Uncommon Measures: Emily Dickinson's Subversive Prosody

Discussion of Emily Dickinson's metrics has been remarkably uniform for a poet whose practice routinely suggests something other than familiar manipulation of metrical design.¹ Thomas Johnson's reading, which has had canonical force in Dickinson criticism since the 1960s,² presents Dickinson as a "self-taught" prosodist who garnered "a beginner's lesson in metrics" from her father's copy of Isaac Watts' hymns and who based her metrical designs in "English hymnology" (84-5). Brita Lindberg-Seyersted follows Johnson and posits a "metrical tension" between the standard forms of the hymn and the "speech rhythms" of Dickinson's verse. Readers such as Martha Winburn England and David Porter read hymnal form symbolically, as a code for traditional authorities against which Dickinson troped her ironic and critical difference. A.R.C. Finch reads Dickinson's occasional use of iambic pentameter as a code of patriarchal authority against which Dickinson's use of popular tetrameter and trimeter is figural. There has been some resistance to reading the poetry as hymn. Anthony Hecht argues that hymnal tradition cannot account for the poems' rhetorical structures, as he aligns the poetry with scripture, riddle, and mystical poetics. Judy Jo Small offers a trenchant critique of canonical readings of Dickinson's metrics as hymnal (41-8), arguing, in part, that the Common Meter endemic to English hymns was also widely used by the romantics, Wordsworth employing Common Meter more frequently than any other metric (44).

In any case, Johnson's original assessment was based on an assumption about Dickinson's education: hymnals provided a "beginner's lesson." But no well-educated person in the nineteenth century would have needed hymnals for a beginner's course in metrics. Metrics were part of a basic education, taught, as had been the case in antiquity, as part of grammar. Lindley Murray's English Grammar, one of the most widely used textbooks in the nineteenth century, defines "ENGLISH GRAMMAR" as "the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety. It is divided into four parts, VIZ. ORTHOGRAPHY, ETYMOLOGY, SYNTAX, and PROSODY" (13).³ Not surprisingly, given the classical roots of European criticism, prosody in English developed through Graeco-Roman theory based on the rhythms of Greek and Latin. This tradition was recodified, in 1959, by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's seminal essay on "The Concept of Meter." Wimsatt and Beardsley developed the concept of "metrical tension" between "accent" and "stress," meter and rhythm, that organizes Lindberg-Seyersted's analysis of Dickinson.

David Perkins' study of nineteenth-century prosody and the scansions that romantic poets themselves created reflects the classical roots of English prosody. Nineteenth-century prosodists described metrics in terms equally well applicable to Latin and English verse, interpreting English "accent" as comparable to Greek and Latin "quantity." This conceptual ambivalence supported the development of a Romantic, expressive approach to metrical analysis. For example, Coleridge named and scanned "I hear a voice pealing loud triumph today" as "Amphibrach tetrameter catalectic": x/x x/x x/x x/ (Perkins 3). Perkins suggests that Coleridge might have scanned in irregular, iambic pentameter, but Coleridge might also have scanned in regular anapests: x/ xx/ xx/ xx/ . Anapests were, and remain, more widely recognized than amphibrachs as a basis for English meter. However, no single words are divided across two feet in Coleridge's scansion. They must be so divided in the anapestic scansion. Scansion in amphibrachs is more faithful to an expressive fusion of meter and rhythm, in preserving the rhetorical integrity of individual words. Wimsatt and Beardsley would define such a fusion as a failure to understand the necessary difference, and tension, between meter and rhythm (596).

In addition to its roots in classical tradition, English prosody has been organized by a host of assumptions about language that have varied over time. Dennis Taylor's introductory chapter on Victorian prosody offers a succinct summary of that variation: "In each [historical epoch] the metrical law...