Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics (Hopkins Studies in Modernism)

Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.ISBN : 9781421439532 Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The "Metronome" Meter and Modern Aurality Meter as Vestige 1 Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost's Distorted Vernacular Frost's Theory of Meter and Practice of Scansion The "Hen Dekker Syllables" of "For Once, Then, Something" The Late Meter of "Directive" 2 Penty Ladies: T.S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender of Modern Meter "Too Penty" Ladies Meter after Satire: The Waste Land Formal Sensibility for a Post-metrical Culture 3 "No Feet to Walk On": Pound's Late Victorian Prosody Late Victorian Pound "Anima" Meter: Bare-Foot and Stub-Toed The Ripost eagainst Meter Pan, Syrinx, and Sappho: Pound's Editorial Control and H.D.'s HERmione 4 Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise Bogan Sara Teasdale and the Labor of the Line Georgia Douglas Johnson's Metrical Bars Louise Bogan's Precise Pentagon 5 The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and James Weldon Johnson Spirituals after the Victrola Cane as Collection Kabnis's Unheard Blues James Weldon Johns on: Re-scanning the Anglo-American Tradition Rhythmic Exegesis 6 Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown's Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes "Black" Rhythm's Double Audience Brown's Outline and Johnson's Book of American Negro Poetry "When de Saints Go Ma'ching Home" Conclusion. Prosody after Form Appendix. Scansion and Metrical Notation Notes Works Cited Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification. In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome , Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.

In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.

"The author offers a historical account of modernist poetic form and analyzes how poetry was read and written in the twentieth century. The rise of free verse in the early 1900s is commonly thought to be a resistance to or liberation from regimented meter, privileging instead an element of "rhythm," but the author reads a range of modernist poetry in relation to the historical practice of metrical form"-- Provided by publisher