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Not only students tend to me somewhat anxious when it comes to meter! The Modernist poets, especially T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, were apparently quite afraid of traditional verse, so afraid, in fact, that they rebelled against traditional form and meter of poetry. So successful were they in their fight, that the legacy of that rebellion is still very much with us as the overwhelming majority of contemporary poetry is written in ‘free verse’, i.e., without meter and fixed forms. However, not only has meter and form continued to be written, most of the major poets of Anglophone Literature have, at one time or the other, returned to meter and form in their published works. In this seminar, we will look closely at poetic meter and traditional form as a continued poetic practice from the 1950s to the 2020s. To remedy the anxiety most people have these days with regard to the subject, we will begin with a re-evaluation of meter which will show that meter is nothing to be afraid of. Our discussions and exercises will enable students to comprehend how meter works, how to identify metrical structure and how to incorporate this knowledge effectively into the analysis of poetry. Next, we will have a closer look at what Eliot and Pound were up to and – spoiler alert! – their entire notion of ‘free verse’ will turn out to be inherently contradictory. Having become a friend and advocate of meter, we will spend the second half of the semester reading a selection of metrical poetry from the late 20th century up to the 2020s, analyzing how meter contributes centrally to contemporary, postmodern Anglophone poetry. |
