42 chapter 1
is upon the knowledge and right application of these powers, that the pleasure
and effect of numbers chiefly depend.” Whereas the terms “cadence,” “pause,”
and “tone” are part of the debate, the problem of metrical feet in English con-
cerns those three seemingly nonvariable terms of versification: “accent,” “quan-
tity,” and “emphasis.” The terms themselves appear again and again but, as we
can see in Sheridan and Murray, the ways that prosodists and poets defined
and used these terms varied widely, and the various ways that English readers
and poets understood these prosodic terms was what identified them as Eng-
lish. The English feet, then, to the average student coming across Murray’s
best-selling grammar book, had authority from classical meters (not exactly
defined, but there nonetheless). Mastery of the peculiar and particular powers
of these “feet” would allow us to understand a more specialized kind of “Eng-
lish meter.” We can see how the obfuscating tendency of these constantly re-
vised textbooks created the market for the definitive guide to English meter
that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century.
In addition to the revision and repetition of metrical terms, another of my
concerns here is how certain ideas about prosodic form are stabilized by the
contingencies of pedagog y. That is, the simplification, for pedagogical pur-
poses, of the historical disagreements about certain aspects of English meter
masks the ideologies of improvement within the Latin grammar and presents
English meter as a self-evident truth. The self-evidence of English meter’s clas-
sical roots took on an even broader ideological meaning at the turn of the
twentieth century, as we will see in chapter three. In one early example of what
will be promoted as a metrical dogma toward the end of the century, we can
see even Murray’s abridged grammar efface and simplify the complex history
of English meter. When Murray’s grammar was abridged, as it often was, the
“versification” section of “prosody” states the following : “versification is the
arrangement of a certain number and variety of syllables, according to certain
l a w s .”^65 There was no reference to problematic accent, quantity, or emphasis
here; versification was simply “arrangement” according to law. This was from
an 1816 edition, intended for a “younger class of learners” who should be pro-
tected from the more technical aspects of English versification, a pedagogical
impulse that would take root in the late nineteenth century.^66 The “certain
laws” of versification and meter are English laws, which should be justification
enough for following them.
Metrical Instability
In addition to the political changes and social changes I outlined above, schol-
ars questioned the widely held belief that Greek and Latin should be the only
languages studied in earnest by the educated elite. Though the true devalua-
tion of Greek and Latin did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century
(and even then it was a slow fade), the discoveries and revivals of eighteenth-