Endnotes

1  Goold Brown, The Grammar of English Grammars (New York: Samuel and William Wood, 1851).

2  Otto Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development, and Origin (New York: Henry Holt, 1922), 7.

3  There is no record in the history of linguistics for the study of prosody, nor is there a survey like Paul Fussell’s extremely useful Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth Century England. For useful histories of language study in nineteenth-century England, see Anna Morpurgo Davies, History of Linguistics, Volume IV: Nineteenth Century Linguistics (London and New York: Longman, 1998) and Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England 1780-1860 (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1983).

4  Stephen Potter, The Muse in Chains (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937).

5  Yopie Prins, “Victorian Meters," Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 89-113.

6  John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985), 19.

7  Prins, 90-91.

8  Goold Brown, The Grammar of English Grammars, 4th ed. (New York: Samuel S. & William Wood, 1858).

9  "The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction," PMLA 74 (1959): 585-98.

10  Coventry Patmore “Essay on English Metrical Law” in Poems Volume 2, The Unknown Eros, Amelia, etc. (London: George Bell, 1890), 217. I am using the fourth edition of the second volume of Poems, which was printed in 1886, 1887, and 1890, attesting to the diverse possible readership of the essay, which appeared in the appendix. Despite the importance that Dennis Taylor has given to this essay (as the harbinger of the “New Prosody”), few of his obituaries mention the essay, and a long Atheneaum piece (5 Dec. 1896, 797) only states: “a thoughtful essay, marked by fresh study, and displaying the genius of the poet in a very distinct and startling light.” Saintsbury discards his metrical interventions in a 15 June 1878 Athenaeum review (757). A long review in The Examiner 29 (1878) states, “it is ingenious and scrupulously exact in expression, and is conceived in a dignified spirit, but errs in recording as legitimate canons of rythmic (sic) art irregularities that are only to be pardoned in genius, not recommended to immaturity. For instance, it is dangerous to attempt, by any public recognition of time, to regulate the varied pauses that enliven and illuminate the best English verse. If once we drop the jog-trot measurement of lines by feet, on the ground that, what we call an iambus has, in fact, by an irregularity, become a trochee, we open the door to every sort of extravagance. By all means, let young people continue to be taught to scan in the old mechanical way. If they are poets, they will learn intuitively to arrange their time. . . . The whole of this study on metre, in short, is highly interesting, whether the reader agrees with it in detail or not. It is singular to find a poet defending with such dignity the theory of an art that he seems, in practice, so often to defy" (821-822). Patmore himself asserts “I have seen with pleasure that, since then [1856], its main principles have been quietly adopted by most writers on the subject in periodicals and elsewhere” ("Essay" 215).

11  Sister Mary Augustine Roth’s reproduction of Patmore’s Essay on English Metrical Law (Washington: Catholic U of America P, 1961) includes an introduction in which she expertly traces the influences of Patmore’s predecessors Joshua Steele, Hegel (“whose Aesthetics provided the philosophical basis for an “organic” theory of prosody unifying ‘life’ and ‘law,’ meanings and versification,” ix), Daniel, Foster, Mitford, and Dallas.

12  George Vandenhoff and Edgar Allan Poe, A Plain System of Elocution, 2nd ed. (New York: Shephard, 1845); George Vandenhoff, The Art of Elocution as an Essential Part of Rhetoric: with instructions in gesture and an appendix of oratorical, poetical, and dramatic extracts (London: S. Low, 1867).

13  William Johnson Stone’s On the Use of Classical Metres in English was published first in 1899 (London: Henry Frowde, 1899) and then reprinted alongside Robert Bridges’s treatise Milton’s Prosody in 1901. Milton’s Prosody was first published in 1887 as part of Henry Beeching’s school edition of Paradise Lost as “On the Elements of Blank Verse,” and it was reprinted in 1894 as a pamphlet all its own (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), reprinted again in 1901 alongside Stone’s treatise, and printed in final revised form in 1921.

14  Jakob Schipper, Englische Metrik, in three volumes (Bonn: Verlag Von Emil Strauss, 1888). Translated into English in 1910 as A History of English Versification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), the book was reviewed alongside Saintsbury’s three volumes.

15  Joseph Mayor, Chapters on English Metre (London: C.J. Clay, 1886; 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1901).

16  T.S. Omond, English Hexameter Verse (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1897) and T.S. Omond, English Verse-Structure (a prefatory study) (Edinbugh: David Douglas, 1897).

17  T.S. Omond, English Metrists (Turnbridge Wells: R. Pelton, 1903) and T.S. Omond, A Study of Metre (London: G. Richards, 1903). Both of the latter were revised and reprinted. Omond was a frequent interlocutor with Mayor, Bridges, and Saintsbury.

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