the history of meter 41
printing of formulations that stress instinct in performance, holding onto the
shadow of elocution and projecting forward to Pound’s desire for a “natural
rhythm.” The abstraction of “feet” in the English grammar book elided con-
troversies over what went into their composition (accent, quantity, emphasis)
and the particular interpretive problems that each of these issues presented.
In another example, Murray’s Grammar included Sheridan’s now familiar
definition of English versification translated from Latin quantities into ac-
cents: “In English, syllables are divided into accented and unaccented; and the
accented syllables being as strongly distinguished from the unaccented, by
the peculiar stress of the voice upon them, are equally capable of marking the
movement, and pointing out the regular paces of the voice, as the long sylla-
bles were, by their quantity, among the Romans.”^61 Murray stops there, but
Sheridan continues, complaining that “the whole modern theory of quantity
will be found a mere chimera.”^62 By leaving out what his predecessor knew, that
the “theory” of quantity would obscure a student’s eventual understanding of
accent, Murray gestures to the Roman genealog y of English verse as if to give
it a high-cultural precedent, but does not reprint Sheridan’s warning that a
deeper investigation into quantity would produce a “mere chimera.” In fact,
Sheridan’s choice of words was incredibly apt for the study of English prosody
more generally: the myth of the chimera involved, of course, a monster put
together from various animal parts, much the same as late nineteenth-century
prosodic historians would argue that En glish prosody was made up of various
linguistic influences. Likewise, a chimera is a something hoped for and
dreamed of, but seldom achieved. The hope for and dream of a stable system
for English prosody, and the buried fear that it might not be achievable was, as
I argue specifically in the following chapters, the engine that drove the study of
prosody into a kind of obsolescence.
While Lindley Murray certainly helped popularize and circulate (though
he did not originate) the idea that English poetic feet had both accent and
quantity, he failed to define either. Versification must follow pronunciation
both literally (students must get through accent, quantity, and emphasis in the
basic pronunciation of words before they get to “versification” at the end) and
metaphorically. The “quantity” of a syllable is defined simply as “the time
which is occupied in pronouncing it.”^63 Rather than admit that English speak-
ers had no system for quantity, Murray made it seem as if what we did have was
far better than what the ancients had. That is, he turned a complicated chi-
mera into a statement of linguistic superiority: the English had “all that the
ancients had, and something which they had not.”^64 This additional compo-
nent, Murray asserted, was that we had duplicate feet to match the ancient
meters, but “with such a difference, as to fit them for different purposes, to be
applied at our pleasure.” Our accent allowed English feet pleasure and free-
dom, as opposed to those fixed Greek and Latin feet. Further, Murray contin-
ued, “[e]very [English] foot has, from nature, powers peculiar to itself; and it