Yet an appreciation of each poet's artistic stance and personal circumstances is crucial to any convincing interpretation of Faure's music, for every setting represents both close collaboration and creative colloquy between
metrist and composer.
Williams, actually is our most accomplished "
metrist." I sometimes wonder what you are up to--your article in NOW says, in substance, that "Art Is Its Own Motivation" which may be a nice stick to beat the proletarian dog with--but which you very conclusively demonstrate is not true, in your own work.
Auden, no mean
metrist, used rhyme royal rather than ottava rima in his "Letter to Lord Byron." Among modern practitioners of light verse, only the late Gavin Ewart came near to matching Byron's range and technical ingenuity, and political correctness has made a modern Byron virtually unthinkable.
His collection of Lyrics (1949) shows him as an adroit
metrist, an unsophisticated sentimentalist, and a clever satirist.
Eliot would soon (1917) be praising Pound's "adaptability of metre to mood, an adaptability due to an intensive study of metre," lauding Pound's individual talent for the way it could transform the most traditional of forms, noting "the great variety of rhythm which Pound manages to introduce into the ordinary iambic pentameter." (20) Remarkably, Jebb observes Tennyson's virtues in nearly identical terms: "As a
metrist, he is the creator of a new blank verse....
Indeed, Larkin's unusual skill as a
metrist has not gone unnoticed: David Timms, for example, remarks of "Talking in Bed" (CP 129) that "[t]he impression of someone speaking, or rather thinking, is achieved through subtle modifications in rhythm" (107) and David Lodge points out that the impressive peroration of "Mr.
Immediately after the publication of the papers by Wimsatt and Beardsley and Halle and Keyser, there was a great outcry in the
metrist community: these people were robbing
metrists of their right to say whatever they like and be irrefutable.
Contrary to what past generations of
metrists have maintained, they argue, building on Yakovlev's theory, that alliteration is not a structural feature of English alliterative versification.
With these arguments, Cornelius synthesizes, corroborates, and advances recent research on the alliterative tradition in a way that should be useful to
metrists and other students of medieval English verse.
My main goal here, in exploring this paradoxical attitude, is to consider the way Swinburne's poetry and criticism together contribute to a larger nineteenth-century discourse in which poets, critics, and
metrists sought to work out the laws of English verse both in theory and through practice.
Whether picking the wrong side in a palace squabble, or fouling up the tax return, or simply lipping off too frequently, the
metrists of the old dynasties were always being packed off to a remote province.