Modernism's Metronome

Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

Ben Glaser

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781421439532
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Despite meter's recasting as a rigid metronome, diverse modern poet-critics refused the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.

In the twentieth century, meter became an object of disdain, reimagined as an automated metronome to be transcended by new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter remained in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogy of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser revisits early twentieth-century poetics to uncover a wide range of metrical practice and theory, upending our inherited story about the "breaking" of meter and rise of free verse.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost’s Distorted Vernacular
• 2 Penty Ladies: T. S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender of Modern Meter
• 3 “No Feet to Walk On”: Pound’s Late Victorian Prosody
• 4 Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise Bogan
• 5 The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and James Weldon Johnson
• 6 Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown’s Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes
• Conclusion. Prosody after Form
• Appendix. Scansion and Metrical Notation
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index