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5.0 out of 5 stars
I Like the Way the Rhythm Makes Me Jump and Move, May 29, 2007
This review is from: Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (Paperback)
In Meter in English, Baker convenes a symposium of poets and critics to contend with a Robert Wallace essay in which he attempts to regularize the contemporary discussion of meter by way of ten propositions he hopes will become consensus. Many of these propositions are terminological(he hopes, for example, to rename the "feminine ending" the less elegant "extra syllable" or "e-s" ending), but others are at the heart of a lively and ongoing debate about the very nature of English language verse (as in Wallace's assertion that "anapestic, trochaic, and dactylic meters do not exist in English.")
The responses, from the likes of Eavan Boland, Annie Finch, Dana Gioia, John Frederick Nims, etc., are widely varied. There is some consensus on small matters (syllabics are not meter proper, but rather a kind of patterning useful for free verse composition), and an acknowledgement all around that prosodic terminologies are not uniformly deployed by practicing poets and critics. It is clear, though, that there will be no consensus on all ten of Wallace's assertions, and by book's end, the reader might feel as though consensus is, anyway, not so advisable as the bigger picture of contemporary prosodic practice composed by the discussion itself.
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