In my forthcoming book Meter and Modernity in English Verse, I begin by defending metrics, the study of poetic meter, a.k.a. prosody. As you probably know if you read this blog, meter is my thing. Metrics needs defending not just because it is a contentious and technical subject, but because it has come in for wounding criticism lately.
I’ll ventriloquize the case against metrics, to avoid naming names. (I do name names in the book.) Metrics, say its critics, is a faux science. It is fruitlessly technical. What do metrists have to show for all those graphs, statistics, symbols, and Greek terms? A relic of Victorian philology, metrics can’t create the knowledge about poetry that it claims to create. It is of historical interest, like alchemy, but it is not worth the paper it is printed on. A sure sign that metrics is a bunch of hot air is the fact that metrists can’t even agree on the basics, such as the nature of stress, the proper placement of accents in a line of poetry, and where poetic forms come from. Each generation’s terminology becomes unintelligible to the next.
This critique sometimes extends to a second target. Meter, the object that metrics purports to disclose, can’t matter in literary studies nowadays. It is a fantasy. The historical stability and formal knowability of meter, implied by techniques of metrical analysis, are illusory. Worse, meter is an illusion that distracts us from what really matters: the political and social meaning of poetry.
I had to respond to these criticisms, because the goal of my book was to build metrical history into a new account of English literary history. If meter had no value, my book had no value!
My basic response is to point out a self-contradiction. The anti-metrists must posit a type of impossible, transcendental knowledge, in order to criticize metrics for not creating it. They choose to judge metrical scholarship against a standard that does not apply to other methodologies, as if metrics, to be legitimate, had to be an infallible truth discovery mechanism, instead of, say, an informed approximation of what poets do. In the book, I write:
To reject metrics as a fantasy of absolute, dehistoricized knowledge is to accede, per negativum, to that fantasy. Metrics is indeed historically contingent, inherently political, and prone to self-confirmation. In this, metrics resembles all other approaches to the study of literature. The choice between affirmation of metrics and acceptance of the limits of historical interpretation is a false one. Metrical form is indeed a literary correlate of politics and ideology. Precisely because it lives in history, however, it refracts as much as it reflects. Poets never make metrical choices in a vacuum. Metrical histories pressurize individual moments of creation and reception, just as political histories pressurize individual moments of action and affiliation. Ideally, metrics accomplishes the very dialectical movement between general and particular, form and history, literary practice and social stratification, that its critics accuse it of short-circuiting.
Criticism of metrics can be so pointed only because few scholars “do” metrics anymore. It’s easy to dismiss a type of knowledge you don’t seek. Plus, meter is still regularly taught to undergraduates, yet the metrical theory in use in the classroom is a century out of date. The lag between textbooks and scholarship leaves the subject all the more vulnerable to criticism.
Lest this sound like the usual complaint that everyone should devote themselves to my hobbyhorse topic, I’ll say (and I say in the book) that metrists are equally to blame. The critics have a point. Metrists bandy about terms that are opaque to other literary scholars; they sometimes appear to promise scientific knowledge about literature; and they often do not explore meter’s intersections with political and social history. In rehabilitating metrics for literary history, my book strives to do better in each respect. The result is, I hope, a metrically inflected literary history that both metrists and anti-metrists can understand, and accept.
Eric Weiskott 