ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a reconsideration of the sixteenth-century debate over quantitative versus accentual poetry in English. It focuses on the implied relation between systems of measurement and value. Philip Sidney, who wrote a good deal of quantitative verse, saw nothing about it antithetical to English. The critic who has written best about the issue of quantitative verse in English is Derek Attridge, who reasonably observes that quantitative poems are most successful when the quantity coincides with the accent. Thomas Campion in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie defends quantitative metres by urging to pay attention to more than accent and rhyme, to the music of the language, which he identifies with the length of its syllables. The rule for quantitative hexameters is that the basic foot is dactylic, a long and two shorts, and that this may be varied by substituting a spondee, two longs, for a dactyl.
