Overhearing Nineteenth-Century Prosody

There is something curiously restless, even restive, about nineteenth-century poetry. It is a time of abundant formal innovation, expressed through outcrops of sheer originality, but also through the recuperation and refashioning of long-established forms, both ‘native’ (accentual, alliterative) and ‘foreign’ (medieval French, classical). It is also a time of urgent uncertainty around the systems for classifying and analysing verse forms. In private musings and exchanges (diaries, journals, letters), and in the proliferation of published essays and treatises on the subject, the recherché issue of versification comes to excite widespread and impassioned interest. Poets, readers, and scholars have always attended to matters of verse form, but the debates on prosody that play out through the nineteenth century are, in volume and vigour, without precedent in English literary history. There is clearly much more at stake than merely artisanal correctness or aesthetic preference. As an academic discourse and a feature of poetic craft, prosody refracts the myriad cultural anxieties of the day, including everything from print culture to philology to the politics of empire.

Today, these rich and strange significances lie more than a century out of earshot, and may only be made audible again through an act of historical recovery. But what kind of recovery is possible and desirable? In explaining the cultural valency of lapis lazuli in fifteenth-century Italy, Michael Baxandall returned his readers to Quattrocento painting with fresh eyes, revealing how its colour arrested contemporary viewers not only for its vivid blueness – as it lights up this robe, or that night sky – but also for its associated cost and rarity as a pigment mined in Afghanistan and imported through Venice.¹ To acknowledge the accents of conspicuous consumption that distinguish synthetic cobalt blue from the exorbitantly priced and extravagantly sourced ultramarine of lapis lazuli is, however, to register in self-conscious and scholarly terms what earlier viewers would have felt immediately and intuitively. It is like explaining a joke, the vitality of which is lost precisely at the moment of paraphrase. Something of the same applies when parsing the implications of nineteenth-century versifying. That act of recovery may return us with fresh ears to the period’s poems and the debates around their form, but insofar as our habitus of hearing is irredeemably modern, recovery may only ever be partial, at a remove. Or rather, to adapt J. S. Mill’s apophthegm, the ‘music’ and ‘verse cultures’ of nineteenth-century poetry cannot now be heard at all, only ‘overhead’.

Both the books under review attempt this act of sympathetic eavesdropping, and, generally, succeed very well. Where Joseph Phelan’s study is usefully comprehensive in its sweep, Jason Hall’s collection of twelve essays by different hands offers a scattered survey that is no less satisfying in its avowed opportunism, and is indeed in some ways more so for being purposely frayed at the edges of its conspectus (taking the ‘long nineteenth century’). The principal achievement of Phelan’s study is in overturning the erroneous view of nineteenth-century prosody as a steady progress from the bonds of formal strictness towards the liberty of the ‘New Prosody’ and ‘free verse’. Phelan replaces that backward-looking narrative with a subtle account of nineteenth-century metrical experimentation, which was productive even (or especially) where it looks to us, in twenty-first-century retrospect, most like a series of dead ends or false starts. This reconstruction is managed on several fronts: arguing for the paradox of freedom in verse (that metrical ‘bonds’ may enable rather than inhibit creative expression); demonstrating the extent to which prosodic theory shaped as well as reflected poetic practice; and exploring the range, overlap, and conflicts between those theories and practices.

Phelan’s story is an important one, and well told. It is, however, hard to shake off the sense that his approach is, simply...