Metre in the Middle Distance

Summary

Let us begin with a delicious pedagogical observation by Andrew DuBois. ‘Still today’, he writes, ‘with the supposed decline of New Criticism as institutional practice, it is not uncommon at even the highest levels of undergraduate education that students be asked to “do a close reading”, if only as a sort of hors d’oeuvre to the final extratextual platter.’² The phrase ‘do a close reading’ indicates that critical closeness is as much a matter of the critic’s writing as of their reading – hence the ‘close’ style of some critical prose, with ‘closeness’ here existing in the atmospheric or meteorological sense of being dense or humid. Although the range of practices commonly referred to under the rubric of ‘close reading’ – the family resemblances, if you will, of American New Criticism and English practical criticism – are recognizable enough, what, I wonder, would constitute metrical close reading?