the history of meter 45
of and arguments over the definitions of terms were all part of prosodic dis-
course in the nineteenth century. Each writer presented a different definition,
term, or even marking system for English verse form, and scholars would do
well to examine the vast and nearly unexplored archives of the thousands of
other schoolmasters and mistresses, linguists, prosodists, and poets who
weighed in on the question of English meter.
In this way, prosodists created the field of prosody, counting and account-
ing for each other’s theories, disagreeing with them, and putting forth their
corrections, adjustments, and improvements, both of each other and, in a se-
ries of revised and reprinted editions, of themselves.
Prosodic discussions were also transatlantic. Lindley Murray and Goold
Brown were American by birth. Vandenhoff was born in England but moved
to the United States in 1842, where he met Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he
co-wrote A Plain System of Elocution.^77 Poe himself published the “Rationale
of Verse” in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1848, and Emerson’s essay
“The Poet” was published in his collected essays in 1844. The desire to define
English national culture against various competing communities or nations—
Scottish, Irish, Indian, American, German—influenced and determined
certain aspects of the global circulation of meters at end of the nineteenth
century in England; the establishment of English literature as a discipline
of study at Oxford and Cambridge created an even greater need to provide
an answer to the perceived conflicts and controversies about English meter.
If the metrical histories of England used meter to order England’s past,
then histories of meter emerged toward the late nineteenth century that at-
tempted to justify their systems by presenting evolutionary narratives of Eng-
land’s progress, histories of the English language, and metrical systems that
could adequately teach younger generations about English poetry in the new
century.
The discourse was often patriotic and bombastic. Robert Bridges’s book
Milton’s Prosody, published alongside a reprint of the late William Johnson
Stone’s treatise On the Use of Classical Metres in English,^78 sold out its first print
run and Milton’s Prosody was revised and reprinted in 1921.^79 The German,
Jakob Schipper, who not only wrote about the form of English meter but had
also written a three-volume history of versification, published Englische
Metrik^80 in 1888 and the much-called-for abridged edition appeared in 1895
as Grundriss der englischen metrik (Wein, 1895). The classicist Joseph Mayor
published the first edition of Chapters on English Metre in 1886 and the re-
vised, second edition in 1901. Thomas Stewart Omond published English
Hexameter Verse and English Verse-Structure in 1897, and in 1903 brought out
English Metrists and A Study of Metre.^81 This is only a small example of the field
that prosodists and poets were carving out for English poetics in the late nine-
teenth century. In each of these, the history of prosody is bound to the history
of England, and prosodic discourse becomes a contentious battlefield.