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Perception and English Poetic Meter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Paul C. Boomsliter ,
Warren Creel  and
George S. Hastings Jr.
Paul C. Boomsliter
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Albany
Warren Creel
Affiliation:
Albany Medical College
George S. Hastings Jr.
Affiliation:
State University of New York at Albany
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Abstract

Metrical organization exists more importantly in the pattern constructions of the listener than in the physical signal. It serves a major function in control of attention, as prosodic features do in daily speech. The accents of speech are timed attention peaks, presenting meanings for which they prepare our attention in advance. Metrical organization fosters expectancy through larger durations—metrical stanzas are larger expectancy spans. The metrical effect is not a mere physical drumbeat; it is an atmosphere of shaped sustained expectancy. Perception is an active process, in which the perceiver contributes pattern. The rhythm of speech is a conspicuous example of such contribution. A technique for investigating and demonstrating the order contributed by meter is provided by unled choral reading.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 2 , March 1973 , pp. 200 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 Mary Augustine Roth, Coventry Patmore's “Essay on English Metrical Law”: A Critical Edition with a Commentary (Washington, D. C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1961), p. 15. This essay, one of the major works of temporal metrics, first published in 1857, is now available with an extensive commentary and a selected bibliography listing 281 references.

2 The Science of English Verse (New York: Scribners, 1880), p. 67. This, the most influential work in temporalist metrics, is also available in a memorial edition (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1945).

3 (New York: Wiley, 1967), p. 108.

4 (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 79. Brown's dissertation is cited below, n. 9.

5 PMLA, 74 (1959), 589. This article is reprinted in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin (New York: Houghton, 1967). Snell's article is cited below, n. 10.

6 Elias Schwartz, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “Rhythm and ‘Exercises in Abstraction,‘ ” PMLA, 79 (1962), 668–74. The table of contents lists the three as coauthors of a four-part exchange, opened by Schwartz's objection to the article cited in n. 5, which was answered by Wimsatt and Beardsley, and so on.

7 In a chapter, “Psychological Theories and Linguistic Constructs,” in Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory, ed. Theodore R. Dixon and David L. Horton (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 466.

8 Scientific American, Sept. 1968, pp. 204–14.

9 “Time in English Verse Rhythm: An Empirical Study of Typical Verses by the Graphic Method,” in Archives of Psychology, ed. R. S. Woodworth, Columbia Contributions to Psychology, 17, No. 2 (New York: Columbia Univ., 1908), p. 49.

10 Ada L. F. Snell, “An Objective Study of Syllabic Quantity in English Verse,” PMLA, 34 (1919), 417–18.

11 Paul C. Boomsliter and Warren Creel, “Hearing with Ears instead of Instruments,” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 18 (1970), 410. This is a speech, reproduced verbatim, and therefore written in the person of Boomsliter.

12 The Function of Criticism (Denver: Swallow, 1957), p. 82.

13 9th ed. (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1955), p. 26.

14 Prosodia Rationalis (London: Alman, 1775).

15 (New York: American Book, 1936), p. xl.

16 In Search of Beauty in Music (New York: Ronald Press, 1947), p. 129.

17 We wish to thank Robert Spinks of the Educatfonal Communications Center at the State University of New York at Albany for important help in recording experiments; also we thank faculty and students of the Dept. of Rhetoric and Public Address and the English Dept., and of the Milne High School in Albany, for cooperation in classroom tests of choral reading and in measuring experiments.