The Strict Metrical Tradition: Variations in the Literary Iambic Pentameter from Sidney and Spenser to Matthew Arnold by David Keppel-Jones (review)

348 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 ode, as well as rhyming doggerel and the riddle. The examples are light and popular; Lee isn=t embarrassed to note that some of his pieces are failed experiments. In fact, Building Bicycles in the Dark doesn=t at all leave us in the dark about how to put together well-constructed pieces of writing. It might well attract young readers or other amateurs of creative writing and give them new and manageable challenges to try out; it could be pleasant reading for anyone who likes playing with language. The book, however, isn=t as practical a guide to writing as its subtitle promises. It is disappointing in its thin treatment of prose, giving intriguing but vague advice such as >be true to the tale in the telling.= Compared to forty-two pages of exercises and examples on writing poetry, there are only fifteen for activities on writing prose. The second paragraph in the section >Where Poetry and Prose Meet= asks readers to write their own stories starting from a list of opening lines. The lines turn out to come from seven passages of Lee=s own prose poetry, which are quoted in the next eight pages. The book has nothing to say to writers of academic prose, though many of them would also benefit from advice on idea-generating processes and invitations to use language expressively. Lee=s comments on preparing work for publication are also less than practical. The need to write a clear, concise cover letter is mentioned at least twice without more detailed guidance on content. The list of references on the publishing process does not include any websites, even for the standard writers= associations. Most bothersome is the volume=s poor editing. Lee=s reiteration of the need for a >perfect= final draft is belied by his (or his editors=) lack of attention to such details as spelling and especially punctuation. It=s hard to keep enjoying the pleasures of language when one must fill in missing words, try not to notice misspelling of other authors= names, and move commas around to reflect intended sentence structures. That aspect of the book turns readers into oldfashioned prescriptive writing teachers, whereas its other qualities remind us that learning to write can be pleasurable, stimulating, and satisfying. (MARGARET PROCTER) David Keppel-Jones. The Strict Metrical Tradition: Variations in the Literary Iambic Pentameter from Sidney and Spenser to Matthew Arnold McGill-Queen=s University Press. xii, 280. $75.00 What happened to English poetry in the early 1590s? How did the idiosyncratic clunkiness of the preceding decades= less inspired verse, sometimes quaint and sometimes ludicrous, become transformed into the supple medium that became a prosodic lingua franca for the next three centuries? David Keppel-Jones=s book sets out to answer this question by examining the nature and development of the >newly perfected technique= that invested the age=s iambic pentameter. Keppel-Jones argues that the new humanities 349 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 technique centred on the ways in which the alternating stress-pattern of a line=s syllables could be varied, and that this technique initially evolved in order to accommodate adjective-noun combinations such as >strong enemy,= >sad troubles,= or >false shows,= with their clusters of stressed syllables, into a poetic line that depended on a regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Chaucer had it easy, because the sounded -e ending of so many Middle English adjectives turned them into disyllabic words with conveniently unstressed syllables coming before the nouns they modified. Once these adjectives became monosyllabic, however, they threw a monkey wrench into the line=s iambic flow. An early solution devised by Scots poets such as Henryson and Dunbar involved letting the adjective close a regular iambic foot and the noun open an inverted foot, as in Henryson=s >For greit sorrow his hart to brist was boun.= However, this solution (called >abrupt inversion= by Keppel-Jones) runs the risk of >endangering the iambic pattern= by inviting misreadings of the line as sounding four beats B two anapests and two iambs...