The Rise and Fall of Meter

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The Rise and Fall oF MeTeR ...

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The Rise and Fall of Meter Poetry and English National Culture, 1860– meredith martin Princeton University Press Princeton & ...

Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey ...

FOR My BROTHER ...

First of all it is expedient to get rid of the word Poetry. —Robert Bridges, 1922 ...

vii Contents ...

Introduction: The Failure of Meter Acknowledgments ix Modern Instability Metrical Communities Meter as Culture A Note on Histor ...

ix acknowledgments This book is the result of years of conversation, consultation, and collabora- tion with many friends and s ...

x Acknowledgments Gikandi, Jeremy Braddock, Caroline Levine, Veronica Alfano, Evan Kindley, Gregory Londe, Amelia Worsley, Jacky ...

< The Rise and Fall oF MeTeR > ...

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1 Chapter 1: The History of Meter When he walked over the meadows He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm. —T. S. Eliot, fr ...

2 introduction their relationship to the changing nation-state. But English meter presented the poet with an array of choices an ...

introduction 3 and Georgian poets were a yawn. The movements associated with the experi- mental avant-garde, retroactively named ...

4 introduction than mere form, is what makes it interesting ; that expression and allusion are key; and that meter is old-fashio ...

introduction 5 emerges as a way for poets to mediate between various publics, broadly con- ceived. For instance, a poet could us ...

6 introduction sociated with English national culture. The proliferation of metrical discourse from the late eighteenth to the e ...

introduction 7 cably bound to the rise of the working classes and to the English empire, as is legible in Macaulay’s 1835 “Minut ...