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.” 

Juliana Spahr confesses that she has 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. This essay is Spahr's story about why this Colloquy matters and why she wishes it had existed prior to this moment. Together, this collection of essays attempts to be attentive to meter but to also be attentive to more than meter. 

What are the historical and existing efforts for employing digital technologies to explore or generate prosody? From the perspectives of information science and textual analysis, Setsuko Yokoyama works with literary scholars and archivists to facilitate critical dialogues on literary artifacts. One of her research aims is to highlight how digital technologies have informed the epistemologies of prosody. In this essay, she uses Hartman’s Scansion Machine to begin sharing her digital prosody projects and prosody-related visualization methodologies.

The purpose of the essay is to offer medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics, bringing a different literary archive to bear on the methodological debate. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. Through three case studies from the alliterative tradition, this essay seeks to demonstrate what is distinctive about the cultural work of early English poetics.

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?

Paul Fussell argued that “the history of prosody is . . . inseparable from the history of ideas.” Scholarship examining this relationship has emphasized how science helps explain prosody, but this direction of influence isn’t the only possibility. Weiss Smith aims to tell a story about a moment when the lines of influence reversed—a story about the “science of prosody,” where the of signifies not about or behind but characterized by. She wants to tell a story, that is, about an attempt to use poetry as an instrument of cutting-edge science.

This essay considers how the Somali-born hip-hop artist K’naan occasionally uses rhymes that embody a slight but perceptually noticeable shift in the rhythms of global Englishes. Our verse prosody is being reshaped by the rhythmic contours of speakers who bring the prosody of their first language to bear upon their rhythmicization of English. This is no matter of local or virtuosic performance but a structural shift in the texture of our language.

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.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome—his 1842 collection of poems written as if they were lost Roman ballads—are all but absent in our current understanding of the Victorian era. 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.

The epistemological problems of the score, notably concerning the relation between the body that produces the sound, and the body that notates the sound, is bound up with an even broader epistemological problem, namely—how do we conceive of linguistic sound as a whole?