I’m reading Paul Fussell’s book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. Here, after giving a couple examples of attempts at purely syllabic metre in English, he concludes, “But accent, like passion and murder, will out, and it will out the moment the poet, arrived at a climax, seizes all the techniques of prosodic reinforcement offered him by the conventions of the English language.” He has the same conclusion later about quantifiable verse; stress/accent is just too much a part of English for either of these to work.
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3Accentual-syllabic meter seems to be fashionable during ages interested in classical rhetoric and distinguished by commitments to the sense of human limitation and order. Of all metrical systems possible in English, the accentual-syllabic is the most hostile by nature to impulse, irregularity, and unrestrained grandiosity. It seems all but impossible to transmit impressions of hysteria or the frantic within a strict accentual-syllabic versification: a weighty judiciousness appears to be the tone most commonly associated with accentual-syllabism.
On the “metrical contract,” and how people impose metres into language:
In his chapter on techniques of scansion, Fussell adds this caveat: “The goal of what we are doing is enjoyment: an excessive refinement of terms and categories may impress others but it will probably not help us very much to appreciate English poetic.”
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