Prosody: Alternative Histories

archived

What are the historical stakes of prosody, and why should we ask? ‘Prosody’ refers both to the patterning of language in poetry and to the formal study of that patterning.

More
Reduced to Rhyme: Contemporary Doggerel
By
David Caplan

Hip hop suggests that doggerel can achieve a surprising flexibility, ranging from the comic to the serious, from the delicate to the vulgar. It would be a mistake, though, to say the technique determines the result. 

Metricalness and Rhythmicalness: What Our Ear Tells Our Mind
By
Reuven Tsur
Tsur suggests that a reader’s rhythmical performance of complex lines (i.e., lines in which the linguistic pattern and the versification pattern diverge) may be regarded as a problem-solving activity that makes the conflicting patterns perceptible.
'Imperfectly Civilized': Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form
By
Meredith Martin
Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome have fallen prey to Matthew Arnold’s 1861 dismissive and damning assessment: “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all. Arnold’s dismissal appears in his own cultural translation project – his lectures on translating Homer argue against using ballad meters as the vehicle for popularizing Homer’s greatness – and Arnold’s influential views have effectively removed Macaulay’s poems and their paratextual materials from the literary map of the nineteenth century. This essay explores what is at stake in such a critical erasure and shows why and how these erasures have shaped our contemporary understanding of poetic form.
The Science of Prosody, Circa 1677
By
Courtney Weiss Smith

Different scientific ideas about nature, minds, bodies, and sounds inspired different prosodic theories and practices.

After Scansion: Visualizing, Deforming, and Listening to Poetic Prosody
By
Marit MacArthur and Lee Miller

Scansion, for generations of American students, has been the dominant method of studying prosody in poetry. How and why did this happen? What if scansion had never become dominant? What alternative methods for understanding poetic prosody have been passed over?

Response
By
Juliana Spahr

I have never really understood prosody. It has always felt like some sort of coded speech that only those who were well trained in the tradition understood. It felt for many years as if there were some who had prosody so deep in their blood that even when they were merely two cells, it beat within those two cells and then as their cells divided, the understanding was built into their body cell by cell and then it came to define how their heart beat. My heart seemed to beat otherwise.

How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper
By
Thomas Cable
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay illustrated what was once again a central rift in English prosody of the past two centuries, between timers and stressers.

My Colloquies are shareables: Curate personal collections of blog posts, book chapters, videos, and journal articles and share them with colleagues, students, and friends.

My Colloquies are open-ended: Develop a Colloquy into a course reader, use a Colloquy as a research guide, or invite participants to join you in a conversation around a Colloquy topic.

My Colloquies are evolving: Once you have created a Colloquy, you can continue adding to it as you browse Arcade.