Maureen N. McLane

Romantic meter and form

Poetic meter is a pattern of marked linguistic features and their absence that shapes a poetic line. In English these features are most often stresses, and the pattern that emerges between marked and unmarked stresses eventually becomes the overall form that is the poem itself. Although meter is measurable, and to some degree predictable, once it has been established through a series of repetitions, the actual rhythm of a poem converges and departs from this pattern of meter, lending it texture and interest. As early as Aristotle, such dynamic emergence, or entelechy, of form has been contrasted to structures, or finite shapes, and when we speak of poetic meters and the larger structures that are poetic forms, we must acknowledge their living dimension as well as the fixed repertoire of kinds of poems that we have inherited from literary history. Even in the two dominant forms of meter in English - accentual and accentual-syllabic verse - we find this tension between expected and emerging form. Accentual meter, which measures pure stresses alone, historically is associated with vernacular verse and song traditions, including British nursery rhymes, game chants, and ballads. Because English is isochronous, that is, it tends to have the same intervals of time between stressed syllables no matter how many unstressed syllables are between them, accentual meters follow the natural stresses of spoken language. The varying syllables of such meter, following the Anglo-Saxon line, often are characterized by four beats and a strong medial caesura. Accentual syllabic meters, however, unfold by means of an ideal pattern constituted by the relation between the number of feet, or groups of syllables, in a line and the number of stresses; in any given poem, the actual line may not supply that relation in the expected way, but the reader or listener will bear the ideal pattern in mind.

Romantic poetry and the romantic novel

Readers interested in the relationship between poetry and the novel in the Romantic period have long been charmed by the scene of the autumnal walk in Jane Austens Persuasion (1818). Keeping each other begrudging yet compulsive company, the extended family circle at Uppercross sets out on a “ long walk,” and Anne Elliot must once again witness at close hand the flirtations of her beloved Captain Wentworth and the Musgrove sisters. Finding pleasure in this walk requires a deliberate effort on Annes part: she thus turns to the mental discipline of “repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” But while Anne occupies her mind “as much as possible in such like musings and quotations,” she cannot help, when “within reach of Captain Wentworths conversation,” but try to hear it. And so the scene unfolds as a drama of what Anne overhears when unable to “fall into a quotation.” With its retrospective structure and its attention to feeling and subjectivity, Persuasion is often called the most “Romantic” of Austens novels. This particular scene is beloved for its “lyric” qualities and structure, and its interest in subjectivity, landscape, colloquy, and voiced and unvoiced emotion, justifies such comparisons. Barbara Hardy once described the episode as resembling an “Ode to Autumn in three stanzas,” and, for Romanticists, Keatss as yet unwritten ode lends an uncanny charge to Austens evocation of autumns poetry.

Introduction: The companionable forms of Romantic poetry

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, Making it a companionable form . . . Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight” It was, most immediately, the work of his own contemporaries that prompted Percy Shelley to proclaim, at the close of his Defence of Poetry (1821), that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The authority of those poets in the age we have come to call “Romantic,” Shelley explained, derived not from their opinions, with which he often disagreed, but from their capacity to tap into a certain spirit - what he called “the spirit of their age.” Shelley figured this with a metaphor taken from recent developments in the natural sciences: it is impossible to read these contemporaries, he wrote, without being struck by “the electric life that burns in their words.” “Electricity,” for Shelley, is at once a modern scientific discovery and a theme that hearkens back to the ancient myth of Prometheus, the thief of divine fire. The prototypical writer of his age - the “Romantic poet” - thus became on Shelleys account a kind of modern Prometheus, a poet of the electric life of words. This view would not go unchallenged. Indeed, even before it was written down in the Defence of Poetry , Mary Shelley had published Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a fable of “electric life” and monstrous ambition with more than casual application to her husbands grand schemes. In spite of such challenges, or because of them, a sense of verbal electricity in Romantic poetry has persisted through generations of readers and assured these writings a special place in British literature ever since.