Victorian Poetry

5

YOPIE PRINS

Victorian meters

In Victorian poetry we see a proliferation of poetic forms, departing from
eighteenth-century heroic couplets and neoclassical odes, and further devel-
oping the Romantic revival of ballads, sonnets, and blank verse into
increasingly refined and rarefied metrical experiments. Alongside the
English fashion in Italian sonnets, French stanzaic forms, Germanic
accentual verse, and various kinds of dialect poetry - as well as a
fascination with the literary recreation of songs, ballads, hymns, refrains,
and other musical forms - there was a return to meters inspired by ancient
Greek and Latin poetry. Victorian prosody - the study of meter - also
became increasingly elaborate: in addition to counting the number of
stresses or syllables per line, as in the tradition of English accentual-syllabic
verse, prosodists tried to measure the length (or "quantity") of syllables in
English according to the tradition of classical quantitative verse. The
publication of historical surveys and theoretical treatises on meter rose
dramatically throughout the Victorian period, ranging from Edwin Guest's
A History of English Rhythms (1838, revised 1882) to George Saintsbury's
History of English Prosody (1906-10), and peaking mid-century with the
New Prosody of Coventry Patmore and his contemporaries, and again at
the end of the century, with the circulation of numerous polemical pamph-
lets and scholarly debates about meter. 1 What are the implications of this
preoccupation with form? In my own history of Victorian meters, I will
begin telling the long and short of that story.
Nineteenth-century theories of meter are often considered antiquated by
twentieth-century readers, as metrical analysis has been reformulated on a
linguistic model and traditional foot-scansion called into question. 2 Rather
than setting aside Victorian metrical theory as an obsolete science,
however, let us take more seriously John Hollander's claim that "prosodical
analysis is a form of literature in itself." 3 It is a literary genre that raises
important historical and theoretical questions about the interpretation of
poetry, beyond a merely technical, seemingly ahistorical approach to the

89