208 notes to chapter 1
rative was promoted and disseminated by schoolmistresses in the classroom and by the
female authors who wrote the majority of English grammar books in the nineteenth
century. Poets like Alice Meynell, Mary Coleridge, and Jessie Pope also participated in
a discourse that promoted the concept of English meter’s preexistence in the heart-
beats and footsteps of particularly English bodies, a discourse, I argue, that escalates
and is articulated in a particularly nationalistic way at the turn of the twentieth
c entur y.
- Doyle, English and Englishness, 19.
- Beer, Open Fields; Dowling , Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de
Siècle; Mugglestone, Lost for Words. - Hugh Blair, Lectures on Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, 227.
- Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, 3.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Abbott, ed., The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, 231.
- See Armstrong, Victorian Poetry; Prins, “Victorian Meters,” 89–113; Cavitch,
“Stephen Crane’s Refrain,” 33–54; Hughes The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian
Poetry; and especially Jamison, Poetics en Passant. - Levine, “Formal Pasts and Formal Possibilities in English Studies,” 1241–56.
- In Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody, Taylor begins to reveal the complexity
of Victorian metrical criticism. Though focused primarily on Hardy’s verse forms, the
early chapters argue for the “abstraction” of meter into a system or “law” against which
the “freedom” of spoken language, with its various unmeasured quantities, was in ten-
sion. Markley’s Stateliest Measures reveals Tennyson’s classical metrical experiments in
English were meant to evoke a kind of national Hellenism.
Chapter 1: The History of Meter- Enfield, The Speaker.
- Guillory, “Mute Inglorious Miltons,” 100.
- Ibid., 101.
- Nonconforming Protestants, but also Quakers, Catholics, and Jews.
- Rule V, Enfield, The Speaker, 7.
- Walker, Elements of Elocution, 263.
- “Prosodic regularity forces the ordering of the perceiver’s mind so that it may be
in a condition to receive the ordered moral matter of the poem, just as, in ethics and
religion, a conscious regularizing of principles and even of daily habits is the necessary
condition for the growth of piety” (Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century
England, 43). - Burt, A Metrical Epitome of the History of England Prior to the Reign of George the
First, vii. - It is distinct, too from the “metrical romances” of earlier centuries, romances that
were being translated and circulated in the nineteenth century. For more on the popu-
larity of the metrical romance in the early nineteenth century, see St. Clair, The Read-
ing Nation in the Romantic Period. - Cf. Prins, “Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexam-
eter Mania.”