English prosody and poetics

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My individual graduate tutorial, English Prosody and Poetics, 1300-1600 (syllabus), will run this spring. This tutorial is a practical and theoretical introduction to issues in late medieval and sixteenth-century poetics. Here are the learning objectives for each unit:

1. Introduction to Verse History and Historical Poetics

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history of metrical study and the key concepts ‘rhythm’ and ‘meter’; comparison of intrinsic (formal/practical) and extrinsic (historical/cultural) approaches to metrical form; practical understanding of modern syllabic meters.

2. The Alliterative Tradition in its Eighth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the alliterative meter in the late medieval period; comparison of competing explanations for the existence of fourteenth-century alliterative poetry; comparison of the use of the alliterative meter in two compositions, Piers Plowman and St. Erkenwald; practical understanding of alliterative b-verse meter.

3. Chaucer’s Tetrameter

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the tetrameter or octosyllable in the fourteenth century; comparison of more and less strictly syllabic accentual English meters; practical understanding of template meter or dolnik.

4 & 5. Chaucer’s Pentameter, Tail Rhyme, and Prose

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter in the fourteenth century; comparison of Chaucer’s several meters and two staged discussions of form (after Sir Thopas and in the Parson’s Prologue); understanding of the relationships between metrical form and manuscript form in Sir Thopas; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical choices in the larger context of his ‘metrical landscape’; practical understanding of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter.

6. Chaucer’s Pentameter in the Fifteenth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter in the fifty years following Chaucer’s death; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical habits to those of his literary heirs, Hoccleve and Lydgate; understanding of the critical uses of, and historical problems with, the concept of a ‘Chaucerian tradition’ extending into the fifteenth century; practical understanding of Lydgate’s decasyllable/pentameter.

7. (Chaucer’s) Pentameter in the Sixteenth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the decasyllable/pentameter in the sixteenth century; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical habits to those of Wyatt, Surrey, and Shakespeare; understanding of Martin Duffell’s concept of ‘the Italian line in English,’ with reference both to Chaucer and later versifiers; critical scrutiny of sixteenth-century perceptions of earlier and contemporary meter as expressed by Gascoigne and Puttenham; practical understanding of Wyatt’s decasyllable/pentameter.

three-position verses in Beowulf

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My note, “Three-Position Verses in Beowulf,” appears in Notes and Queries. This note proposes that some metrical patterns with three positions are rare but authentic in the meter of Beowulf. More generally, the note seeks to draw a theoretical distinction between systematic metrical patterns (those that adhere to the metrical system obtaining at a given point in verse history) and asystematic patterns (those that do not adhere to the synchronic metrical system for historical reasons). Here’s the opening frame:

The most recent theory of Old English meter is that of Nicolay Yakovlev. Like many of his predecessors, Yakovlev finds that the Old English half-line is composed of four metrical positions. However, he countenances two five-position patterns, known in Sieversian notation as A* and D*. He goes on to discuss the theoretical implications of their existence:

[A] traditional metre is hardly ever given opportunity [sic] to become completely cohesive. The average time span between major prosodic upheavals appears to be less than that required to eliminate any remains of the previous restructuring. It means, inter alia, that the number of asystemic patterns, i.e. patterns that are not produced by general metrical rules and should therefore be specified individually, may be greater or smaller at any given point in poetic history, but it will hardly ever be zero. Given the rare opportunity to observe a cross-section in the history of a poetic tradition, we always see ‘a work in progress’; the picture observed will always be inherently dynamic, similarly to a proper synchronic description of a language. Old English patterns D* and A* seem to be examples of such a historical residue.

Yakovlev provides a brilliant explanation for the occurrence of five-position verses. In a ‘traditional metre’, i.e., one with a continuous historical development, marginal patterns could coexist with normative ones for a certain length of time before being normalized or reinterpreted as a new norm. Yakovlev does not identify any other ‘asystemic patterns’, but nothing in his account of Old English meter precludes the possibility.

Although they are always explained differently or emended, verses of the form SxS occur in Beowulf. […]

phantom syllables

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My article, “Phantom Syllables in the English Alliterative Tradition,” appears in Modern Philology. This article lays the groundwork for my first book by comparing and connecting phenomena in Old English meter and Middle English alliterative meter. Less obviously, the article is a first attempt to generalize and operationalize the key concept of ‘metrical phonology,’ i.e., the stylized linguistic forms that inhabit meter. Here’s a representative paragraph, followed by the concluding paragraph:

Carried out with the help of electronic concordances and graphing software, these often perspicacious metrical analyses tend toward notational abstraction. But medievalists interested in the entwined fates of poetry and language ignore meter at their peril. Tucked away in R. D. Fulk’s compendious History of Old English Meter (1992), implicit in the conclusions drawn therein, is the premise that poetic meter is a reliable criterion for establishing absolute chronologies, that developments in verse form follow straightforwardly from developments in the spoken language. A metrical history of comparable scope and polemical density has yet to be written for the Middle English poems, but the seeds have been sown or, rather, the lines of battle have been drawn. It is a battle that must be fought on metrical grounds, for whatever one might like to say about the revivals, survivals, or deaths of poetic traditions, one must in any case confront a burgeoning cache of hard data excavated from the very stuff of metrical language and therefore not directly beholden to the standard accounts of linguistic change or dialectal variation.

[…]

The story of alliterative poetry is neither one of decay and neglect nor of the inevitable triumph of a language or a culture. At each moment, poets must have had access to an array of metrical attitudes ranging from the avant-garde to the nostalgic, full of sounds newfangled, familiar, outdated, and all but forgotten. Future scholarship on alliterative verse would do well to attend to the poetry’s motley meter, built of past language states but not reducible to any one of them; in constant development but never caught up with the times; forever at play with invisible friends, old sounds that had disappeared without going obsolete.

meter and the distant past

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My short essay, “The Meter of Widsith and the Distant Past,” appears in Neophilologus. This essay mobilizes metrical and linguistic evidence in order to dispute the possibility that any portion of the Old English poem Widsith was composed before the migration of the Angles and Saxons to Britain (adventus Saxonum). In so doing, this essay seeks to ground the modern editorial definition of ‘text’ in verse history. Here’s the abstract:

In a recent article in this journal, Leonard Neidorf argues for a seventh-century date for the Old English poem Widsith, while countenancing the possibility that one portion of the poem was composed before the migration of the Angles and Saxons to Britain (adventus Saxonum). The present article disputes the possibility of a pre-adventus date for this and other portions of Widsith. Metrical considerations tend to contradict such an exceptionally early dating, with ramifications for the categorization and interpretation of the poem as a whole. After reviewing the pertinent metrical evidence, this article argues that the available metrical form of Widsith is the essential feature by which the poem, whenever and wherever it was composed, can be recognized as ‘the poem’ in the first place. This article concludes that Widsith is not an ancient poem from a pan-Germanic distant past, but an encyclopedic Old English poem that turns inherited vocabulary to its own rhetorical purposes.

puns and poetic style

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My essay on wordplay in the Old English poem Exodus appears in Etymology and Wordplay in Medieval Literature: Poetry, Hypothesis, and Experience in the European Middle Ages, edited by Mikael Males. This collection, published in the Brepols Disputatio series, grew out of a 2013 conference at the University of Oslo. The essay, entitled “Puns and Poetic Style in Old English,” asks a historical question and uses poetic style to begin to answer the question. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of the first section:

English poetry written in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries comes down to modern scholars with little secure information about date of composition, authorship, or place of composition. The Old English poetic corpus comprehends an array of genres and topics, from brief monologues to riddles to lengthy biblical narratives. Cutting across these categories is a single poetic metre and a highly conventionalized poetic style. Old English verse, characteristically sententious, utilizes paronomasia and wordplay to achieve particular literary effects. Yet writers from this period have left behind no ars poetica recording their perceptions of English metre or poetic style. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. As such, the best available evidence for the cultural status of vernacular poetry in this phase of English literary history may be the poetry itself. This essay identifies extensive wordplay in one Old English poem and reads this wordplay as an index of the tastes and aims of a long-lost interpretive community.

After surveying the evidence for the dating, circulation, authorship, and localization of Old English poetry, this essay assesses older and newer critical approaches in Old English studies, with special attention to work on wordplay and poetic style. In light of the scant evidence for traditional categories of contextualization afforded by most Old English verse, I argue that poetic style can sometimes provide more precise answers to pressing literary-historical questions. The second section identifies and discusses several puns on nautical terminology in the Old English Exodus, a 590-line narrative poem very loosely based on Exodus 13. 18—14. 31 and attested uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 (late tenth c.). Junius 11 also contains Genesis and Daniel, longer and more straightforward versifications of those biblical books, and Christ and Satan, an imaginative dialogue in verse. I direct consideration of wordplay in Exodus toward an understanding of the genre and purpose of the poem, in order to begin to answer the question posed by Roberta Frank in 1988, ‘What kind of poetry is Exodus?’

[…]

Despite sustained attention to this topic within Old English studies, the meaning of paronomastic strategies remains incompletely understood. What, precisely, were puns thought to accomplish, and by what means did authors signal them or audiences apprehend them? The following investigation of nautical puns in Exodus will not answer these questions directly, but I hope to offer both a reorientation of the problem in terms of poetic style and an illustration of the ways in which the study of style, in a fragmentary corpus, can reveal the practices of otherwise unknowable literary communities. I read wordplay in Exodus as an indication of its author’s attitudes toward language and knowledge. At the same time, I seek to extrapolate from literary practice to textual interpretation and from interpretation back to practice, confirming the importance of wordplay for the interpretation of Old English poetry in general but also suggesting some ways in which a particular composition may be seen to reflect its (now lost) literary-cultural context. In the process, puns in Exodus will emerge as significant literary strategies and crucial historical evidence. In comparison with other Old English poems, wordplay in Exodus seems to me at once more insistent and less obviously derivative of Latin exegetical modes. For that reason it may repay the individual treatment it receives in the remainder of this essay.