Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line.

Students of English today bring with them deep anxieties about the study of poetry, the main reasons being lack of familiarity with the terms of poetic analysis and apprehension about its aims and motives. Such is the context for these two books. Holder (admittedly addressing an American version of these circumstances) proposes a rejection of traditional prosody; Attridge refines prosody with the aim of reassuring nervous students, and of aiding those who work within teaching systems that operate in direct opposition to the kind of pedagogic practices necessary to bring students to the pleasures of poetry.

The accessibility of Poetic Rhythm stems largely from its delineation of beat, stress, meter, and rhythm according to a methodology and a system of transcription that does not burden its readers with Latinate or Greek terms, or alienate them with unmanageable forms of notation. Attridge builds carefully upon The Rhythms of English Poetry. The rich and varied assortment of examples used here (a new selection, rather than a bowdlerized version of that found in the earlier text) provides abundant evidence of the features being explored. More importantly, the examples are woven into the thesis that all speakers of the English language …