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.” 

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.

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.

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.