From a review of _All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of
Meter and Versification_, by Timothy Steele, in _The New Criterion_
(Archives)
http://www.newcriterion.com/
"
The best course, writes Steele, and it is a valuable piece of advice, "is to
treat as an iamb any foot whose second syllable is heavier than the first."
(Following the practice of the Danish philologist Otto Jespersen, Steele in
one section marks lines with the numbers 1 through 4, with 1 identifying the
lightest syllable and 4 the heaviest.) These mutations in stress in
particular, Steele remarks, "indicate how incredibly complex metrical
practice is in comparison to metrical description."
"
I find this distinctly worrying -- I don't know how fair the review is to
Timothy Steele's book, but it seems, here and elsewhere, to reflect a
formalism that isn't "new" but old -- specifically the sort of narrow-minded
metrical provincialism that was sloshing around Britain in the fifties, in
the wake of Philip Larkin and the Movement, when Tragger-Smith (who
popularised those four degrees of stress that Steele apparently draws on, an
idea now pretty much rejected by any competent linguist) was in vogue.
This is an off-the-cuff comment -- I was mooching around, chasing this and
that, and came on the review. Apparently (according to amazon.com), people
who buy books by Timothy Steele also buy books by Derek Attridge (presumably
_Poetic Rhythm : An Introduction_, which I haven't seen, but I do know,
quite well, Attridge's earlier _Rhythms of English Poetry_). I find it
difficult to match the sophistication of Attridge's approach with the
(apparent) naiveté of Steele.
What we seem to be into, here, is a rule-driven metrics rather than an
ear-driven one. While it's possible to write a perfectly good iambics,
without being able to formally 'scan', simply through having +read+ poetry
in iambic pentameter (Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Stevens -- need I go
on?) the reverse doesn't strike me as true.
I wonder where John Donne (or indeed any of the Metaphysicals, or anyone
other than the narrowest of eighteenth century versifiers) would fit in? A
limited and limiting view of tradition ...
A fuzzy late night/early morning post, but I found myself going gulp, gulp,
gulp! as I read the review, and wanted to share my distress.
Robin
Oh, a further snippet:
"
In a note to chapter one, Steele does dispute two erroneous scansions by
Paul Fussell in Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (scansions involving pyrrhics
and spondees), but this is very nearly it for criticism ...
"
If Steele takes such metrically illiterate rubbish as Fussell's Metre&Form
seriously enough to dispute with it, then I have +real+ worries. I know it
had (has?) some status as an "American textbook", but that doesn't make it
any good.
R.
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