[Gutenberg 43352] • A History of English Versification

In any treatment of the poem as an aesthetic phenomenon (it would be pointless here to argue object against experience), the primary distinction must always be between the poem heard and the poem seen--the poem in the ear and in the eye (mind's ear, mind's eye)--the aural and the visual modes in which this artform is manifested. The "sound a poem makes" as its phonetic structure is being kept apart from actualized performances, which are "sound" at another level. Within this first-order distinction, the domain of English versification (as theory) is treated under each of its topics or aspects: Meter, Verse, Stanza, Rhyme and Sonnet. The study of English versification begins with the high Renaissance in England, so that the historical range is effectively coterminous with Modern English, Middle and (especially) Old English being for our purposes distinct enough so as virtually to constitute a foreign language. The books and articles devoted to versification written in the last two decades has not been equaled since Jakob Schipper's seminal Englische Metrik (1880-88) provoked a heavy flurry of interest in prosodic matters for over thirty years. Twentieth-century poetics has shown very little interest in nineteenth-century philology, but perhaps we have come full cycle. Perhaps as centuries draw to an end our minds turn into channels deeper than any Zeitgeist, grooves cut into our unthought consciousness of cycles, numbers, and spans. Perhaps Yeats--even Nietzsche--was right. This book is liberally illustrated with verse examples, both in their original languages and in translation.