Abstract
Arethinking—and in most cases a rejection—of inherited meters is one of the defining characteristics of the poetry of the Modernist period. The free verse of T. S. Eliot Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, the syllables of Marianne Moore, and rhc syntactic and intonational experiments of Gertrude Stein sought new sonic bases for poetic form: traditional meter was judged to have become too clotted with its past for serious use.1 To the poets and critics who descend from that generation of Modernist innovators, meter has often seemed at best an irrelevancy or a brake on poetry, at worst a nostalgic throwback to previous forms and hierarchies, both aesthetic and political. The comments of David Antin, in a particularly influential essay, arc clean meter is “trivial,” a “phonological idiosyncrasy”; it serves merely as a symbol of order.”2
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Notes
For the history of free verse, see, for example, Chris Beyers, A History of Free Verse (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2001);
H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Origins of Free Verse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 98–133, 117.
J. H. Prynne, Field Notes: ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and Others (Cambridge, n. pub., 2007).
Drew Milne, “Agoraphobia, and the Embarrassment of Manifestos: Notes Towards a Community of Risk,” Jacket 20 (December 2002) http://jacket-magazine.com/20/.html ; originally published in Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing 3 (1993): 25–39.
Laura Kilbride, “‘Political All the Way Down’: Keston Sutherland on Poetics, Politics and Community,” The Literateur (November 25, 2011), http://literateur.com/interview-with-keston-sutherland/.
Stephen Thomson, “The Forlorn Ear of Jeff Hilson,” in Complicities: British Poetry 1945–2007, ed. Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007), 153–167,
Peter Jaeger, “‘I Am Something Nonne’: Jeff Hilson’s Nature Writing,” Journal of Irish and British Innovative Poetry 2 (2010): 125–136;
and Peter Barry, “Contemporary British Modernisms,” in Teaching Modernist Poetry, ed. Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 94–115, 106–111.
Hilson’s principal publications are A Grasses Primer (London: Form, 2000),
Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982);
Marjorie Perloff, “After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries,” in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86–110.
William Carlos Williams, “VS,” Touch ston e 1.3 (January 1948): 1–4,
quoted in Stephen Cushman, William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 105.
Brian Reed, “Now Not Now: Gertrude Stein Speaks,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 33.4 (2007): 103–113, 104.
See for example Keston Sutherland’s The Odes to TL61P (London: Enitharmon, 2013).
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© 2015 Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith
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Rumsey, L. (2015). The Atypicality of Jeff Hilson: Metrical Language and Modernist Pleasure. In: Lang, A., Smith, D.N. (eds) Modernist Legacies. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488756_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488756_7
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