PROSODY

in modern criticism, the study of all the elements of language that contribute toward acoustic and rhythmic effects, chiefly in poetry but also in prose. The term derived from an ancient Greek word that originally meant a song accompanied by music or the particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Greek and Latin literary critics generally regarded prosody as part of grammar; it concerned itself with the rules determining the length or shortness of a syllable, with syllabic quantity, and with how the various combinations of short and long syllables formed the metres (i.e., the rhythmic patterns) of Greek and Latin poetry. Prosody was the study of metre and its uses in lyric, epic, and dramatic verse. In sophisticated modern criticism, however, the scope of prosodic study has been expanded until it now concerns itself with what the 20th-century poet Ezra Pound called the articulation of the total sound of a poem. Prose as well as verse reveals the use of rhythm and sound effects; however, critics do not speak of the prosody of prose but of prose rhythm. The English critic George Saintsbury wrote A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present (3 vol., 190610), which treats English poetry from its origins to the end of the 19th century; but he dealt with prose rhythm in an entirely separate work, A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912). Many prosodic elements such as the rhythmic repetition of consonants (alliteration) or of vowel sounds (assonance) occur in prose; the repetition of syntactical and grammatical patterns also generates rhythmic effect. Traditional rhetoric, the study of how words work, dealt with acoustic and rhythmic techniques in Classical oratory and literary prose. But although prosody and rhetoric intersected, rhetoric dealt more exactly with verbal meaning than with verbal surface. Rhetoric dealt with grammatical and syntactical manipulations and with figures of speech; it categorized the kinds of metaphor. Modern critics, especially those who practice the New Criticism, might be considered rhetoricians in their detailed concern with such devices as irony, paradox, and ambiguity. This article considers prosody chiefly in terms of the English languagethe only language that all of the readers of this article may be assumed to know. Some examples are given in other languages to illustrate particular points about the development of prosody in those languages; because these examples are pertinent only for their rhythm and sound, and not at all for their meaning, no translations are given. the rhythmic aspect of language; in literary criticism, the term chiefly denotes the metrical structure of poetry and the study of such structure. Traditional prosody is that which dominated English poetry between the 16th and 19th century, though it had first been more or less established in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13401400). It is based on lines measured by syllable stress and is sometimes called accentual-syllabic verse. Each line of verse consists of basic units called feet, with either two or three syllables in a foot. These syllables are weak or strong according to the way they are pronounced. The word forget, for example, has an unstressed syllable (weak) followed by a stressed syllable (strong). The four principal feet found in English poetry are the iambic (behld); the trochaic (tger); the dactylic (dsperate); and the anapestic (un derstnd). If a line comprises only one foot it is called monometer; if two, dimeter; if three, trimeter; if four, tetrameter; if five, pentameter; if six, hexameter; and so on, though the count in English verse seldom goes above six. Lines organized into complete groups are called stanzas, which are then identified by the number of lines (couplet, tercet, quatrain, sestet, octave, and so on) and by the metre the lines follow: thus, iambic pentameter; trochaic dimeter; dactylic tetrameter; and so on. The complete group of stanzas confirms the verse form of the poem (such as sonnet, ode, lyric poem). Old English and Middle English poetry, on the other hand, were written in a strong-stress metre. That is, the lines of verse are not measured by feet but by a constant number of strong stresses. The number of unstressed syllables in each line is variable. The lines of verse divide sharply at a medial pause called a caesura, on each side of which are two stressed syllables. There was a return to this sort of prosodic structure in the later 19th century, influenced by the innovative writing of Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It has been developed in the 20th century by such poets as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden (though these three were also masters of traditional prosody). Romance language verse is largely based on a syllabic metre; that is, the line is determined by a fixed count of syllables. Stress and pause, on the other hand, are variable. Experimentation in English verse with this kind of structure has generated a prosody more interesting to the eye than to the ear. The prosody of Greek and Latin poetry was determined by quantitative metres. This was possible because the rules governing length of vowels (quantity) were established by precise grammatical conventions. No such rules obtain in English. Moreover, Greek and Latin are both inflected languages; that is, words change their form to indicate distinctions in mood, case, tense, and number. Thus complicated metrical patterns and long, slow-paced lines developed because the languages were hospitable to an alternation of long vowels (a characteristic of the root vowels) and short vowels (a characteristic of the inflected syllables). English had lost most of its inflected forms by the 15th century. German, which has retained them, is more at ease in adopting and adapting the ancient classical metres. It should be noted that the terminology of traditional English prosody was established by Renaissance theorists who sought to impose the rules of classical prosody on vernacular English forms. They merely succeeded in redefining, in classical terms, the elements of an already existing syllable-stress metre. Non-metrical prosody is a feature of modern poetry, although many critics deny that it is possible to write poetry without employing some kind of metre. Visual prosodies have been fostered by poets of the Imagist movement and by such experimenters as e.e. cummings, who revived the practice of some Metaphysical poets in shaping the verse by typographical arrangement. Prosody entails several important elements other than metre. Rhyme scheme, too, is one of a variety of effects including alliteration and assonance that influences the total sound meaning of a poem. Very often, prosodical study is trying to discover the subtleties of a poem's rhythm, its flow, a quality rooted in such elements as accent, metre, tempo, but not synonymous with them. Prosody also takes into account a consideration of the historical period to which a poem belongs; the poetic genre; and the poet's individual style. Finally, the term prosody encompasses the theories that have been developed through the ages about the value of structure: from the decorum of the classical age, which identified certain metres as suitable only for particular subjects; to Renaissance formulations of laws by which modern verse was restricted to classical measures; to the 18th-century exhaustion of Alexander Pope's idea that the movement of sound and metre should represent the actions they carry; to G.M. Hopkins' controversial theories of sprung rhythm based on natural stress of words. Since the publication in 190610 of George Saintsbury's great History of English Prosody, the subject has been a respected part of literary study, though much dispute continues to surround prosodic theories. Additional reading General works Paul Fussell, Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965); Harvey S. Gross (ed.), The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody (1966); Joseph Malof, A Manual of English Meters (1970). Greek and Latin prosody Paul Maas, Greek Metre, trans. by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1962); Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Mollendorff, Griechische Verskunst (1921), the definitive work on the subject but difficult for beginners. Prose rhythm Morris W. Croll, Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (1966), contains classic essays on the period styles of prose and on musical scansion of verse; George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (1912, reprinted 1965). History and uses of English prosody William Beare, Latin Verse and European Song: A Study in Accent and Rhythm (1957); Robert Bridges, Milton's Prosody, rev. ed. (1921); Harvey S. Gross, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry: A Study of Prosody from Thomas Hardy to Robert Lowell (1964); T.S. Omond, English Metrists (1921, reprinted 1968); George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present, 3 vol. (190610); John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (1961). Theories of prosody Seymour B. Chatman, A Theory of Meter (1965); Otto Jespersen, Notes on Metre, in The Selected Writings of Otto Jespersen (1962); William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, The Concept of Metre: An Exercise in Abstraction, in William K. Wimsatt, Jr., Hateful Contraries (1965); Yvor Winters, The Audible Reading of Poetry, in The Function of Criticism (1957). Non-Western prosody Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (1961); James Legge (ed. and trans.), The Chinese Classics, vol. 4 (1960).