the history of meter 37
troversies over Anglo-Saxon meter and also foreshadows the ways that Anglo-
Saxon “rhythm” would be revived institutionally at the turn of the twentieth
century in the name of stable English national culture. Turner explains (quot-
ing liberally from Bede):
The style of their poetry was as peculiar. It has been much disputed by
what rules or laws the Saxons arranged their poetical phrases. I have ob-
served a passage in the general works of Bede which may end the con-
troversy, by showing that they used no rules at all, but adopted the sim-
pler principle of consulting only the natural love of melody, of which
the human organs of hearing have been made susceptible; and of using
that easy allocation of syllables which pleased the musical ear. In defin-
ing rhythmus Bede says, “It is a modulated composition of words, not
according to the laws of metre, but adapted in the number of its syllables
to the judgment of the ear, as are the verses of our vulgar (or native) poets.
Rhythm may exist without metre, but there cannot be metre without
rhythm, which is thus more clearly defined. Metre is an artificial rule
with modulation; rhythmus is the modulation without the rule. Yet, for
the most part, you may find, by a sort of chance, some rule in rhythm;
but this is not from an artificial government of syllables. It arises be-
cause the sound and the modulation lead to it. The vulgar poets effect
this rustically; the skilful attain it by their skill.” From this passage it is
obvious that Bede’s poetical countrymen wrote their vernacular verses
without any other rule than that of pleasing the ear.^48The first thing to observe here is that the definition of Anglo-Saxon meter was
already a controversy. The rules of even the most native rhythms were not eas-
ily definable, and despite attempts to turn “meter” into a grammar, scholars
disagreed about the best way to read, teach, and analyze English meter. Though
Turner concludes that “pleasing the ear” (Bede’s “musical” ear) was the only
rule, the surge of interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry and grammar in the early
nineteenth century meant that more readers would have been listening to and
perhaps accustoming their own ears to the particular imagined sounds of
Anglo-Saxon accentual-alliterative meters.^49
Though the status of prosody in the grammar book seems far afield of our
more traditional concept of poetics, it has, nonetheless, influenced how we
think about the authority of English versification in the nineteenth century.
The simplification of prosodic discourse and the limitation of complex discus-
sions of prosodic controversies tended to collapse the concept of English pros-
ody into its two most basic parts: an ordering system that had certain laws, and
a system of English laws that are better than classical meter because they give
the poet more freedom and are therefore proudly and identifiably English.
Though most of the prominent English grammarians, or “New Rhetori-