Julia S. Carlson - Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s Poetry in Fields of Print

Romantic Marks and Measures

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Romantic Marks and Measures

Wordsworths Poetry in Fields of Print

Julia S. Carlson

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

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University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4787-9

For my parents

Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen. Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning informationfor all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands. Even our language, like our paper, often lacks immediate capacity to communicate a sense of dimensional complexity.

Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information

I have the whole punctuation to settle; which in blank-verse is of the last importance, and of a species, peculiar to that composition; for I know no use of points, unless to direct the voice, the management of which, in the reading of blank-verse, being more difficult than in the reading of any other poetry, requires perpetual hints, and notices, to regulate the inflexions, cadences and pauses. This however is an affair, that in spite of grammarians, must be left pretty much ad libitum scriptoris [to the discretion of the writer]. For (I suppose) every author points according to his own reading.

William Cowper to William Unwin, 2 October 1784

A British man, speaking French discovers his country as much by the emphasis he lays upon particular syllables, as by any other mark.

James Burnett Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language

Contents

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Introduction

When Francis Jeffrey reviewed Thalaba in 1802, he made Robert Southeys poem a test case of all that was wrong with the new, revolutionary school of poetry. One of his strongest criticisms concerned the poems measures: Southeys predilection for experimental, unrhymed verse-forms was, he said, untraditional and un-English: Blank odes have been known in this country about as long as English sapphics and dactylics; and both have been considered, we believe, as a species of monsters, or exotics, that were not very likely to propagate, or thrive, in so unpropitious a climate.

Southeys attempt to naturalize sapphics had failed, Jeffrey asserted, and he predicted a no better fate for Thalabaa jumble of all the measures that are known in English poetry, (and a few more), without rhyme, and without any sort of regularity in their arrangement. Strange combinations exercised the mind, and rather than being repeated with any degree of uniformity were multiplied, through the whole composition, with an unfounded licence of variation. Thalabas cadences were not merely unprecedented but failed to set precedents within the poem.

Figure 1. James Gillray, New Morality; or the promisd instalment of the high-priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the homage of Leviathan and his suite (London, 1798), detail. Trustees of the British Museum. Reproduced by permission of the British Museum.

Cut away to the year 1812: another critic was printing excerpts from a Southey epic and inviting readers to discover their measure. In his Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instruction on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language, John Thelwall reproduced a passage from The Curse of Kehama (1810), extolling its beautiful variety of lyrical measure, well worthy of elocutionary analysis.