Thomas Cable considers the influence of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Concept of Meter" (1959) from a broadly ontological perspective. The authors took issue with structural linguistics for not being abstract enough when discussing poetic meter and with “temporal” (including “musical”) approaches for imposing a score extraneous to the text. What these methods had in common was attention to an individual performance that might be plausible but was something different from the enduring text from which other performances might derive; hence their article's subtitle, “An Exercise in Abstraction.” 

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?

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.