Literary anthologies and handbooks are filled with helpful statements about versification, that is, the basic principles of verse composition. A sonnet has fourteen lines and may be Petrarchan or Shakespearean; rhymes are masculine or feminine; blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Most of my students know such things, or at least think they should, and creative writing students have no particular difficulty producing examples. Versification in foreign languages is a bit more abstract, at least for those who have not had serious language instruction. Even vague references to classical metrics are becoming rare in our classrooms, and foreign verse itself has become at best a source of quickly domesticated forms and stylistic devices. Old English contains alliteration and what are called kennings. French fixed forms are easily imitated and are treated as a variant of the Western haiku. Composing, say, a ballade, a virelai, a sestina, or something that looks like one, a few lines in apparent parody of Beowulf or even Chaucer: these are amusing and doubtless profitable exercises.
Yet looking at foreign verse in this manner omits what is a much more challenging part of that meter. A poem, even in one of these fixed forms, consists not just of a pattern of lines (how the completed poem looks), but of something more basic—those elements that constitute the line itself and its fundamental character. A French Alexandrine is not simply a line of twelve syllables, as it might be described in a verse handbook. French writers wrote these lines according to a detailed (but not overly mysterious) set of rules for determining what a syllable is and which syllable types are permitted in what line locations. A Latin hexameter is not simply a Longfellow-esque sequence of dactyls and spondees; it is constructed according to detailed (but again, not overly mysterious) rules of syllable length and accent.
The present guide is written with intelligent nonspecialists in mind, that is, poets, readers of literature, and students of literature and those who teach them. There is no reason a competent speaker of English with an interest in verse or poetry cannot easily understand the basic rules of verse composition in languages that employ the same basic alphabet. The chapters that follow will provide such readers with a working knowledge of basic principles of select European verse systems that have influenced English poets from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The guide is practical rather than theoretical; it does not propose new theories of metrical analysis nor is it intended as a survey of scholarship in versification. Writers of English verse and students of English literature need a chance to see how English verse differs from verse in other European traditions and how those traditions have affected what today we think of as English verse. And one cannot know how Latin and French affected English unless one knows in some detail what the principles of those verse systems are.
To understand these systems requires some knowledge of what is often called prosody, that is, the minimal units of verse composition: what are the distinguishing features of syllables (e.g., stress, length) or basic rhyme types? in what cases can verse be analyzed as feet, and what are the larger elements that organize these units into lines? I will deal with larger forms (fixed forms in romance languages, lyric forms in Latin) when necessary, but I make no attempt to give any more than a cursory survey of various fixed forms, whose patterns can be readily found in other books of reference.
Students of English literature today are likely to be exposed to versification and its apparent mysteries largely in English classes. And one only has to talk to these students to realize that what now passes for general or conventional instruction in verse simply does not work. When told I was working on versification, most of my friends, whatever their level of education—high school, college, graduate—responded kindly but vaguely that they “never really got that.” Even my academic colleagues, although less inclined to admit such things, prove in their discussion of verse that they never really got it either.
And no wonder. These are intelligent people; and the reason they never “got” versification is that there was likely nothing coherent in what they were taught for them to get. I have been instructed in versification since grammar school, and only because little of what I was taught stuck do I feel competent to discuss it now. There is in English a massive confusion of basic terminology, where Greek words of dubious legitimacy form our basic vocabulary of verse, where the word long means “accented,” where style is confused with rules, and where the Great Baggy Monster of English versification—the dreaded Iambic Pentameter—is apt to leap out at any moment and smother anything that smacks of reason or clarity. Even sound attempts in English to discuss foreign verse often begin with English verse, as if the principles of English verse were familiar and well known—all in the well-intentioned attempt to show how different, say, French or Latin verse is from English. But the principles of English verse are not well known at all and the matter so little understood by students and those who teach them that this is a terrible place to begin. It would make far more sense to begin with Latin and French verse in order to understand English verse than the other way around. The basic principles of Latin and French verse are perfectly well known; most details are uncontroversial, and in some cases the basic analysis of such verse has been unchanged for centuries.
For students of grammar and literature a few generations ago, things were different from what they are today: versification was a compulsory subject. Most modern English poets, like most Victorian poets, eighteenth-century poets, early modern poets, and medieval poets, had been instructed in Latin and had had the rules for Latin verse literally beaten into them; thus no serious student of literature needed the kind of information found, say, in chapter 2 below. But the sort of exercise familiar to my own teachers (e.g., take a passage from Livy and write it in the style of Tacitus; rewrite this passage of Milton in Latin hexameters) was certainly not part of my education. Today, I know many competent classicists who struggle mightily with the basics of verse analysis. The situation is not much different in French and Italian; in my experience, those who sing these languages are often more familiar with the rules of verse composition than those who teach them.
What was once second nature to English poets—scanning and even composing Latin verse—has thus become largely a historical curiosity. And what once would have seemed a reasonable thing to do—writing one’s native verse according to the rules learned in Latin class—now seems quaint and bizarre. Most literary historians and poetry instructors know how important classical education was to English poets but often dismiss it by characterizing the few eccentric attempts to impose these schoolboy rules of Latin versification on English as failures: too bad Philip Sidney and Thomas Campion attempted to write in quantitative verse; they should have known better. Hearing such things, and recalling the gobbledegook they have been taught in the past, intelligent students can only conclude that versification is a subject not worth knowing.
| The first part of my discussion deals with quantitative Latin verse, a verse form in which nearly all English poets from the sixteenth to the twentieth century were trained. Other verse systems I discuss are the classical French syllabic systems and early Germanic accentual verse as it was understood by modern scholars of this literature. I have chosen these examples not because they represent versification in general or even European versification. Latin, French, and Old English exemplify, rather, what are often described as three basic forms of versification in the West: quantitative verse, syllabic or isosyllabic verse, and accentual verse. Other languages might serve just as well, and perhaps better. But I am less familiar with them. To these three, I have added a chapter on what could be called the verse of libretti—that is, verse entirely controlled by extra-verbal music. As for English verse, despite the assurances of some introductory guides to English meter, there is no single system that reasonably applies to the English tradition generally, nor is one proposed here; I thus deal only with select cases in chapter 6.
Rules of Latin and French versification changed as the language changed. What I provide here are particular slices of these histories. I ignore the early history of Latin verse that shaped Roman poets (i.e., early Saturnian verse) as well as the transformation of Latin in the Middle Ages and describe the far more stable system of Latin versification as taught in schools. For French, I concentrate on a few specific issues (e.g., the caesura) on which much of the development of French verse was felt to depend. Descriptions of early Germanic verse are changing; I focus here on the one that has provided the basic vocabulary for verse types to most students in the twentieth century. Finally, I use the self-evident differences between classical composers such as Giulio Caccini and Richard Wagner and the blues artist Robert Johnson to sketch the lurking problem of musical forms in verse. Music was at the base of much of what is now printed as verse; and it is music to which the language of much of our poetics still inadvertently alludes, with terms such as musicality, tone, and rhythm.
I have made no attempt at a universal terminology or a new self-consistent system of notation to describe these various systems. The terminology used to describe classical verse works reasonably well to describe classical verse, and the somewhat different language developed in the Middle Ages to describe French verse has proven to be useful for that purpose even through the twentieth century. I will thus use the simplest forms of these conventional languages of verse description as long as they are not inaccurate or positively misleading. I will avoid if possible the most obvious sources of ambiguity, and, when those ambiguities cannot be avoided, explain at least why they exist. When the conventional language fails, I will use the most common language I can.
Classical verse was not composed on the same principles as modern verse. To say that English blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter is misleading and in my opinion flat out wrong, and to imply that English verse can be analyzed coherently in such terminology borders on mystification. Our hypothetically attentive and intelligent students are told to analyze Shakespeare according to whatever rules of iambic pentameter might be drawn up on the board; having forgotten, perhaps, that versification is not worth knowing, they will now conclude, reasonably enough, that such matters are simply beyond human comprehension. But they’re not. It’s just that the anatomical description of an elephant is not necessarily the best language to use in describing, say, a house fire or an internal combustion engine.
Resources
There are many guides to foreign versification designed for English students, and a growing number of these—some useful, some dated, and many rapidly changing—have appeared on the internet. Among the more notable printed guides are Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (2000); John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse (1981); and the anthology by William K. Wimsatt, Versification: Major Language Types, Sixteen Essays (1971). These are good introductions, but most omit much of the basic and essential prosodic detail, detail that is essential for their readers to have any idea of what their examples mean. Hollander’s manual is an exercise in poetic virtuosity, and much of it is composed in the meters that are being described. But without knowing the precise details of those meters, a reader is lost. You can only understand this manual if you are able to write it; reading it is unfortunately not enough.
Serious and detailed presentations of Latin, French, or German verse systems are generally found only in language instruction manuals and thus are not easily accessible for most students in classes in English literature. One learns the principles of Latin hexameter as a third-year Latin student, French Alexandrines as an advanced French student. These manuals tend not to condescend to their readers, and few make detailed information accessible to anyone who does not already have a fairly good grasp of it. One can extract most of what I say about Latin verse in such books as Introduction to Latin Meter by D. S. Raven (1965) or The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry by James W. Halporn, Martin Ostwald, and Thomas Rosenmeyer (1963; rev. 1980). Also useful are the sections on meter in once-standard grammar books, such as Allen and Greenough’s Latin Grammar for Schools and Colleges, a text that has been through over a century of editions and revisions and is now available online. Editions of classical poets designed for schools also contain valuable sections on meter. Yet, most material is presented as reference (that is, readers apparently know the basic principles of Horace’s verse and need only to brush up on the fine points of, say, the scansion of a Fifth Asclepiad). Even to an intermediate Latin student, such guides are intimidating, and advanced Latinists will often struggle with many of the details; to non-Latinists, they are nearly impenetrable. In addition, modern student editions of standard Latin texts rarely mark naturally long vowels, and many versification manuals omit them as well, despite the fact that these details are essential to the meter of Latin; this may or may not be a morally and pedagogically sound way to teach language, but it makes versification far more difficult for all but fluent Latinists.
For French, specific and detailed rules of prosody and versification have been articulated and debated by critics and poets for centuries, and there are, fortunately, many excellent discussions available in English; L. E. Kastner’s A History of French Versification (1903) is itself the basis for standard guides to French versification now published in French, in particular, W. Th. Elwert, Traité de versification française des origines à nos jours (1965) (originally in German, now a basic manual in French). The situation with early Germanic verse is a bit better. The majority of those who have studied Old English and bought books on this subject are introductory students, and serious discussion of verse, therefore, often appears in introductory handbooks. The section on meter in the revision of Bright’s Old English Grammar and Reader (1972) is no less accessible to the first-year student than to the advanced one. Yet, like similar studies in classics, these discussions tend to be ancillary and for students primarily interested in the languages themselves; there are, as far as I know, no studies that present this material in a form that is both accessible to intelligent students who have not been trained in these languages and detailed enough to be interesting to such students.
An assumption made in many general discussions of versification, including those mentioned above, is that to understand verse is to understand poetry; this assumption is particularly noticeable in works from the 1960s and 1970s such as Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965; rev. ed. New York, 1979), and in the articles and subjects dealt with in the various editions of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex J. Preminger (1962; new edition, 1993). It is basic to the way literature was taught to most of us: form is meaning. Scholarly books and monographs that discuss the versification practices of particular authors tend to share this assumption; Dante’s hendecasyllable, if worthy of discussion, must partake somehow of that grander thing, Dante’s poetics. But the collapsing of these various levels of poetic phenomena obscures all of them. Versification is one thing; style is something else. And poetry, whatever that is, may well be something else again. There are lines from the Aeneid whose versification is quite obvious, yet their meaning eludes me; similarly, there are lines from Wallace Stevens I understand completely, yet I have no idea what their metrical basis might be.
The organization of some of my chapters differs in one important way from that of standard manuals. I am concerned here less with coverage, that is, a systematic synopsis of each verse type, than with accessibility. I spend more time on what is easily understood than on what is not; for Latin, I begin with dactylic hexameter, not because this form is basic in a theoretical or historical sense, but because it was the form learned first by and most familiar to centuries of Latin schoolchildren. Those who are willing to understand this form but lose heart when it comes to the intricacies of dramatic verse can gloss over the more difficult forms in later sections or ignore them entirely, as students and teachers alike have done for centuries. For French verse, I concentrate on the classical Alexandrine because this was the form subject to the most debate in the history of French poetics. The principles behind these forms (or more precisely, the principles thought to be behind them) are not overly controversial nor are they difficult to learn. This guide should provide enough material to enable readers to scan most common Latin verse types, to distinguish classical French verse from its late nineteenth-century variants, to scan a few lines from Beowulf, and, in this last case, to understand why once-standard scansion has been critiqued. It should also indicate how such systems operate or could operate in particular English poems. Ideally, this guide will demystify some of the discussions on verse to which students of English literature have been subjected and enable them to see when the obscurity of these discussions has sources other than the impenetrability of the subject.