Description
Book SynopsisUncovering the unexplored archive in the history of poetics, the author shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity.
Trade ReviewWinner of the 2013 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism, Robert Penn Warren Center and Western Kentucky University Co-Winner of the 2013 Sonia Rudikoff Prize, Northeast Victorian Studies Association Winner of the 2012 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association "[T]hrough her skillful close readings, Martin reveals a generation of war poets much more finely tuned to nationalist discourses of metre and their changing relationship to them than had been previously acknowledged."--Elizabeth Micakovic, Literature & History "Martin's great accomplishment, done with impressive detail, panache, and style, is to reveal the ideological presuppositions, political desires, and personal needs of metrical practitioners and theorists in the culture and period that she examines."--Richard Cureton, Review of English Studies "This book open[s] new horizons for historical poetics and prosody... Martin's [work] is at once the most historically capacious work to date and the one that goes the farthest toward proving not only the utility of a historically attuned prosody for the study of poetry but the necessity of the field to both formalism and cultural studies."--Ben Glaser, Modern Language Quarterly
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction: The Failure of Meter 1 Modern Instability 1 Metrical Communities 5 Meter as Culture 10 A Note on Historical Prosody 14 Chapter 1: The History of Meter 16 A Metrical History of England 16 A Grammatical History of England 33 Grammatical Instability 39 Metrical Instability 42 Chapter 2: The Stigma of Meter 48 Metrical Irrelevance 48 The British Empire of Letters 52 Marking Instress 54 Acute Stress in --The Wreck of the Deutschland-- 61 Mistrusting the Ear 67 Chapter 3: The Institution of Meter 79 Metrical Mastery 79 Inventing the Britannic 87 Dynamic Reading 91 Mastery for the Masses 94 The English Ear 99 A Prosodic Entity 102 Chapter 4: The Discipline of Meter 109 Patriotic Pedagogy 109 Matthew Arnold's Metrical Intimacy 112 Henry Newbolt's Cultural Metrics 122 Private Meters, Public Rhythms 130 The Sound of the Drum 139 Chapter 5: The Trauma of Meter 145 Wartime, Poetics 145 Sad Death for a Poet! 150 Therapeutic Measures 158 Bent-Double 171 The Kindred Points of Heaven and Home 176 Chapter 6: The Before- and Afterlife of Meter 181 Metrical Modernism 181 Make It Old: Robert Bridges and Obsolescence 187 Alice Meynell's "English Metres" 198 Toward a Critical Prosody 203 Notes 207 Works Cited 241 Index 261
