Literary History

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Very broadly speaking, prosodic history is characterized by swings between strict insistence on metrical rules, and various kinds of freedom in their application.

When poetic form is valued for its artificiality -- that is, for the confidence it gives the reader about the poet's authority -- meter dominates rhythm. Anapests are not allowed into the iambic line, and substitutions in general are infrequent and of few kinds (occasional spondees, trochees at the beginnings of lines and after caesurae). Variation among lines becomes subtle; in this fairly uniform verse, even the placement of a caesura can have a very striking effect. English poetry from mid-seventeenth century through most of the eighteenth century depends on these subtle variations; Alexander Pope is a good example.

Periods that value naturalness in poetry allow more flexibility in the use of meter. Poets in the nineteenth century, metrical poets in the twentieth, and sixteenth-century dramatics like Shakespeare, give the rhythm of speech more precedence over metrical pattern.

For more on this topic, see others in the Literary History menu.

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One aspect of the historical swings between strict and loose applications of metrical rules appears in poets' greater or lesser willingness to allow anapests into the metrical line. Because they change the number of syllables in the line, anapestic substitutions are fairly radical departures from the iambic norm, disrupting and destabilizing the metrical line, emphasizing the speech rhythm rather than the controlling meter.

In periods of strictness, anapests are avoided. Though it's hard to exemplify a negative -- quoting lines that don't contain anapests doesn't prove much -- a study of Milton's prosody shows this avoidance at work. Elision becomes an important way of maintaining metrical regularity.

When poets want to give the impression of people talking (more than of the poet constructing), anapestic substitutions help, as in this line from Robert Frost:

In his plays, Shakespeare uses occasional anapests --

-- while in his non-dramatic poems he avoids them.

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Robert Browning (1812-1889) is best known for his dramatic monologues, a form he pioneered. As the term implies, these poems present themselves as the speech of a character, and this suggests that the verse would emphasize speech. Browning does indeed use a great many metrical substitutions, as well as unprecedentedly strong enjambment; the counterpoint between speech rhythm and meter is a powerful driving force in his verse:

In this line, with its double caesura and multiple spondees, the iambs seem almost incidental gestures toward the metrical norm. Were it not for the pentameters around it, we would hardly recognize as iambic pentameter a line like this:

Browning's metrical variations, however, are largely confined to rearrangements of stress and alterations of the number of stresses. He rarely uses anapests in iambic poems. The result is an emphasis on speech rhythm that, instead of seeming to relax the language from the dominance of meter, crams the metrical line yet tighter.

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Though a full account of Geoffrey Chaucer's (1343-1400) Middle English versification is far beyond the scope of this little program, Chaucer is roughly speaking the founder of English accentual-syllabic meter. The iambic pentameter which by some estimates informs 75% of all English poetry was more or less his invention.

English is a combination of Anglo-Saxon (Teutonic) and French (derived from Latin). By the same token, English accentual-syllabic meter combines Anglo-Saxon accentual with French syllabic meter (see "Foreign Meters" among the Advanced Topics). This shift was just beginning in Chaucer's time, and the great popularity of his work made the combination permanent. He began with iambic tetrameter (possibly a reminiscence of the four-stress Anglo-Saxon line), but shifted to pentameter before his great work, the Canterbury Tales. The heroic couplet was his favored form, though for Troilus and Criseyde he used rime royal. (See those items in the Verse Forms menu.)

In reading Chaucer's pentameters, we must remember to pronounce many of the final e's on words, which later either became silent or dropped away entirely:

Poets after Chaucer, when the language had changed, did not know this. Some of the splendid angularity of Thomas Wyatt's Verse can be traced to this ignorance.

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T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was one of the early masters of free verse. But many of his most interesting prosodic experiments involved, not doing away with meter entirely (like William Carlos Williams), but hovering near it, moving delicately in a series of lines from recognizable meter into the immediately discovered rhythms of free verse, and back again:

Eliot, along with Ezra Pound, announces the twentieth-century style of prosodic variety: his work is a catalogue of forms, from children's chants to long-lined free verse almost like Whitman's to heroic couplets. His plays, especially, try out most of the prosodic resources available to the modern, historically conscious poet. Eliot's idea that the poet's work enters into community or dialogue with the work of all past poets (see his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent") takes concrete shape in his prosodic range.

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John Milton (1608-1674), introducing blank verse into English, kept the iambic pentameter line strictly decasyllabic (ten syllables). We scan

There is no anapest in the middle, because a syllable in "disobedience" is elided. (The word was pronounced "disobedjence" -- this is also the process, called y-glide, by which Americans, at around Milton's time, said the word "Indian" as "Injun.") Elision becomes common in metrically strict styles. A line that might have as many as thirteen syllables ("From Heaven, for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts") is reduced to the normal ten. Milton's insistence on the decasyllabic line complements his decision to give up the formal support of rhyme; as often happens, a new looseness in one dimension accompanies a new restriction in another.

Partly because the absence of rhyme changes the kind of attention that poet and reader pay to line-breaks, Milton is one of the first great masters of enjambment.

While Milton rigorously avoided anapests, he used other substitutions quite vigorously, especially spondees. See the Reference on spondee for a famous example.

Some of Milton's poems in meters other than iambic pentameter, such as "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," display a remarkable range and delicacy of metrical variations.

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Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was a master of the heroic couplet during the Augustan period. Most of his verse maintains strict metrical regularity, and shows how subtly varied such regular verse can be:

Here Pope uses only common substitutions (spondees, initial trochee), and the decasyllabic norm of iambic pentameter is not broken. Yet the lines are individual and varied in rhythm: the first line uses alliteration to bridge the sixth-syllable caesura, and deftly places the same word ("Nature") in two different positions with respect to the foot-boundaries. (We probably hear this as a mild syncopation.) The second line, unusually, has two caesurae (isolating the divine command, "Let Newton be!"); and the regular iambs at its end give both the line and the couple great finality.

For Pope, regularity is not a simple absolute commandment, but paradoxically a way of making sound imitate the sense of the lines. His most pervasive theme is order -- cosmic, social, and artistic. When he wants to represent a contrasting disorder, he can introduce quite startling metrical variations:

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Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) stands on the other side of a century of great change in the English language from Geoffrey Chaucer. The iambic pentameter invented by Chaucer could no longer be heard (from the printed page) in the same way in Wyatt's time. In this sense, he misunderstood Chaucer's meter, and his pentameters are full of holes left by all those dropped final e's. But this version of the story won't account for the power of Wyatt's verse. Its irregularity went back out of fashion for almost another century; but returning to Wyatt from John Donne (1572-1631), and certainly from the late twentieth century, we hear his verse as flexible and energetic, not flawed.

Wyatt's pentameters shift in a single poem ("They Flee from Me") from the almost wholly regular --

-- to the almost unscannable:

Ears attuned to T. S. Eliot's lines that shift from metrical to nonmetrical and back again can find Wyatt's freedom with the meter exhilarating.