Abstract
Despite repeated attempts to naturalise it, the hexameter has never taken root in English poetry; the experiments with the metre carried out by various poets during the nineteenth century seem at first sight to have had little lasting impact. Such experiments were, in fact, seen by many critics as confirming the metre’s fundamental incompatibility with the structure of the English language. ‘It is not an English metre, and it never will be,’ thundered the Dean of Canterbury when confronted with a hexameter translation of the Iliad: ‘All that has been done to naturalize it has entirely failed. The scholar can read it and enjoy it, but then it is on account of his knowledge of it in Greek and Latin … the merely English reader can make nothing of it.’1 Others argued that the ‘merely English’ reader could make something of it, but that what he or she was reading had little or nothing to do with the epic metre of Greek and Latin poetry. According to J. S. Blackie, ‘it may be proved scientifically that English hexameters have not, and never can have, to the English ear, that … weighty majesty, which the ancient critics recognised in the sounding march of Homeric and Virgilian verse’.2 Given this climate of critical hostility it is not surprising that the fashion for English hexameters did not endure much beyond the 1860s; and it is tempting to see them, from our current perspective, as a kind of poetic equivalent of the Albert Memorial, a product of the Victorian impulse to graft the past onto the present no matter how incongruous the result.
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Notes
Dr. Alford’s opinion is cited by William Whewell in ‘English Hexameters; Mr. Dart’s Translation of the Iliad’, Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1861/2), pp. 487–96 (487).
J. S. Blackie, ‘Homer and His Translators’, Macmillan’s Magazine 4 (1861), pp. 268–80 (278); Blackie’s ‘scientific’ demonstration is discussed below, pp. 61–3.
On pre-Victorian hexameter experiments, see Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, ‘When Klopstock England Defied’, Comparative Literature 55 (2003), pp. 130–63.
London Literary Gazette 217 (Saturday, 17 March 1821), pp. 161–3; Lionel Madden, Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 284.
Preface to Robert Southey, A Vision of Judgement (London: Longman, Hurst, 1821), p. xxvii; the original preface is reprinted in The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey (New York: D. Appleton, 1846), pp. 791–5.
For the meeting with Klopstock see letter to Thomas Poole of 20 Nov. 1798, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 1:260. Coleridge’s hexameter experiments (mostly in letters to friends) are discussed in Bernhardt-Kabisch, ‘When Klopstock England Defied’, pp. 144–8.
J. W. Robberds (ed.), A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich … containing his correspondence of many years with the late Robert Southey, Esq, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1843), 1:308.
Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2 vols (New York: Haskell House, 1968 [1882]), pp. 553–4.
James Blundell, Hexametrical Experiments or a Version of Four of Virgils [sic]Pastorals … (London: William Pickering, 1838), p. v. Blundell praises Southey’s pioneering work: ‘to his original labours the cordial thanks are due of every true lover of English hexametrics’ (p. xi).
See also J. N. Douglas Bush, ‘English Translations of Homer’, PMLA 41.2 (June 1926), pp. 335–41 (338); the translation was published in parts during 1844–5.
Lancelot Shadwell, The Iliad of Homer. Faithfully Rendered in Homeric Verse from the Original Greek (London: William Pickering, 1844), ‘Advertisement’ between books II and III (pp. 44–5).
William Whewell, ‘Letter 2’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60 (1846), p. 328.
Ibid., p. 330.
William Whewell, ‘Letter 1’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60 (1846), p. 20.
Whewell, ‘English Hexameters’, Macmillan’s Magazine 5 (1861/2), p. 489.
J. S. Blackie, ‘On the Rhythmical Declamation of the Ancients’, Classical Museum 1 (1844), pp. 338–68 (354). Blackie’s time signatures describe the quantitative feet of classical prosody rather than their modern accentual equivalents. His use of the term ‘dipod’ anticipates (and may indeed have influenced) Patmore’s terminology.
J. S. Blackie, ‘Remarks on English Hexameters’, Classical Museum 4 (1847), pp. 319–30 (321).
Ibid., p. 324.
Ibid., p. 323.
From Blackie’s inaugural lecture on his appointment as Professor at Edinburgh in 1852; cited in Dinah Birch, Ruskin’s Myths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 35. On the connection between the hexameter debate and the politics of university reform, see J. P. Phelan, ‘Radical Metre: The English Hexameter in Clough’s Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich’, Review of English Studies n.s. 50 (1999), pp. 166–87.
William Whewell, ‘Letter 3’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 60 (1846), p. 478.
Arthur Hugh Clough, A. H. Clough: Prose Remains, ed. Mrs B. Clough (London: Macmillan, 1888), p. 140. Clough corresponded with Longfellow during the 1850s, offering, on one occasion, to send him ‘the long book of Hexameters’ published by Whewell, Lockhart et al. (see above, p. 58); letter of 18 Jan. 1855, in A. H. Clough, The Correspondence of A. H. Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 2:494.
Henry W. Longfellow, Review of W. E. Frye’s translation of Tegnér’s Frithiof’s Saga, North American Review 45 (1837), Art. VII, pp. 149–85 (159).
Ibid., p. 162.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie (6th edn; Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1848), p. 13 (the lines are not numbered; all subsequent quotations will be from this edition, with part and section numbers in parentheses in the text).
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, 6 vols (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1966–82), 3.145 (28 November 1847).
For the historical background to the poem, see Manning Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, ‘The Origin of Longfellow’s Evangeline’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 41 (1947), pp. 165–203.
See, e.g., Edward Thorstenberg, ‘Is Evangeline a Product of Swedish Influence?’, Poet-Lore 19 (1908), pp. 301–17; Hawthorne and Dana, ‘Origin of Longfellow’s Evangeline’, p. 177.
J. S. Blackie, On the Living Language of the Greeks, and its Utility to the Classical Scholar (Edinburgh, 1853), p. 24.
Kingsley, Fraser’s Magazine 49 (Jan. 1849), pp. 103–10 (107); rpt in M. Thorpe (ed.), Clough: The Critical Heritage (New York: Thorpe, 1972), pp. 37–47 (43).
The version used is found in Charles Kingsley, Poems (London: Macmillan, 1889).
F. W. Newman, The Iliad of Homer faithfully translated into Unrhymed English Metre (London: Walton and Maberly, 1856), pp. v–vii.
Henry Malden, ‘On Greek Hexameters’, in Proceedings of the Philological Society (London: George Bell, 1854), 5:149–57 (151).
Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 1:97–216 (124).
Ibid., 1:125.
Ibid., 1:151–2.
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© 2012 Joseph Phelan
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Phelan, J. (2012). The English Hexameter in Theory and Practice. In: The Music of Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359253_4
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