Description
Book SynopsisDespite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the breaking of meter and rise of free verse.
Trade ReviewModernism's Metronome is an extremely learned book.
—Scarlett Higgins, University of New Mexico,
American Literary ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost's Distorted Vernacular
Chapter 2. Penty Ladies: T. S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender of Modern Meter
Chapter 3. "No Feet to Walk On": Pound's Late Victorian Prosody
Chapter 4. Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise Bogan
Chapter 5. The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and James Weldon Johnson
Chapter 6. Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown's Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes
Conclusion. Prosody after Form
Appendix. Scansion and Metrical Notation
Notes
Works Cited
Index
