Brennan O'Donell, The Passion of Meter; A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art

Brennan O’Donnell, The Passion of Meter; A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art, The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 1995

Concentration on the image, abandonment of rhyme, calculated unmetricality or arhythmicality, innovative breaking of traditional metrical metrical forms, concrete poetry, the use of typographical means to call attention to the text of the poem as text… (3)

…criticism of poetry in the past seventy years has, as David Perkins argues, “devoted itself largely to explaining and defending” contemporary tendencies… (3)

The elegance of Surrey falls on deaf ears, whereas Wyatt’s more “modern” roughness draws praise; the rhythms of Donne and Browning make those of Herbert and Tennyson seem merely tame by comparison. (3)

Many approaches to poetry recently in favor—among them the various “cultural studies” methods—tend to discourage any critical approach that values literary language as a consciously and intentionally shaped medium significantly set apart from other kinds of “discourse.” (3)

The Preface to Lyrical Ballads (with its appen-[3]dix) has become a lens through which Wordsworth’s attitudes toward metrical art have been viewed, despite Wordsworth’s explicit claims that its arguments are applicable primarily to the poems originally published as Lyrical Ballads. Complicating the issues raised in the Preface, too, in Coleridge’s influential disparagement of its arguments. (3-4)

His most characteristic lines are perfectly traditional accentual-syllabic decasyllabics or octosyllabics. Even the most cursory survey of his selection and use of verse forms shows that he regarded regular, traditional, and recognizable verse patterns and stanzas as important means for framing his own individual voices. (4)

In a postromantic climate in which originality tends to be equated with breaking through or out of the old, such tendencies seem to be at [4] odds with the image of the revolutionary Wordsworth, who according to Hazlitt heralded an age in which “rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular meter was abolished along with regular government.” [“Lectures on the English Poets, VIII: On the Living Poets,” in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dutton, 1930-34), 5:162.] … Blake’s long line in the “prophetic” books provides an example of romantic metrical form as originating with the individual poet. (One must make one’s own meter or be enslaved to another’s.) In comparison with such manifestos and such practice, Wordsworth’s versification lends itself to censure as representing at least a partial failure to effect a genuinely “romantic” liberation of the spirit of poetry from its exile in the Egypt of its own remembered past. / The most influential late-nineteenth – and early-twentieth-century compendium of prosodic opinion, George Saintsbury’s monumental History of English Prosody, is also (unfortunately for Wordsworth’s critical reception) an excellent example of this kind of thinking. For Saintsbury, Blake and, especially Coleridge led the way in establishing a “romantic revival.” They liberated English verse from a numerical conception of the line (a syllabic prosody in which the number of total syllables in the line is strictly governed) and instituted a foot-based prosody that, in allowing latitude in the total number of syllables so long as the number and placement of stressed syllables remains consistent, is more adaptable to the actual qualities of spoken English. The Coleridge of Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel is figuratively the hero of Saintsbury’s providential history… Coleridge’s verse helps to make possible Shelley, Browning, and [5] Swinburne (3:60). … “In no great poet does prosody play so small a part” (3:74). / This study argues for Field’s ear against Saintsbury’s. It argues, that is, for the desirability of an ear open to the possibility of important and unexpected sources of interest and creative tension in the metrical forms the sensuous patterns of Wordsworth’s verse (whether or not these are anticipator of later developments)… (5-6)

…reassess what Wordsworth actually said about the significance of meter… in contrast to what he commonly taken to have said… The poet’s duty to give pleasure restricts him in matters of versification to … a severely limited range of fixed, familiar, and conventional patters of arrangement of sound and rhythm. At the same time, Wordsworth’s definition of a poem as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” commits him to a language organized according to the dictates of a genuinely motivating passion. This language is vitally rhythmic (as is all passionate expression) but innocent of the abstract metrical forms of literary convention. Wordsworth describes the poet as an artist who engages in a process of “fitting” the syntax and rhythms of impassioned speech to the conventional arrangements of metrical form… This notion of tense opposition between what Wordsworth calls the “passion of the sense” (or “passion of the subject”) and the “passion of [7] meter” marks a significant distinction between Wordsworth’s theories and the better-known (and widely embraced and promulgated) theories of Coleridge. Coleridge describes successful metrical art as involving the reconciliation of tensions within an overarching unity of effect. (7-8)

Wordsworth…complex oppositional relationship between artfully structured language in metrical forms and the actual language of passion. According to this view, metrical form does not function solely (as it does for Coleridge) as one among many indications of a heightened state of passion; it is (or can be) a kind of counter-presence in the poem, … Thus, Wordsworth’s theory properly understood encompasses the Coleridgean notion of successful metrical composition as productive of a unified whole in which tensions are fully reconciled (a unity in multeity) but does not limit its definition to this one possibility. (8)

…Wordsworth denies his reader the comfort of taking for granted the function of meter in any one poem or body of [8] poems. (8-9)

He learned the basics of his craft during a period remarkable for its uniformity of practice and opinion and published his major work in a climate of intense debate about the nature and function—and even value—of verse. By the time he died, practice and theory in England were both characterized as pervasively by diversity and experimentation as they were by uniformity in his youth. In Wordsworth’s youth, the heroic couplets of Dryden, Waller, and especially Pope had defined the technical limits of the heroic line. Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry ruled the day. The heroic line contained ten syllables and ten syllables only; hypermetrical syllables were not allowed, were routinely lopped off by contraction or elision, and were, in for subject to one or another rule for syllabic reduction, mightily offensive to the ear of the cultivated reader. Even-numbered syllables were stressed; odd were not (with only a few variations allowed). Pauses [9] were to be employed midline, after the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable. Run-on lines were discouraged. These practices were so firmly institutionalized by the 1770s that Samuel Johnson could proclaim, apparently without a tinge of irony, that to attempt improvements beyond what Pope had been able to accomplish would be “dangerous.” / During Wordsworth’s lifetime, English literature saw many “dangerous” attempts at improvement. Critics argued against Pope’s contradiction and elisions as unnatural and called for looser restrictions on the number of syllables admitted per line… Milton’s blank verse—heavily indebted to Italian models, and to many eighteenth-century ears exceedingly wild and sublime—was increasingly cited as a musically various, liberating alternative to Dryden’s urbanity and correctness. The greater availability of more accurate texts of the elder English poets—especially of Chaucer and Shakespeare—meant that more and more the model on which poets’ formed their style was English rather than classical. A vogue for popular English and Scottish song and balladry brought verse from an oral and musical tradition into respectability—and the romantic poets drew freely on the language, and eventually on the rhythms, of Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Robert Burns’s Highland songs, Scott’s Minstrelsy of Scottish Border, and other collections of “extraliterary” verse. (9-10)

…Wordsworth persisted for the most part in writing relatively strict accentual-syllabic verse in the midst of this rapid change. By the 1840s, Wordsworth was admitting that he could not accustom his ear to the “freer movement” of the accentual verse of younger poets, … by the mid- to late century, those subtleties of his verse that stem from his strict adherence to tradition (elision of extrametrical syllables and a uniform placement of stress that makes small variation significant, for example) were already becoming lost on most readers (as they certainly are lost on Saintsbury). (10)