the history of meter 35
Some of this uncertainty was evident in the construction of grammar books
and the place of prosody, meter, and versification within them. Commonly,
historical grammars were divided into four sections: orthography, etymolog y,
syntax, and prosody (perhaps moving down the scale of most easily standard-
ized to least). In many nineteenth-century grammars, “prosody” was further
divided into “pronunciation, utterance, figures, and versification.” Doubly
marginalized, “prosody” was the last part of the traditional grammar book,
and “versification,” which literary scholars often (and some would argue con-
fusedly^37 ) equate with “prosody,” was the fourth and final definition of that
word.^38 The relegation of “prosody” to the end of grammar books from the
late eighteenth century through the beginning of the nineteenth shows that,
despite, or perhaps because of, the nervousness about standard pronuncia-
tion that accelerated toward the end of the century, the study of spelling, his-
tory, and ordering of words took precedence over their pronunciation. Or
rather, “grammar books” were prescriptive, whereas the quite distinct guides
to elocution and rhetoric were meant as aids to individual performance, and
“prosody” bore traces of both of those fields, as well as the quite distinct
model of the “poet’s handbook.”^39 This tension between allowing or elimi-
nating individuation in performance often lurked behind the prosody wars
in the late nineteenth century, and is the root of our contemporary inabil-
ity to decide whether meter is essentially a textual form or a guide to vocal
performance.
Within the section “prosody,” the subsection “versification” is nearly an ap-
pendix, evidence of the way that versification, as a field, was either so simpli-
fied as to provide only the rudiments of verse form (and even these were differ-
ent from book to book) or so technical that it required a treatise or manual all
to itself.^40 The uncertain and marginalized status of meter and versification in
the study of grammar is an important reason why so many scholars of poetics
found themselves with differing opinions on the matter—the simple fact is
that the authors of grammar books not only did not know what to do with
versification as a subsection of grammar, but that in attempting to find a way
to turn the study of versification into a kind of grammar, and thus provide it
with rules and standards, they presented the topic as if it were a discipline.
Though prosody and versification appeared as an afterthought in these books
and eventually disappeared entirely, the tensions and disagreements over their
aims and uses were evident in the way that a single grammar book changed its
approach to them over the course of the nineteenth century.^41 In attempting to
standardize and simplify the rules of English versification and meter, these
grammar books prove the desire for a stable system at the same time that their
constant revisions belie the instability of “prosody” as a subject. Could “pros-
ody” at once provide a certain amount of discipline (like a grammar and
within the grammar book), while at the same time reaching the status of a
“grammar” with standards all its own?