the phenomenon involves the shortening of the first syllable, as compared with its quantity in the normal foot. I can myself detect no ground for this whatever.

4 I believe that the exigencies of stage delivery, and the doubtful accuracy of transmission in our older poetic drama, make dramatic blank verse a problem which it is safer to consider separately.

5 The Writing and Reading of Verse, p. 72.

6 “Music and Metrics,” Stud. Phil., XX (1923), 392-93.

7 “The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose,” Stud. Phil., XVI (1919), 50.

8 “The Iambic-Trochaic Theory in Relation to the Musical Notation of Verse,” JEGP, XXIV (1925), 68.

9 Notice, in this connection, Dr. Stewart's use of “generally,” “usually,” “in most cases,” which obviously does not exclude the possibility that special cases of a different character may exist.

10 This second tendency, I take it, is what Professor Andrews refers to in mentioning the tendency of trochaic verse to turn into “dimeter with a quadruple rhythm” (op. cit., pp. 269-70).

11 Lyric Poems (London, 1894), p. 6.

12 This is in essence the method used by Professor Croll in his study of prose cadence referred to in note 7 above.