If it is true that in art only technical matters can be taught, then the evidence of Meter in English suggests that, despite a revival in formal verse, our graduate programs in poetry are teaching very little indeed. This book brings together the responses of fourteen distinguished poets and teachers to a target essay, in the form of ten propositions, by poet and teacher Ronald Wallace; it ends with a long reply by Wallace to his respondents.

Unfortunately, Wallace muddles things from the start, and his confusion infects virtually all the essays that follow. Ironically, his first mistake is one of form. Trying to strong-arm his complex subject into simple axioms, Wallace hands down ten pedantic boldface commandments. These range from whingeing terminological quibbles, “Instead of the term ‘feminine ending’ we should say simply extra-syllable ending,” to bafflingly obvious statements, “The spondee [a foot of two long stresses] is a good, and fairly frequent foot in English.” Though he may not realize it, Wallace is no Moses, leading the less enlightened masses into a land of prosodic clarity. He’d do better breaking his rigid tablets.

Far more damning than the form of his argument is its content. From the outset, Wallace fails to make two fundamental distinctions, the lack of which renders his observations precisely useless. First, he does not distinguish between prosody as description and prosody as prescription. The importance of this is evident in his last proposition. Does he mean spondees are “good,” which is to say acceptable for poets to employ when writing? In that case let’s all rejoice that Ronald Wallace has come along to tell us it is “good” to do what poets have been doing for the last five centuries or so. Or is the spondee “good” and “frequent” in the sense that it accurately describes what we hear when we read poetry? Wallace himself provides no answer. Second, when writing about individual poems, Wallace never distinguishes between speech stress (accents as we actually hear them) and metrical ictus (the ideal accents that the meter causes us to expect). That almost none of the book’s contributors notices these basic errors in Wallace’s essay, I find especially disturbing. In fact, many of the essayists do nothing more than express bland agreement with Wallace’s key points. Just how bad has our thinking about prosody become?

No less an authority than Robert Hass, our Poet Laureate, entertains the notion that accentual-syllabic meters are “the principal way in which the educated classes in Europe mystified their utterance and gave it repressive authority, which they called poetry.” Just think of the oppressed people who would have been liberated had Wordsworth only written free verse instead of sonnets! Someone ought to tell our laureate that this sort of ranting went out of fashion with berets and bongos.

Though he denies it when responding to his critics, Wallace alternately confuses and misuses the terms meter and rhythm. Rhythm is not, as Wallace avers, merely the tension between speech stress (what he calls “speech run”) and metrical ictus. Compounded of syntax, diction, lineation, and rhyme, as well as meter (or the metrical tension described above), rhythm is the broadest of categories. That is why no two iambic (or trochaic) poems will have the same rhythm: Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and Wordworth’s Prelude are both in iambic pentameter, yet their rhythms are entirely different. But Wallace needs to fudge the line between meter and rhythm in order to make his central and most egregious claim: that there is only one meter in English poetry, and it is iambic. All other meters, say trochaic or anapestic or dactylic, “do not exist in English.” They are “sub-meters.” Furthermore, he believes that “iambic and trochaic, anapestic and dactylic rhythms [my emphasis] are mirror image and … indistinguishable from one another as meter.” These meters may be construed as symmetrical, or indistinguishable, on the page and in theory, but the ear easily discerns a trochaic from an iambic.

Having already decided that all English poetry is iambic, Wallace replaces the notion of meter with the term rhythm in order to discuss those troubling “sub-meters.” Thus, in his scheme Blake’s “Tyger” becomes an iambic poem with a trochaic rhythm. He refuses to listen to the falling meter of the poem:

x / x / x / x
Tyger Tyger burning bright
x / x / x / x
in the forest of the night

Because it is permissible to imagine an unstressed syllable at the beginning of these lines, Wallace argues that the poem is iambic tetrameter with a trochaic rhythm. It is not. Anyone with an ear can hear that this is a poem composed of trochees. Again, our prosody must accurately present what we hear when we read a poem, either silently or aloud.

For a corrective to Wallace’s more misguided proclamations, one must turn to the essays by Dana Gioia, John Frederick Nims, Lewis Putnam Turco, and Timothy Steele. Gioia has a strong grasp of prosody’s history; he employs forceful examples of verse, and, unlike Wallace, he doesn’t try to analyze single lines out of context. Nims and Gioia are virtually the only contributors with pleasing prose styles; the rest proceed in a scholarly shuffle. Turco alone substantively addresses the issue of “free verse,” and Steele, in his excellent essay, is the only writer in the book who clearly distinguishes between prescriptive and descriptive prosody, speech stress and metrical ictus.

While others in the collection make useful points too numerous to list here, as a coherent look at its subject, Meter in English fails. On the other hand, it has succeeded in stressing to me just how poorly our poets and teachers understand the complexities of poetic meter.