How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper
Thomas A. Cable · Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020
Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction, " an essay that summarized and crystallized an infl uential approach to poetic form. As the authors insisted, their essay off ered little new but presented common wisdom that had become obscured or forgotten and needed restatement.Yet their clarity, succinctness, and wit made it arguably the high-water mark of New Critical approaches to meter and one of the most important metrical statements of the twentieth century.It continues to be a point of reference and departure.Th e collaboration of a literary critic (Wimsatt) and a philosopher (Beardsley) resulted naturally enough in two main strands of argument refl ecting their disciplines, although it is clear that the authors shared literary and philosophical ideas.As for the literary, their taxonomy of the history of English poetic form is a wonderfully clear description of the two main traditions of English prosody.Th e fi rst comprises the old "strong-stress" medieval meters (Beowulf and Piers Plowman), aspects of which have been sporadically revived, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Th e second comprises the "syllable-stress" meters (especially iambic pentameters and tetrameters from Chaucer to the present).Pedagogically, the taxonomy works neatly in surveys of British and American poetry even as its historical and theoretical ideas have been rejected and superseded.