My article, “Before Prosody: Early English Poetics in Practice and Theory,” appears in Modern Language Quarterly. This article draws on the methods and arguments of my first book to reconsider the historical study of poetics in general. Specifically, the essay makes a medievalist contribution to the emerging subfield known as ‘historical poetics.’ I workshopped an earlier version of this essay while visiting Stanford University. Here’s the abstract:
Since the sixteenth century, the history of English poetics has had two sides: a history of theory and a history of practice. Contemporary literary scholars are mapping new connections between the history of theory and the history of practice, under the rubric of “historical poetics.” Thus far historical poetics has been most strongly associated with the study of nineteenth-century poetry. This essay takes a longer view onto the histories of English poetry from the perspective of early English verse. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. This essay offers medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics, thereby bringing a different literary archive to bear on methodological debates about the historical study of poetics. Three case studies, centered on alliterative verse, explore what is distinctive about the cultural work of early English poetics.
I’d like to use this post to introduce a general methodological approach in the field of poetics. Much of my work on early English poetry thus far has been concerned to analyze poetic features not as objective linguistic structures but as mental events. Meter as a mental event; syntax as a mental event; wordplay as a mental event. This general approach to poetics might be termed ‘phenomenological poetics.’*
In pursuing phenomenological poetics, I find myself producing scholarly work that cuts across the structuralism/poststructuralism and formalism/historicism dichotomies. On the one hand, phenomenological poetics differs from most strands of structuralism in refusing to externalize form. For example, my article on Old English poetic syntax mounts a historicist argument against modern editors who propose to chop poetic texts into modern sentences. I argue that certain kinds of syntactical complications are stylistic effects purposefully offered to medieval minds, not syntactical problems accidentally offered to modern textual criticism. To make this argument, however, I build on the findings of modern linguistics and the study of syntax: it’s an argument about the history of form that recognizes form but tries hard not to reify form.
On the other hand, phenomenological poetics operates differently from most strands of poststructuralism, too. For example, my first book tracks the history of the English alliterative meter from the seventh to the sixteenth century. Where poststructuralists often express skepticism about the reality of meter as an object of inquiry, I discuss meter as a real mental event. I consider my work to be materialist, with the understanding that the materials are not pronunciations, spellings, syllables, or even metrical notations but forms of expectation and perception. Meter, for me, lives in the mind, but it lives in the mind in formally and historically specifiable ways. My book argues, in part, that we should not allow that formal and historical nuance to be flattened out by skepticism about our ability to capture it. In phenomenological poetics, questions about literary form and questions about literary history simply coincide, inasmuch as recovering medieval thought processes about poetry is an inherently formal and historical task.
In describing my approach as materialist but concerned with mental processes, I am, of course, coming close to the interdisciplinary field known as cognitive poetics. The cognitive sciences are those dealing with the material that grounds the mental. Thus far I have not connected my research in poetics with the cognitive sciences, but I have learned a great deal from metrists who have: Nick Myklebust, for example.
*A quick Google search reveals that others have used the phrase in a different sense, to refer to poetry that itself engages phenomenological philosophy or phenomenological experience.
As a Text Technologies Fellow, I gave a lecture to the Stanford CMEMS Workshop entitled “The Old English Exeter Book and the Idea of a Poem.” This lecture represents new thinking at the nexus of poetic meter, manuscript form, and the history of ideas. My thanks to the attendees for helpful questions and criticisms. Here’s a modified version of the opening frame of the talk:
As a visitor to the Workshop in Poetics, I presented a work in progress entitled “Before Prosody: Early English Poetics in Practice and Theory.” This essay relates the conclusions of my first book to the emergent research paradigm known as ‘historical poetics.’ My thanks to the members of the Workshop for incisive questions and comments. Here’s an abstract:
Scholars of Victorian poetry have called for a ‘historical poetics’ that would reevaluate the received narrative of English literary history by recovering alternate ways of theorizing and experiencing poetic form. This essay takes a longer view onto the histories of English poetry from the perspective of Old English and Middle English verse. The primary purpose of the essay is to offer medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics, thereby bringing a different literary archive to bear on critical conversations about the theory and practice of English versification. The contribution of this essay to the field of historical poetics will be to indicate a constitutive gap between the practice and theory of verse. Through three case studies drawn from ongoing research on the alliterative tradition, I seek to demonstrate what is distinctive about the cultural work of early English poetics. Recognition of the ways in which modern questions fail to illuminate medieval meters is the first step toward a more capacious historical poetics.
As a contributor to a developing digital resource for the study of prosody, I discussed alliteration as a poetic device and an ornament in alliterative meter; the alliterative tradition, Old to Middle English; and the state of the field of alliterative metrics.
As a guest lecturer in English 301B, I taught a class of undergraduates and graduate students about the history of the alliterative metrical system c. 900-1200, with examples drawn from the Battle of Brunanburh (c. 937), Durham (1104-1109), and Lawman’s Brut (c. 1200). We asked how this metrical system stood around 900, how it changed between then and 1200, and how modern scholars have conceptualized these metrical principles and transformations. It was exciting to be able to help the students connect meter with the primary concerns of the seminar: linguistic form, literary style, periodization, and manuscript context.
My article, “Alliterative Meter and English Literary History, 1700-2000,” appears in ELH. This article historicizes the methodology of my first book by asking how eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century students of alliterative poetry conceptualized the relationship between metrical history and literary history. I contend that the divergence of metrics and literary history in the late twentieth century was a direct response to 250 years of sustained interaction between the two fields. I argue that post-2000 research on alliterative meter holds out the possibility of rapprochement between literary history and philology. This article grew out of a conference presentation earlier this year. Here’s an abstract for the article:
Nicolay Yakovlev’s 2008 Oxford thesis has already been felt to mark a significant juncture in the history of the study of English alliterative meter. This essay describes Yakovlev’s conceptualization of metrical history as a paradigm shift in study of medieval English literary history. The central section of the essay charts the scholarly study of alliterative verse, 1700-2000, focusing on the braiding of political, literary, linguistic, and metrical histories. The essay concludes by considering the intellectual significance of a non-teleological English literary history and pointing out some of the shapes it might take, focusing, as throughout, on the alliterative tradition.
Certain syntactical ambiguities in Old English poetry have been the focus of debate among students of metre and syntax. Proponents of intentional ambiguity must demonstrate that the passages in question exhibit, not an absence of syntactical clarity, but a presence of syntactical ambiguity. This article attempts such a demonstration. It does so by shifting the terms of the debate, from clauses to verses and from a spatial to a temporal understanding of syntax. The article proposes a new interpretation of many problematic passages that opens onto a new way of parsing and punctuating Old English poetry.
In this essay in the history of poetic style, I demonstrate that the sequence in time of Old English half-lines sometimes necessitates retrospective syntactical reanalysis, a state of affairs which modern punctuation is ill-equipped to capture, but in which Anglo-Saxon readers and listeners would have recognized specific literary effects. In the second section, I extrapolate two larger syntactical units, the half-line sequence and the verse paragraph, which differ in important ways from the clauses and sentences that modern editors impose on Old English poetic texts. Along the way, I improve the descriptive accuracy of Kuhn’s Laws by reinterpreting them as governing half-line sequences rather than clauses. I conclude with a call for unpunctuated or minimally punctuated critical editions of Old English verse texts.
Eric Weiskott 
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