ABSTRACT
I have given a grossly oversimplified version of this, partly no doubt because of my own difficulties in grasping the complex version. What Epstein and Hawkes say in their pamphlet is that the iambic foot should be redefined as ‘weaker-stronger’ rather than as ‘weak-strong’ and that the possibilities of combination are ‘weak-weak, weak-tertiary, weak-secondary, weak-primary, tertiary-tertiary, tertiary-secondary, tertiary-primary, secondary-secondary, secondary-primary, primary (single bar) primary, and if one wishes to include the so-called “pause-foot” in which one element of the iamb is a paralinguistic pause (pause) – there are four more possibilities: (pause) weak, (pause) tertiary, (pause, secondary, and (pause) primary, for a total of fourteen possible four-stress matrices for the iambic foot in English, and no more.’ They can get, however, a great many more, though still a fairly small finite number, by considering the phenomenon of what they call ‘juncture’ between syllables. They have rather a passion for the number four, and find four kinds of juncture as they find, also, four degrees of pitch. What they mean by juncture can roughly be suggested to the ordinary reader, like myself, by considering the difference between ‘Annapolis’ and ‘An apple is’ and ‘glass-house’ and ‘glass house’. It should be noted that their weak-weak combination does not create a true English pyrrhic, nor their tertiary-tertiary, secondary-secondary, or primary-primary combinations a true English spondee. The second element of the foot is always felt as stronger. For the purposes of this monograph, I have, though not reverting to the simple binary weak-strong scansion, 80reduced the Trager-Smith possibilities to: weak-tertiary, weak-secondary, weak-primary: tertiary-secondary, tertiary-primary: secondary-primary, or to six instead of the fourteen Trager-Smith matrices. I have left juncture, as I have left pitch, out of the picture. Epstein and Hawkes do not seem, at least in their monograph of 1956, to be much interested in quantity, which seems to me aesthetically very important in English verse, however difficult it is to write quantitative verse in English that will be taken unambiguously as such. And they do not discuss syllabics.
