3/16/2023 0 Comments Latin scansion practice![]() In the case of the genre of lyric, Culler contends that “the weight of tradition helps make there be something to be right or wrong about” (2009: 883 cp. Similarly, Culler qualifies the poststructuralist critique of the category of lyric, emphasizing the distinction between theory and practice. “The history of verse thinking is not the same as the history of representations of verse thinking” (932), he cautions. Conceiving of poetry as “an institution, a series of practices as real as the belief in them and the capacity for them” (2010: 933), Jarvis questions the presumption that the representation of poetic practices mirrors the practices themselves. In a pair of essays responding to Prins’s program of historical poetics, Jarvis argues for “technique” as “the way in which the work of art most intimately registers historical experience” (2010: 931 cp. Jackson proposes to break into new understandings of the histories of English poetry, less by offering a new account of poetic form than by fixing critical attention on “the history of lyricization” (2008: 183) as a cultural process in its own right.įrom different angles, Simon Jarvis and Jonathan Culler have endeavored to broaden the scope of historical poetics to include the description of poetic forms in their aesthetic richness and historical dynamism. In Jackson’s account, the New Critical flattening of poetry into Poetry and the explosion of the genre of the lyric are best comprehended as one and the same historical process. By coordinating material and cultural analysis with a critique of editorial and critical history, Jackson seeks to relocate the lyricism of Emily Dickinson’s verse from practices of poetic composition to practices of poetic reading. On the other side, historical poetics shades off into the histories of poetry per se, with focus on the twentieth-century amalgamation of diverse literary forms and practices into an idea of Poetry with a capital ‘P.’ These two projects of historical recovery converge in Virginia Jackson’s book-length study, Dickinson’s Misery (2005). On one side, historical poetics shades off into the histories of poetic genres, especially lyric, as in the essays gathered in the January 2008 issue of PMLA under the heading “The New Lyric Studies” (cp. In addition to meter, this emergent research program reconsiders two other literary topics of enduring critical interest. Martin argues that meter mattered in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, and in ways that were strategically obscured (and then simply forgotten) by later polemicists and practitioners. The unlikely protagonists of Martin’s new literary history are the prosodist George Saintsbury and the poet-prosodists Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Coventry Patmore. Through a combination of archival research and cultural analysis, Martin implicates the concept of meter in British war and nation-building, from Empire Day to the National Service League to the New English Dictionary. Martin’s 2012 book, The Rise and Fall of Meter, trawls now-obscure poetics manuals and the annals of prosodic infighting to challenge the inevitability of modern scansional techniques. Yopie Prins, Meredith Martin, and other scholars of Victorian poetry have called for a ‘historical poetics’ that would reevaluate the received narrative of English literary history by recovering alternative ways of theorizing and experiencing poetic form (Hall 2011 Martin 2012 Prins 2008). In the early twentieth century, Anglo-American modernists championed free verse through poetic compositions as well as directive treatises.Ĭontemporary literary scholars are mapping new connections between the history of theory and the history of practice. The late nineteenth century witnessed an upsurge in the production of both English poetry and theoretical writing about its metrical forms. ![]() In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from John Milton’s metrical experiments to George Hickes’s monumental Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus (1705), poetry and prosodic theory were both under continual development. ![]() In the late sixteenth century, classically educated men subjected accentual-syllabic English verse to Latin quantitative scansion and attributed the confused result to deficiencies in English poetry and the English language. Since the sixteenth century, the history of English poetics has had two sides: a history of theory and a history of practice. ![]()
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