Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 by Weiskott Eric;

Author:Weiskott, Eric;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

This is the sigh of a conservative academician at the end of his career. English and Latin have switched roles in the teaching of meter. Whereas Milton, in 1669, took pride in having authored a Latin grammar text that equipped students to read about prosody directly in Latin (see Chapter 6), Lewis, in 1960, gives up on Latinate English prosody being translated back into the study of Latin verse.

Piers Plowman met blank verse before a new discipline challenged the prestige of Latin prosody. In exploring an early confrontation between two English metrical traditions, Part II suggests a new shape for sixteenth-century verse history and a different path to the present. Literary historians have nearly always understood early blank verse as the beginning of the metrical future,44 but its first practitioners and readers understood it as the recovery of the metrical past. In a 2004 essay, Stephen Guy-Bray questions the medieval/modern periodization and “the sort of thinking that is called ‘Whig history’” in relation to Douglas’s and Surrey’s Aeneid translations.45 “Rather than being the beginning of something,” Guy-Bray contends, “Surrey is the end of something.”46 Of the two, Douglas better represents “the new departure we seem to want to find” in sixteenth-century English literary history.47 Guy-Bray’s arguments invert Lewis’s metrical judgments in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century and align with the conclusions of Part II. The Langlandian affinity of Surrey’s new verse form, most conspicuous in Gascoigne’s Steele Glas and commentary from Webbe to The Miller of Trompington, indicates that blank verse discloses metrical modernity only insofar as it recapitulates metrical antiquity.

Part III begins from the observation that the architect of metrical modernity as it is usually understood in English studies was neither Douglas nor Surrey. To the extent that modern scholars can retrospectively identify a single person responsible for modern metrical tastes, the honor falls to a poet of the fourteenth century. His name was Geoffrey Chaucer.

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