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Limping Prosody For those of my readers who haven’t kept up with prosodic history , there is a line of often distinguished thinkers (the bestknown members are Sidney Lanier and Edgar Allen Poe) who have decided, each in their turn, that English-language poetics needs a complete overhaul—and that no one else is qualiAed to do the job. Alan Holder’s sense of isolated zeal, sometimes so passionate as to unbalance his arguments, Ats him admirably for membership in this cranky club. Rethinking Meter is uniAed less by its author’s organizational plan than by his bitter resentment of the generally accepted system of scanning (mapping the sound patterns of) metered poetry. Holder sets out saying that he will “clear the Aeld,” and it’s hard to And a prosodist he doesn’t completely trash in his Arst chapters; indeed, as the author of one book he critiques, I must say I was rather honored to be trashed in such good company. Holder’s bibliography is extremely impressive, and his book takes on an overwhelming amount of material. For all the earlier chapters’ sound and fury, however, they are likely to remain largely unconvincing to the informed reader. Only in the last couple of chapters, when Holder stops criticizing and Anally advances some ideas of his own, does Rethinking Meter become the worthwhile—and indeed the valuable—book that it really is. Holder’s Arst project is to try to discredit the conventional system of scanning by regular rhythmic units, or “feet.” He does this by listing examples of inaccurate scansions from a variety of prosodists, on the one hand, and by critiquing the common explanations of how meter affects a reader, on the other. Neither 157 Review of Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line, by Alan Holder (Bucknell University Press, 1995). Originally appeared in American Book Review (November 1996). of these approaches is particularly persuasive, in spite of the heartfelt annoyance with which Holder intersperses his arguments . Prosody is admittedly a subjective art, and no prosodist would deny making mistakes or Anding occasional lines unscannable —but these exceptions don’t necessarily discredit the vast majority of easily scannable lines. Similarly, no prosodist would deny that accounts of how meter makes you “expect” a certain rhythmic effect, or of how an “ideal” metrical pattern haunts each actual line, are just clumsy attempts to explain the experience of reading metered verse. But these arguments don’t do away with the actuality of meter any more than a discussion of the inaccuracies of color theory does away with the experience of perceiving color. It would probably be fruitless to argue this point, or any other points about traditional prosody, with Holder; he does not disguise the fact that his bottom line, the real reason he wants to discredit traditional prosody, goes far beyond any rational argument . He resents the conventional system of foot-scansion because it “imposes” a uniAed “system” onto various poetic lines. Over and over, the reader of Holder’s Arst four chapters is made aware of the extent of his bitterness over this fact, his sense that the inAnite, natural beauty of the speech patterns that make up the poetic line is being somehow “forced” into unnatural, mechanical foot-patterns by a conspiracy of anal-retentive control freaks. Given the basic weakness of his logical arguments, and the fact that he discusses very little actual poetry, Holder’s continual kvetching makes tedious reading for those not as viscerally threatened by the prevalent system of foot-scansion as he is. This is not to say, however, that his unchecked pique does not give rise to a few truly amusing insults, like “the foot fetishists.” When Holder begins to attack speciAc prosodic approaches, it seems clear that much of his onus against traditional scansion is based on misunderstandings about how the system works. Holder seriously misreads a classic work on the history of prosody, John Thompson’s The Founding of English Meter. Thompson’s book explores the vast changes that took place between George Gascoigne ’s mechanical view of meter as rigid and unvarying, in 1575, and the openness to variation from the metrical norm that accompanied the metrical Buency of Sidney and Shakespeare a half century later. Holder seems not to have read the second half 158 of Thompson’s book; he conBates Thompson’s view of meter with Gascoigne’s, and criticizes Thompson several times for thinking that meter forces the unnatural pronunciation of words...

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