Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650
Eric Weiskott, "Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650"
English | ISBN: 0812252640 | 2021 | 352 pages | PDF | 3 MB
English | ISBN: 0812252640 | 2021 | 352 pages | PDF | 3 MB
What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers.
In
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