Steele uses the stress numbers only to indicate that, in an iambic line,
not every stressed syllable is equally stressed and that not every
unstressed syllable is is equally unstressed. There are two chapters on
metrical variation and substitution. As he says in a post to Eratoshere
( a public forum so I think it's fine to quote it here):
"We’re accustomed to fourth-generation vers-libristes who imagine that
to write in meter is to forsake personal rhythm. But another
tendency--one to which we who are interested in meter are perhaps
sometimes prone--is to forget that there are all sorts of rhythmical
potentials within meter. One does not have to write ka BOOM, ka BOOM, ka
BOOM, etc"
The full discussion is here:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/Forum19/HTML/000038.html
BTW, the site is so heavily java-scripted and otherwise over-designed
that it is nearly impossible to use without a broadband connection and a
fast machine.
But I do think that Steele, along with some of the other New Formalists,
is too iambi-centric, as I have already indicated back-channel to Robin.
On Tuesday, July 17, 2001, at 09:48 PM, Robin Hamilton wrote:
> 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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