Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Jason David Hall, and: The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Joseph Phelan, and: The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 by Meredith Martin (review)

All of the books under review agree that meter—despite what we have learned from modernism—interests. But what is meter? It cannot be simply conflated with the material stuff of poetry nor can it be dismissed as an abstraction irrelevant to the composition or comprehension of poems. Meter is a curious thing (as Karl Marx observed of his dancing table). Or rather, it is many curious things, for as the authors and contributors to these volumes also agree, meter in the nineteenth century never referred to a single, stable concept. Yopie Prins (who contributes an essay on Alfred Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break” [1842] and its many musical settings to Meter Matters) has argued that Victorians treat meter as an impersonal technology under development, a semi-mechanical means not for capturing but for producing, through a system of word-signs and spaced intervals in printed poetry, the illusion of voice (a fiction best divorced from sound and a psychologically complex speaker). She refers to meter’s impersonal technology as “voice inverse” (Meter Matters 108). Musical settings of Tennyson’s lyric, she argues, please as they elaborate on the “as if” of meter’s music: helping us to read a poem as if it were a song (106). Meter, she suggests, fascinates for its psychological or musical fictions if we recognize them for what they are: a “metrical imaginary that persists in many current discussions about meter and meaning” (108). For Isobel Armstrong, who also considers “Break, Break, Break,” meter is less a technology than a process, a “living form” that is the “collaborative effect of poem and reader” each time a poetic text is performatively actualized in a reader’s physical or mental ear (48). Meter is “the product of a somatic pressure encouraged by the sound system of the poem’s language, abstracted by the mind, and returned to language and the body when the poem is read in real time” (27). While meter itself has neither thought nor feeling, in Armstrong’s Hegelian reading it generates meaning and affect in the interplay between metrical and semantic patterns (two different systems, most interesting when they do not agree) as the poem’s printed language is thought, heard, and felt in the mind of the reader.

Joseph Phelan and Meredith Martin, the authors of the two well-researched and carefully argued monographs under review, address meter as, respectively, medium and discourse. For Phelan, meter—which T. S. Eliot dismissed to send poets back to the study of the rhythms of everyday speech—is simply poetry’s medium, “the amalgam of conventions, traditions and associations which make up the medium (rather than the material) of verse” (180). Phelan sets out to recover the thinking that will allow us to understand how that medium is stretched in productive new (or new/old) directions by poets whose prosodies haven’t been easy for scholars and critics to recognize, let alone appreciate: Robert Southey, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Arthur Hugh Clough, Coventry Patmore, William Morris, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Phelan carefully contextualizes each poet’s experiments within one of two contemporary debates, the possibilities of an English meter that would remake classical hexameter (Southey, Longfellow, Clough), or alternatively, the possibilities for expanding the capacities of English verse by reviving alliterative accentual meter (Morris and Hopkins). Only by understanding what the poets are doing in relation to a particular “substructure of shared metrical knowledge...