Remembering Klopstock's Mitausdruck

"Wer kennt ihn heute?"¹

July, 1805: The Edinburgh Review, one of the most influential magazines of political and literary criticism in nineteenth-century Great Britain, published a review of An Inquiry into the Principles of Harmony in Language (1804), a book on modern and classical versification written by William Mitford. Mitford, an historian of Ancient Greece whom Lord Byron once called "perhaps the best of all modern historians whatsoever,"² had published a first edition of the book anonymously in 1774. By 1804, Mitford's Inquiry had become a comprehensive treatise on the mechanics of poetic meter. His long-standing interest in the relationship between poetry and music led him to advocate for the organization of verse based on tonality (that is, musical pitch produced by accents or stresses) rather than quantification (counting the number of syllables by measuring their length). While the mechanics of Greek and Latin offer clear rules regarding the harmony of poetic language, Mitford wrote, "for the very different harmony of English verse no rule could be obtained."³ His championing of spoken English as a poetic language for "the cause of English letters" (Mitford n.p.) was, in this way, a contribution to one of the most debated questions of English prosody at the time: should English poets measure their verse by sound or by syllable?

The author of the review was William Herbert, a botanist, politician, scholar of poetry, politician, and clergyman. Best known for his work on hybridization and the evolution of bulbous plants, Herbert also cultivated a keen interest in poetry. He had just published a curious Greek translation of Ossian's Latin poem "Darthula" in 1801, followed by a selection of Icelandic and old Scandinavian poetry in English translation.⁴ In his lengthy review of Mitford's book, Herbert passionately contested Mitford's argument that Latin verse is "regulated solely by certain dispositions of quantities,"⁵ arguing that it ignores the importance of accents as a means of regulating classical meter. This was the starting point of Herbert's somewhat bitter general assessment of modern verse, especially of the kind written by poets who confuse accent and quantity and as a result produce "faulty" poetry.

Among the worst offenders of such verse, Herbert wrote, was Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. "Klopstock, whose reputation is perhaps undeservedly great," Herbert wrote, "has prefixed to his Messiah a treatise upon that disgusting abortion, which is called the German hexameter."⁶ Modern reinventions of the hexameter such as Klopstock's, he argued, were based on the entirely false belief that Latin meter is regulated by quantities when, in fact, one can find numerous rules deriving from Latin accentuation. Though there is a great deal to be said about whether the German hexameter is, in fact, an abortion, what interests me in this essay is the claim Herbert makes about Klopstock—or rather the relationship between the generality of a statement such as the one about Klopstock's "undeservedly great reputation" and the particularity of the grounds on which he is rejected.

At the time Herbert published his review on An Inquiry—two years after Klopstock's death in 1803—German literature was beginning to make waves among British poets and writers. In the 1790s, William Taylor had published English translations of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), Christoph Martin Wielands's Göttergespräche (Dialogues of the Gods), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), and Gottfried August Bürger's Lenore (Lenora), contributing to the enthusiastic reception of German Romanticism among British poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge.⁷ William Herbert observed "the extraordinary hexameter-mania [that] had lately pervaded Germany"⁸ with concerned disdain. He saw the problem with both Mitford's theory of versification and Klopstock's hexameter not so much as a matter of choosing accentual verse over quantitative meters, but as a misguided linguistic and poetic understanding of how accentuation and quantification work both in Latin and Greek and in English. "All this be nonsense, as unmixed as ever flowed from the pen of man, it deserves some notice," Herbert continued, "as having...