204 chapter 6
various English meters. I realize, as I hope you do as well, that I cannot account
for all varieties of metrical discourse in the nineteenth century. Rather, I am
learning to ask, when poets were inventing or experimenting with prosodic
systems, with what else, in addition to the measure of the line, were they wres-
tling? Why was the question of English meter even a question? How did meter
permeate discussions of religion, education, psycholog y, and disciplinary for-
mation in general? What does “meter” mean if we refuse to take for granted
that our traditional understanding of iambs and trochees is an artificial, cul-
tural construct? The “rise and fall” of meter I narrate here certainly shows the
broad sweep of excitement about defining English meter in a time of disciplin-
ary formation and change (the decline of classics, the rise of “English”), but as
these disciplines were also calling up metrical narratives in new ways at differ-
ent moments, what meter “means” changes from one community to the next
at each moment. “Meter” and metrical discourse is constantly rising and fall-
ing ; that is, its status can be “on the rise” in one community just as it is falling
out of favor in another, depending on what associations these communities are
making, and what battles are being played out and for what reasons. But just
because forms or conventions might be best understood as unstable, it does
not mean that we should not honor them anyway; realizing and gesturing to
an inherent instability at the heart of “formal” discourse does not close the
aesthetic possibilities of a poem, shuttling it into cultural studies and consid-
erations of material culture. Rather, considering the political and aesthetic di-
mensions of poetry’s instability might allow us to look closely at the places
where forms seem “fixed,” asking why that is the case. Paying attention to the
historical contingencies of poetic form at the same time that we attend to the
poem both broadens and deepens our engagement with poems in/and history
and also gives us the opportunity to question the assumptions that we make as
readers when we encounter texts.
All of this is to say, my historical approach to prosody is to provide a more
nuanced picture of the formal contingencies of the poem at a specific moment,
while also remaining aware of why we are invested in this particular practice.
The narrative of competing metrical forms has multiple strands that apply to a
variety of cultural domains: our associations between certain metrical forms
and certain social classes, between metrical tropes and gender, and between
perceived metrical stability and perceived institutional or ideologically com-
plex hierarchies of power (the church, the domestic sphere). Providing con-
current formal histories—incomplete though they may be—to these genera-
tive allegorical readings of prosodic form, are important parts of the practice
of historical prosody. Historical prosody is by no means limited to meter;
meter is just one part of it, and much work needs to be done on pronunciation,
rhyme, rhythm, alliteration,^21 and so on. Likewise, work beyond the prosody
of the poem toward the history of formal circulation can, should, and has re-
cently begun to extend beyond England and into the colonial world, as well as