Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse

Abstract

Her current projects include "Ladies' Greek," a book on translations of Greek tragedy by women in Victorian England and America, and "Voice Inverse," a series of essays on meter and music in Victorian poetry.

Early English meter as a way of thinking

“…Like Gilbert and Sullivan's character, Chaucer was chronically overemployed; a resident of London, at one time or another he worked as a clerk, comptroller of customs, diplomat, esquire, forester, page, and soldier, among other jobs (Carlson 2004). These three poets have garnered the lion's share of scholarly attention, and the present study follows suit by placing them at the center of an essay in historical poetics (for recent revivals of the term see Prins 2008;Jarvis 2014). But I will continually note how the metrical practice of a range of contemporary and earlier poets shaped the structures of thought informing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the Canterbury Tales.…”

Historical poetics and the problem of exemplarity

“…Veselovsky often makes striking juxtapositions of examples drawn from both high literature and folk and popular culture. 31 Lanier is for Prins an exemplar of Victorian poetics, and one of Lanier's principal exemplars is Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose 'Break, Break, Break' (1842) helps Lanier make a case for the musical scansion of poetry. 27 Veselovsky's focus on mobile motifs is one solution to a perennial tension between the 'vast and vacuous generalizations' of poetics, which risk transcending history altogether, and 'the empirical data of individual works or historical formations', which risk surrendering poetics to 'the atomization of evidence'.…”

Historical poetics and the register of history

“…Although a New York Times review of The Science of English Verse complained that 'we are somewhat in danger of being "scienced" to death', what kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing are implicit in Lanier's claim to 'science'? 24 The rhetoric of 'interesting' is another form of disciplining: anyone turning to Lanier for insights into reading poems today is, tacitly, 'boring'. But it is also a methodological claim: that Lanier's thinking can only make sense within its historical moment: to historicise is necessarily to contextualise.…”