the history of meter 39
verse” (“usually used in heroic poetry intermixed with lines of ten syllables”),
and “elegiac” (which could be “appropriate for elegies” but is also “a common
metre for poems of a lighter cast”), Coote seems to throw up his hands at
“lyric”: “[i]n lyric poetry, or that which comprehends odes, sonnets, songs, &c.
various measures are adopted.” Though he goes on to name a few possibilities
for rhyme schemes and accents, he ends his discussion by admitting “the mea-
sure of odes is so variable and irregular, that no determinate rules can be given
for them.” Coote’s “Laws of Verse” only followed the Latin model by using the
word “feet,” but he departed from the standard set forth by the other gram-
mars in favor of attempting to describe English meters based on English poems
themselves. There is a hint, here, with his inclusion of the Anglo-Saxon alpha-
bet and his avoidance of the classical names for the metrical feet that Coote
was leaning toward a potentially more autonomous possibility for En glish
versification.
Grammatical Instability
Though the emergent interest in Anglo-Saxon verse forms subtly influenced
the versification sections of English grammar books, the authority of classical
metrical feet remained prominent in standard grammars until the end of the
nineteenth century. Despite the ascendancy of the classical model, however,
the terms for prosody, meter, and versification were still unstable even in the
most widely circulating and popular grammar textbooks. Lindley Murray’s
best-selling English Grammar sold a staggering sixteen million copies in the
United States and four million in Great Britain. William Woods asserts that
it was Murray’s Grammar that “brought the eighteenth-century emphasis on
correctness and rules into the nineteenth century and established it as the
reigning tradition.”^53 This was, perhaps, the case for the elements of grammar
except prosody. In the case of the metrical aspects of prosody, Murray’s Gram-
mar shows both how the poetics of prosody anticipates the descriptive model
for grammar adopted later in the nineteenth century and how, despite the
descriptive model, the specific terms we use for English meter are historically
contingent.^54 In 1795, the year of Murray’s first edition, “prosody” had two
simple definitions: “the former teaches the true pronunciation of words, com-
prising accent, quantity, emphasis, and cadence, and the latter the laws of ver-
sification.”^55 We can sense, already, how these two definitions are intertwined,
for the laws of versification depend on the very definitions of accent, quantity,
emphasis, and cadence. To give just one example of the volatility of “prosody,”
in the 1810, 1828, and 1839 editions of Murray’s Grammar, pronunciation is
comprised of “accent, quantity, emphasis, pause, and tone.”^56 “Cadence” has
been replaced by “pause” and “tone.” In elocutionary terms, emphasis meant
raising the voice while cadence meant lowering the voice, but in the later edi-
tions the falling voice is replaced by “pause,” which has a spatial counterpart in