Mechanized Metrics: From Verse Science to Laboratory Prosody, 1880-1918

From roughly the 1880s on, a methodical verse "science" was beginning to assert itself. Gripped by the thought of articulating an objective, fact-based metrics, poetry scientists brought to bear on the traditional verse-line principles of observation and, later, on full-blown experimental practices—not to mention a curious array of instrumentation. By the turn of the century, metrical verse was being subjected to a rigorous measurement regime, which employed techniques and apparatuses derived from the new disciplines of experimental physiology and psychology. Proponents of this newly mechanized metrics pitched themselves enthusiastically into the turn-of-the-century prosody fray, believing they could resolve, once and for all, some of the fundamental dilemmas of versification.