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The Two Domains: Meter and Rhythm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

George B. Pace
George B. Pace*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia
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Extract

The widening breach between the study of the English language and of the literature written in it appears anew in the December 1959 PMLA. There, two distinguished literary scholars, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, find need to defend the traditional scansion of English poetry against a “linguistic view.” It is not, of course, the fact of their arguing for their beliefs which is disturbing, although even here the breach is evident: “the more extravagant claims of the linguists,” “these extraordinary claims,” “we wish in the main to avoid the cumbersome grammar of the new linguists.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 76 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1961 , pp. 413 - 419
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1961

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References

Note 1 in page 413 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept of Meter: an Exercise in Abstraction,” PMLA, LXXIV (December 1959), 585, 593. The attack is against the musical theory also, but this will not concern me.

Because of the newness and tentative nature of the linguistic approach, it is surprising to find Wimsatt and Beardsley writing, “The linguistic view, as it happens, has been authoritatively [my italics] illustrated in the contributions to the Kenyan symposium of 1956 by Harold Whitehall and Seymour Chatman” (p. 585). These are valuable articles but hardly authoritative; cf. the following (contradictory) footnote from Wimsatt and Beardsley's paper: “Mr. Chatman… has [subsequently] made it clear that his views on meter actually differ very little from those of the present writers. Our purpose is only to use Mr. Chatman's text of 1956 as a point of departure for the explication of an issue” (p. 585).

Note 2 in page 414 Especially as set forth in An Outline of English Structure, Studies in Linguistics Occasional Papers, 3 (1951).

Note 3 in page 414 Charles R. Hockett, for example, rejects a fourth degree of stress as phonemic.

Note 4 in page 414 Ironically, I am indebted to another “dissenter” for many of the references in this paragraph (Dwight L. Bolinger, “A Theory of Pitch Accent in English,” Word, xiv, August-December 1958, 110); for the pertinent quotation from Jespersen see Chatman, “Robert Frost's Mowing: an Inquiry into Prosodie Structure,” Kenyon Review, Summer 1956, p. 424.

Note 5 in page 414 One problem arising from the breach between linguistics and literary study comes into focus here. It is clearly impractical to attempt a description of juncture at this point, yet understanding of the feature is essential for full comprehension of this paper.

Note 6 in page 414 “A Report on the Language-Literature Seminar,” in Harold B. Allen, Readings in Applied English Linguistics (New York, 1958), p. 395.

Note 7 in page 414 “From Linguistics to Criticism,” Kenyon Review, Summer 1956, p. 419.

Note 81 in page 415 have called the distinction between meter and rhythm an old one, but it has rarely been observed consistently; cf., for example, the definition of meter in the revised Thrall and Hibbard (“the RHYTHM established by the regular… occurrence of similar units of RHYTHM,” New York, 1960, p. 285).

Note 9 in page 415 And uncommon. Cf. A. A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structures (New York, 1958), p. 16.

Note 10 in page 415 Wimsatt and Beardsley's philosophic approach to stress appears also in their insistence that “in the nature of things… five stresses will always include one weakest” (p. 598).

Note 11 in page 415 My experience with (non-linguistic) students suggests two to three weeks to be adequate for a “broad grasp.” Most of these students, however, had had some training in phonetics and phonemics.

Note 12 in page 416 Kenyon Review, Summer 1956, pp. 427–430.

Note 13 in page 416 As, for example, in the reading of The Idea of Order at Key West (Caedmon TC 1068).

Note 14 in page 416 “The Personal Heresy in Criticism,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, xix (1934), 10–11.

Note 15 in page 416 The following quotation suggests the need: “I have in this chapter sometimes used the traditional metrical feet to describe what are not always strictly metrical units. If I knew of a simpler way of making this kind of point I should use it” (George M. Ridenour, The Style of Don Juan, New Haven, 1960, p. 128).

Note 16 in page 417 “An Analysis of The Windhover: An Experiment in Structural Method,” PMLA, LXX (1955), 970.

Note 17 in page 417 Poems of Gerard M-anley Hopkins, 3rd ed. (New York, 1948), p. 228. I have omitted the notation of an “outride.”

Note 18 in page 417 “Report,” p. 397.

Note 19 in page 418 There is a suggestion that only the duration is rhythmically significant.

Note 20 in page 418 The points here are debatable. What I am chiefly seeking to avoid is “etic” thinking, instead of “emic” (cf. Kenneth L. Pike, Language in Relation to… the Structure of Human Behavior, Glendale, Calif., 1954, I, 8).

Note 21 in page 418 Outline, p. 49.

Note 22 in page 418 Introduction to Linguistic Structures, p. 28.

Note 53 in page 418 For example : “Th lòwng hérd / winds slôwl / ò'er th léa //” (Whitehall, Kenyon Review, Summer 1956, p. 418; repeated in the same form in his English Institute essay, Sound and Poetry, New York, 1957, p. 143).

Note 24 in page 418 The corresponding term for traditional metrics would, of course, be meter analysis. I hope my arguments for a more rigorous limitation of meter analysis will not be misunderstood as a disparagement of it. It is a necessary approach (1) because many poets employ it (although they do not read their poems in a two-stress, no-juncture, no-pitch fashion) and (2) because its high degree of abstraction is valuable in itself.