Iambic Pentameter from Shakespeare to Browning: A Study in Generative Metrics (Studies in Comparative Literature) [Hardcover]

M. L. Harvey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1996 | ISBN-10: 0773487409 | ISBN-13: 978-0773487406

This study adds to the debate over metrical description. The debate concerns how best to describe and account for the rule-governed metrical practice of poets writing iambic pentameter in English. The major work in this study is to reconcile the opposing points of view of the Halle and Keyser theory and the Kiparsky theory. It accounts for the placement in the poetic line of all the stress and intonation break sequences observed by the earlier theorists, and some additional ones as well. It oultines a basis in linguistic perception for the practice of many poets writing iambic pentameter, and accounts for the occasional anapestic/iambic lines which recur throughout the iambic pentameter tradition and attain prominence in the work of Robert Browning.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 122 pages
• Publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0773487409
• ISBN-13: 978-0773487406
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,208,499 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The pitfalls of objectively scanning a line., January 28, 1998

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Teop Tnomrev "Goodpuppy" (Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Iambic Pentameter from Shakespeare to Browning: A Study in Generative Metrics (Studies in Comparative Literature) (Hardcover)

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Iambic Pentameter from Shakespeare to Browing

This is the first book this reader has read from the series "Studies in Comparative Literature" and the twentieth in the series. It is clearly not written for the causual reader who wishes to deepen his or her appreciation for the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Shelley, or Browning. It is what it claims to be--a study in generative metrics, with the emphasis on "study".

From the first page, the reader will be left with the distinct impression that he has walked into the middle of an ongoing conversation. The author of the book, M.L. Harvey, assumes an acquaintance with prior material and the reader is well-advised to become acquainted with that material. Mr. Harvey has other matters to attend to and proceeds quickly with his own elaborations. If the reader (as I did), chooses not to read from Halle and Keyser's "English Stress, Its Form, Its Growth, and Its Role in Verse" (an earlier exegesis on which some of Mr. Harvey's own ideas build) then the footnotes are central. Read them all. They are hardly asides, being more often essential to Mr. Harvey's contentions.

This is not slight material and the reader may often wish the editors had treated Mr. Harvey's material with similar energy. Mr. Harvey, for example, uses `W' to denote a weak stress and `S' to denote a strong stress along with a variety of other symbols including `N',.'Z', `a' and `b', all of which are mercifully explained in a glossary of terms. The problem arises when these symbols are meant to be placed above their relevant syllables. In some instances, it is difficult to discern which syllable they are being placed above. I found myself sometimes trying to decipher Mr. Harvey's intentions. In one or two instances, the symbols referred to by Mr. Harvey were missing in the relevant example, or the shorthand he apparently used in preparing the manuscript was not converted to its appropriate symbol.

The thrust of Mr. Harvey's book is to create a kind of metrical unified field theory for each of the poets considered. Mr. Harvey refers more than once to the empirical support for his conclusions, including laboratory's in which a number of readers were apparently given material to read (presumably poetry). Based on their reading habits (and presumably his own and those of his peers) a fairly reliable pattern can be discerned as to how English speaking readers scan a line. There is safety in numbers, but this approach is also problematic and reveals a central difficulty. Such research reveals how -twentieth century- readers (including Mr. Harvey) scan a line, but cannot reveal how a sixteenth or seventeenth century reader might have scanned a line, let alone the poets, for whom context was also a consideration. Although it is not clear, Mr. Harvey seems to propose, in a passage called "How to Scan a Line", that his rules, derived from observed patterns of scanning, can in turn be used to "objectively" scan a line.

An oddly conspicuous example of where this method can go wrong, is one he returns to repeatedly. Mr. Harvey, for example, finds that the line: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" contains two anapests followed by two iambs. Because, in his opinion, a stressed syllable occurs in the third and sixth position, the line must adhere to the abstract pattern "WWSWWSWSWS". This conclusion is almost unanimously counter to the accepted reading of this line by Shakespearean scholars, and by inference, Shakespeare himself. Although a modern reader (the nub of the problem) would read this line as containing two anapests, one need only refer to the most recently published examination of the complete sonnets (an outstanding book by Helen Vendler called "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets") to see where and how Mr. Harvey's methods can go wrong. Ms. Vendler writes: "It is the iambic prosody that first brings the pressure of rhetorical refutation into Shakespeare's line: `Let -me- not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments.' [Ms. Vendler italicises "me"] The speaker says these lines schematically, mimicking, as in reported discourse, his interlocutor's original iron laws." The context of the line [it is not clear that Mr. Harvey's methods of scanning take into account the dramatic context of any one line] contradicts his methods. Another example he chooses comes from Lear: "Bids the winds blow the earth into the sea". He again reads this line as beginning with two anapests. Given the context of the line, it is more likely and more accepted (according to sixteenth and seventeenth century habits of speech and prosody) that the line is iambic throughout, the first foot being trochaic and the second a spondee. This is a reading that can be applied to many of Mr. Harvey's double anapests and one which argues that his `rules' (such as the successive S constraint) need further refinement. It is this reader's experience, for example, that a spondee in the second foot, while creating a minimal stress, paradoxically serves to further enforce the stress value of the fourth position, often imparting to that position the highest stress of any other syllable. In Lear's line above, "blow" would therefore receive the greatest stress of any syllable in the line, a reading which, contextually at least, makes more sense.

A more egregious example of misreading, due to changes in habits of pronunciation and even to present day differences between the continents, comes when Mr. Harvey examines Milton. Words like "contest" and "blasphemous" and "surface" (all taken from Paradise Lost) were still accented on the second syllable. "Which of us beholds the bright surface." (P.L. 6.472 MacMillan. Roy Flannagan Editor.) Mr. Harvey, offering an example of a "very rare `inverted foot'" (the credit for its recognition he gives to Robert Bridges) gives the following line: "Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim Prostrate (P.L. 6.841) In fact, Robert Bridges and Mr. Harvey are both mistaken in reading the fifth foot as inverted and one need not be a seventeenth century scholar to recognize it. Webster's International Dictionary: Second Edition, in fact, provides the following pronunciation key. (pros [stressed] trat [unstressed]; formerly, and still by some. Esp. Brit., pros [unstressed] trat [stressed]). Any laboratory of Americans, nearly without fail, would also misread this line, and so the danger of overwhelming empirical evidence!

This misreading (due to changes and differences in pronunciation), along with contextual misreadings, is symptomatic and reveals the flaws yet to be ironed out by Mr. Harvey. For the time being, his methodology fails to take into account context, as demonstrated by the sonnet, as well as changes in pronunciation, as demonstrated by his extracts of Milton, and therefore can still only be used as a semi-reliable presentation of how these individual poets created and scanned their lines. Rather than using Mr. Harvey's methodology (if such should be the temptation) the modern reader of these poets is still advised to purchase a well-annotated edition where the proper scanning of a line is a concern.

That being said, I do not wish to discourage anyone from reading Mr. Harvey's work. Objections like those mentioned in this review are inevitable when dealing with something so subjective and changeable as the pronunciation of the English language. Mr. Harvey's undertaking is not an enviable one and the objections so far raised are less than his successes. Mr. Harvey's reasoning is, for the better part, solid and insightful. In fact, to be fair, one should spend as much time sampling his successes. This, however, would only restate what is already well-stated by Mr. Harvey. Most notably, he convincingly answers (in this reader's opinion) why poets prefer iambic verse to trochaic verse-no mean feat and a question which clearly fascinates Mr. Harvey.