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Byron, Conversation and Discord: Chatterton Lecture On Poetry

JANE STABLER

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 139, 2005 Lectures

This chapter focuses on the force of Byron as a ‘talker’ between poetry and conversation in English verse. It discusses the conversational mode of his poetry, which is noted to be often taken for ... More

This chapter focuses on the force of Byron as a ‘talker’ between poetry and conversation in English verse. It discusses the conversational mode of his poetry, which is noted to be often taken for granted. The chapter also explores Byron's mobile attention to the role of the reader and with the degree of dissonance or friction that the reader helps engender. It shows that the boundaries of both speech and poetry are both enforced and eroded by Byron.Less

David Fairweather Foxon 1923–2001

Nicolas Barker and James McLaverty

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 161, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, VIII

David Fairweather Foxon (1923–2001), a Fellow of the British Academy, published English Verse 1701–1750: a Catalogue, a book that not only took a long leap forward into a new century; it also ... More

David Fairweather Foxon (1923–2001), a Fellow of the British Academy, published English Verse 1701–1750: a Catalogue, a book that not only took a long leap forward into a new century; it also provided a cross-section through the record of all British books and books printed abroad in English in a period in which the total number of books, periodicals, and ephemera began to increase exponentially. The period was also one in which the whole concept of authorship and the relationship between author and the book trade changed substantially, as a result of the Copyright Act (1709). Foxon was born in Paignton, the son of a Methodist minister. Bletchley Park was a crucial experience for him, socially and intellectually. He met a variety of gifted academics, some eccentric, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge, at an early age; it gave him training in codebreaking; and it introduced him to his future wife. Foxon was involved in the recataloguing of the British Museum Library, a gigantic undertaking that had begun in 1929.Less

Rhyming

Daniel Sawyer

in Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This chapter investigates manuscript evidence for readers’ attention to one particular aspect of form, rhyme. The chapter begins by examining occasions when scribes copied Middle English verse in ... More

This chapter investigates manuscript evidence for readers’ attention to one particular aspect of form, rhyme. The chapter begins by examining occasions when scribes copied Middle English verse in unusual layouts with atypical lineation, because such occasions drove scribes to punctuate the structures of poems more explicitly. The resulting punctuation reveals that scribes often read, and expected other readers to read, cycles of rhyme, not individual lines, as the basic building-blocks of rhyming verse. The chapter then turns to the evidence of rhyme braces. Manuscript case-studies show that readers were usually adept and accurate when adding rhyme braces, but did not always choose to represent the actual rhyme. Their decisions reveal an aesthetic interest in balanced and unbalanced structures in rhyme, which helps to explain the effects and pleasures offered by some unbalanced stanza forms of the period, such as rhyme royal. A systematic quantitative survey of the braces in long poems written in couplets then shows how much care and labour was spent representing rhyme accurately even in copies of poems which modern scholarship has tended to regard as essentially utilitarian texts. Readers had, it is suggested, a strong formalist interest in rhyme in all kinds of rhyming verse. The evidence also demonstrates that different readers could pursue different kinds of formalism, and that poets did not always see eye to eye with the readers who eventually absorbed and transmitted poetry.Less

Introduction

Daniel Sawyer

in Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350–c.1500

This introduction positions the book in relation to past work in the history of reading, introduces the materials and methods used, and lays out brief overviews of the five chapters. The history of ... More

This introduction positions the book in relation to past work in the history of reading, introduces the materials and methods used, and lays out brief overviews of the five chapters. The history of reading has an established large-scale narrative which offers little detail on the reading of vernacular poetry in later-medieval England. Readers’ own marginal comments on Middle English verse cannot supply this missing detail, as they are rare at this time, and so mark their writers out as atypical. A combination of methods is proposed for examining a broader range of evidence instead, including close reading and detailed manuscript case studies, but also quantitative surveys inspired by continental European scholarship. Middle English verse does, it is suggested, constitute an identifiable topic. A working taxonomy of canonicity in Middle English poetry is offered, and widely successful anonymous religious instructional poems such as The Prick of Conscience are proposed as useful comparanda for canonical texts. The introduction closes by summarizing what follows.Less

Examining the Evidence for Phonemic Affricates: Middle English /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/ or [t-ʃ], [d-ʒ]?

Donka Minkova

in Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age

Affricates represent an analytic challenge, as a category intermediate between simple stops and a sequence of a stop and a fricative. The paper traces the historical evidence for the development of ... More

Affricates represent an analytic challenge, as a category intermediate between simple stops and a sequence of a stop and a fricative. The paper traces the historical evidence for the development of OE [c], a single segment, to palatal [cj], assibilated [tʃ], the sequence [tʃ], and back to a single segment contour /t͡ʃ/, building on diagnostics like the blocking property of medial clusters versus singletons in resolution in OE verse, alliteration, metrical treatment in terms of syllable weight, data from language acquisition, phonetics in terms of durational properties, the interaction with Middle English sound changes, as well as the early neutralization of the singleton-geminate contrast. Further support comes from spelling, including a possible Celtic origin for OE <cg>, and <ch> spellings in LAEME as evidence supporting Orthographic Remapping of Palatal c. Finally, the author considers the impact of Old French loanwords, where the simplification of affricates in Anglo-Norman is argued to be delayed compared to Central French due to the existence of the sequences [tʃ] and [dʒ] in Middle English.Less

Introduction

Rebecca M. Rush

in The Fetters of Rhyme: Liberty and Poetic Form in Early Modern England

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the idea of rhyme as a binding force, which is fundamental to poetic theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early modern poets ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the idea of rhyme as a binding force, which is fundamental to poetic theory in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early modern poets consistently imagined rhyme as a band, fetter, or link that tied the poem together. Indeed, many theorists believed that rhyme's connective function made it essential to the structural integrity of verse. This understanding of rhyme as a band, fetter, or jointure made it apt to be seen as an analogy for other types of bonds, particularly those that unite friends, lovers, or political communities. Therefore, the same questions that fascinated sonneteers and plagued political theorists—What powers can bind the freeborn mind? Are these powers natural or artificial? What is the scope of individual liberty? Can limitation be productive?—also animated debates about rhyme and its place in English verse. By telling the dynamic story of rhyme from Elizabeth's reign—when the couplet was a sign of ancient liberty—to the Restoration, this book investigates what it meant for poets to subject themselves to what they so often described as the bands or fetters of rhyme.Less

Licentious Rhymers: Donne and the Late Elizabethan Couplet Revival

Rebecca M. Rush

in The Fetters of Rhyme: Liberty and Poetic Form in Early Modern England

This chapter examines how John Donne played a formative role in a new school of couplet poetry that arose in the 1590s. The youthful poets who belonged to this school rejected the interwoven rhymes ... More

This chapter examines how John Donne played a formative role in a new school of couplet poetry that arose in the 1590s. The youthful poets who belonged to this school rejected the interwoven rhymes favored by many Elizabethans, insisting that elaborate rhyme schemes betrayed a preference for form over reason. Reacting against Italianate stanzaic poetry, these poets took up the Chaucerian pentameter couplet in order to flout imported poetic rules and return English poetry to its original state of rational liberty. They contended that the antiquated form, with its loose rhythm and enjambed lines, allowed them to restore verse to its proper function as a forum for free, argumentative discourse. By considering Donne's early experiments with the couplet, the chapter provides a new perspective on a period of Donne's career that has often proved elusive.Less

Wider Reading

Daniel Sawyer

in Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book, and explores some possible implications for future study in various manuscripts and texts. The manuscript presentation of Piers Plowman for ... More

This chapter summarizes the conclusions of the book, and explores some possible implications for future study in various manuscripts and texts. The manuscript presentation of Piers Plowman for reading is compared to the presentation of The Prick of Conscience, and the resulting similarities and differences illustrate the value of studying the filtration of formal choices through habits in book production. The chapter considers the presence and absence of the marking of rhyme in copies of The Canterbury Tales, and then closes by examining the work of the compiler Robert Thornton as a case study which draws together many of the book’s themes.Less

An Even and Unaltered Gait: Jonson and the Poetics of Character

Rebecca M. Rush

in The Fetters of Rhyme: Liberty and Poetic Form in Early Modern England

This chapter explains why Ben Jonson's measured couplets were seen as a watershed in the history of English poetry. It argues that the battle between the couplet and the stanzaic poets in the 1590s ... More

This chapter explains why Ben Jonson's measured couplets were seen as a watershed in the history of English poetry. It argues that the battle between the couplet and the stanzaic poets in the 1590s ended in a sort of stalemate. The young couplet poets eroded the influence of stanzaic poets like Edmund Spenser by associating stanzas with a cowardly submission to mistresses, conventions, and continental rules of poetry. Nevertheless, their separation of verse from measure was not particularly congenial to most seventeenth-century poets, who continued to hold to the view that poetic form should reflect divine or social order. By instituting a reform of English verse that reconciled the argumentative freedom of the couplet school with the measure of the stanzaic poets, Ben Jonson made the couplet a fitting vehicle for his ethical poetry, which celebrates a circumscribed, private kind of liberty. In doing so, he developed concepts of lyric freedom and a separate poetic sphere that would be taken up and reinterpreted by the subsequent generation of poets.Less

‘Diverse folk diversely they demed’

Daniel Sawyer

in Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This chapter argues for the variety and vitality of the reading of Middle English verse in the period c.1350–c.1500, drawing on evidence from poems themselves and from surviving evidence of their ... More

This chapter argues for the variety and vitality of the reading of Middle English verse in the period c.1350–c.1500, drawing on evidence from poems themselves and from surviving evidence of their later-medieval ownership and transmission. Since some of the successful poems used as comparanda for canonical writers in this study might be less familiar to readers, the chapter briefly introduces The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, considering their origins, organization, and internal depictions of reading. It is argued that such long, anonymous poems display interesting variety, not homogeneity. Allusions, provenance evidence from manuscripts, and records in wills and inventories all show how these texts were read in combination with many other types of material, by all kinds of readers and throughout the period, in ways which modern literary history is not necessarily capable of predicting. These findings should, it is suggested, encourage caution in the extrapolation of reading tastes and habits from individual pieces of surviving evidence.Less

Harold Monro, Poetry Anthologies and the Rhetoric of Textual Materiality

Patrick Collier

in Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890-1930s

This chapter meditates upon the role of the poetry anthology and its claims on literary value at the turn of the twentieth century. By sorting the output of poets, the anthology might seem to ... More

This chapter meditates upon the role of the poetry anthology and its claims on literary value at the turn of the twentieth century. By sorting the output of poets, the anthology might seem to stabilize literary value; but like all print artefacts in the period, the anthology was overproduced, and therefore could also be seen as positing multiple, competing canons. The anthology form was in flux in these years as well, with such familiar conventions as tables of contents and the grouping of poems by poet not having emerged as norms. In this context, the textual materiality of anthologies became a complex system for intervening in debates about value. The chapter revisits the most popular anthologies of the era—Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse—to sketch out the emerging codes of the anthology form. Poet and publisher Harold Monro, the chapter argues, pursued a more egalitarian textual politics than these popular anthologies, particularly his underappreciated 1929 anthology, Twentieth Century Poetry. The chapter reads the content and the metatexts of Twentieth Century Poetry as asserting a catholic vision of modern poetry as vital to everyday life.Less

Navigating

Daniel Sawyer

in Reading English Verse in Manuscript c.1350-c.1500

This chapter explores navigation in the reading of later Middle English verse, examining how readers entered books of poetry and how they moved around within poems. The chapter explores the varying ... More

This chapter explores navigation in the reading of later Middle English verse, examining how readers entered books of poetry and how they moved around within poems. The chapter explores the varying fates of the navigational apparatus in different poems, and discusses the use and, sometimes, creation by readers of summaries, tables of contents, and indexes to English poems. A quantitative survey of fixed bookmarks offers a new method for recovering readers’ movements. Finally, the chapter examines how navigation could obscure the distinctions between individual texts and whole books, and could sometimes be used by later-medieval readers to manipulate attribution and canonicity. Past discussions of navigation in reading have often used a distinction between continuous and ‘discontinuous’ (out of order) reading; this chapter concludes that considerably more fine-grained gradations are visible within these two categories.Less

Borrowed PATH verbs in Middle English

Judith Huber

in Motion and the English Verb: A Diachronic Study

Chapter 9 analyses the use of the path verbs enter, ish/issue, descend, avale, ascend, mount, and amount in Middle English autonomous texts and translations from French and Latin, focusing on their ... More

Chapter 9 analyses the use of the path verbs enter, ish/issue, descend, avale, ascend, mount, and amount in Middle English autonomous texts and translations from French and Latin, focusing on their recurrent contexts and their complementation patterns. It shows that these verbs are borrowed predominantly in specific, often non-literal or manner-enriched senses relating to discourse domains such as administration, military, religion, and the like, rather than being borrowed as verbs for describing general literal motion events. Their application for general literal motion events is shown to be less restricted in translations from French and Latin, in which translators often react to the presence of a path verb in the original by using the same verb in its Middle English form. This and the continued influence of French and Latin after Middle English may eventually have led to a wider application of the verbs in later stages of the language.Less

Borrowed PATH verbs in Middle English: Preliminary considerations

Judith Huber

in Motion and the English Verb: A Diachronic Study

Chapter 8 presents the hypotheses about the early use of borrowed path verbs in Middle English which will be investigated in chapter 9: Previous research suggests that these path verbs, which have ... More

Chapter 8 presents the hypotheses about the early use of borrowed path verbs in Middle English which will be investigated in chapter 9: Previous research suggests that these path verbs, which have been shown in chapter 5 not to have any real native forerunners, can be expected to be more frequently used for general literal motion events in translations from French and Latin than in autonomous Middle English texts, while they are expected to be more frequently used for metaphorical and other non-literal motion in autonomous texts. Furthermore, it is likely that they acquire additional manner semantics in Middle English, as speakers interpret them in line with the semantic patterns prevalent in Middle English motion verbs. The chapter also introduces the methodology and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse which serves as the basis for the study.Less

The Seventies

in A Gallery to Play to: The Story of the Mersey Poets

The 1960s has been characterised as the best years for the Mersey Poets. By January 1970, things had changed. The Beatles disbanded and a Conservative government led by Edward Heath assumed power in ... More

The 1960s has been characterised as the best years for the Mersey Poets. By January 1970, things had changed. The Beatles disbanded and a Conservative government led by Edward Heath assumed power in Britain. John Lennon downplayed the years of change and counter-cultural rebellion, a sentiment shared by Brian Patten. Roger McGough also viewed 1970 as incomplete, while Adrian Henri, an atheist, saw good things at the beginning of the new decade. In March 1973 Philip Larkin created controversy after The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, an anthology of poems of which he was editor, came out. One of the issues was the inclusion of Patten in the anthology. Between 1972 and 1975, the Mersey Poets were involved in a series of small tours, publications, residencies, and events. Patten attended the ‘Poetry Gala’ at the Royal Festival Hall in February 1969 with Christopher Logue, Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, and Stevie Smith.Less