Prosody: Alternative Histories
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What are the historical stakes of prosody, and why should we ask? ‘Prosody’ refers both to the patterning of language in poetry and to the formal study of that patterning.
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Book Chapter
Hip hop suggests that doggerel can achieve a surprising flexibility, ranging from the comic to the serious, from the delicate to the vulgar. It would be a mistake, though, to say the technique determines the result.

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Journal Article
One might not instinctively think that Charles Olson and Gerard Manley Hopkins should have had a great deal in common.

Journal Article
A project of “critical prosody” should re-embed poetic form in the historical politics of meaning. It should show how meter meant different things to different communities in a longer metrical discourse.

Book Chapter
Tsur suggests that a reader’s rhythmical performance of complex lines (i.e., lines in which the linguistic pattern and the versification pattern diverge) may be regarded as a problem-solving activity that makes the conflicting patterns perceptible.

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Book Chapter
For centuries, sophisticated readers and performers of rhyme have derived pleasure from the ways in which innovative poets and lyricists have simply altered the tempo.

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Essay
Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome have fallen prey to Matthew Arnold’s 1861 dismissive and damning assessment: “a man’s power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all. Arnold’s dismissal appears in his own cultural translation project – his lectures on translating Homer argue against using ballad meters as the vehicle for popularizing Homer’s greatness – and Arnold’s influential views have effectively removed Macaulay’s poems and their paratextual materials from the literary map of the nineteenth century. This essay explores what is at stake in such a critical erasure and shows why and how these erasures have shaped our contemporary understanding of poetic form.

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Essay
Different scientific ideas about nature, minds, bodies, and sounds inspired different prosodic theories and practices.

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Essay
Scansion, for generations of American students, has been the dominant method of studying prosody in poetry. How and why did this happen? What if scansion had never become dominant? What alternative methods for understanding poetic prosody have been passed over?

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Journal Article
The primary purpose of the essay is to offer medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics.

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Essay
What are the historical and existing efforts to employ digital technologies for exploring or generating prosody?

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Essay
I have never really understood prosody. It has always felt like some sort of coded speech that only those who were well trained in the tradition understood. It felt for many years as if there were some who had prosody so deep in their blood that even when they were merely two cells, it beat within those two cells and then as their cells divided, the understanding was built into their body cell by cell and then it came to define how their heart beat. My heart seemed to beat otherwise.

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Book Chapter
Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay illustrated what was once again a central rift in English prosody of the past two centuries, between timers and stressers.