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Peter G. EppsLiterature ReviewOld English Literature (EN 5302)Dr. Denton
Poetic Rhythms in English Poetry Old and New
As a poet and a student of nineteenth-century British verse, I am especiallyfascinated by matters of form, of the boundaries between poetic and non-poetic modes of utterance, whether oral or inscribed. One of the most lasting features of poetics,especially where matters of rhyme and rhythm are concerned, is the constant appeal bypoets and critics alike to the history of English poetic usage as precedent. Milton appealsto an older state of the language, and to classical usage, to justify his choice of blank verse over against the heroic couplets of the Restoration poets. Coleridge appeals toearly English poetry to justify his swerve away from regular metrical feet in favor of astrong-stress accentual poetry without syllable counting; Poe appeals to the classics infavor of a strict quantitative meter, and then to the history of English poetry to condemnLongfellow’s attempt to reproduce Greek dactylic hexameter in English long poetry.Whitman, of course, thinks to confound them all by defying history—and yet, within hispoetry can be found evidence of strong-stress accentual meter marked by sound-relationswithin each line; these are, of course, quite reminiscent of certain features of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry.All of which is to say that there has been considerable lack of agreementconcerning what, exactly, the modern poet and critic can learn from the history of Englishpoetry; simultaneously, there seems to be near-universal agreement, even wherereluctantly granted, that there exists some core group of prosodic features which mark off “English poetry” from other poetries and other forms of utterance in English. In a rather
 
diverse group of articles by E. Clemons Kyte, Martin Halpern, and James I. Wimsatt, Ifind considerable evidence that certain recurrent features of English poetry can be relatedto certain enduring characteristics of the English language, even as specific prosodicsystems become obsolete with time and changing usage.
E. Clemons Kyte, “On the Composition of Hypermetric Verses in Old English,”
 Modern Philology
71:2 (Nov 1973), 160-165.
Kyte’s concern is the most specific of those treated by the three authors I chose tobring to you. Essentially, Kyte is attempting to find a description of hypermetric verseswhich conforms to the formal strictures of the Sievers five-type theory. After evaluatingseveral other attempts to account for hypermetric verse, most notably that of A. J. Bliss,Kyte concludes that most explanations account for too few features of Anglo-Saxoncomposition or cover too few of the actual occurrences of hypermetric verse. RegardingBliss’s theory that “a hypermetric verse is a joining of two normal verses in which thefinal syllables of the first verse have been replaced by a sequence equivalent to anordinary verse” (161), Kyte notes that, while the theory works as far as it goes, attemptsto regard “double hypermetric verses” as “the coalescence of three normal verses in thesame manner as described for the regular hypermetric verses” raise additional concerns.The problem, as Kyte describes it, is simply that “there are only thirteen instances” in theOld English corpus of lines which can be so analyzed.Kyte’s solution is to examine the availability, within the Sievers five types, of “light verses,” irregular verses produced by “the reduction of the first of the two expectedstresses.” Kyte follows Bliss’s observation that the lighter stress in the verse is balanced
 
out by the addition of unstressed syllables. Kyte then suggests that these “legitimatevarieties of normal verse” are available, in addition to the basic five types, to “combine toform hypermetric verses” in the manner described by Bliss. The key difficulty formetricists, Kyte suggests, is that a hypermetric line produced by fusion of verses with alight verse first is easily mistaken for “normal verse preceded by an extended anacrusis”(162). By replacing the “multisyllabic anacrusis” with hypermetric verse with a light firstelement, Kyte hopes to allow the Sievers five types to be used to more accurately classifythe elements of Old English poetry. Also, it allows certain hypermetric verses to be moreconfidently classified as such. Consider the following four verses:mid synna fyrnummægen mid modes snyttrumþara þe hit mid mundum bewandno þy ær he þone heaþorincWhich are hypermetric? Kyte argues that two are hypermetric, while two are examplesof anacrusis. [answer to be given in class]For my purposes, the most intriguing idea presented in this article is thepossibility that hypermetric verse essentially varies only in its increasing frequencyacross the Old English period, which Kyte suggests is “a means of coping with theincreasing number of syllables in a language as it moved from a synthetic to an analyticalstage” (165). That “actual change in poetic cadence is strikingly evident only when oneadvances to the Middle English period” suggests that more is at work in English poeticsthan can be accounted for by the Norman influence on poetics; it also suggests that,underlying the technical adjustments made to accommodate linguistic change both within
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