ABSTRACT
It is not just the pentameter that was broken by Pound. Rather, it is all kinds of beat-based, accentual-syllabic prosodies in verse written in, or translated into, English. The proposed prosody in the present book does not abandon the accentual-syllabic tradition but adopts a framed approach which builds on the work of the accentual-syllabic tradition, adding other elements to determine free verse rhythms. The problem with the ‘pentameter’ (a shorthand for all metrical forms) is its linearity and oversimple stress system of either strong or weak beats. It is fully acknowledged that the pentameter provides the backbone of a poetic tradition in verse in English, supposedly because it is close to the rhythmic intonations of the speaking voice. But English speech rhythms are more diverse, more subtle, than is suggested by a beat-based theory, and free verse in English reflects that range and subtlety. In this chapter there is not a full history of scansion in English verse but a look at 18th- and 19th-century prosodies; a discussion of quantity in English phonetics; consideration of the syllable as a minimal unit of language; and a discussion of some of the recent theories of free verse prosody. The ‘ghost’ of metricality appears to haunt many such attempts at accounting for the rhythms of free verse. This book aims to dispel that ghost.
