ABSTRACT
The first motive of the new linguistic metrics,2 the desire to approach verse with the aid of a knowledge of the workings of living language (where 'stress' is astonishingly more subtle than the 'stressor-not-stress' of traditional metrics), was a reaction against the linguistic unreality of the Saintsbury school. It was good to be reminded that verse is language as well as stylized pattern. But the orthodoxy demanded by the Trager-Smith metrists, the formalization of the line always in terms of the complete suprasegmental array, took away the simple pattern, or at least our means for understanding this pattern, this 'abstract metre'. By isolating one function of metrical analysis, other functions were ignored. Not unnaturally, Trager-Smith metrics has lost its excitement.3 It is difficult today to understand what the I956 Kenyon Review pioneers intended: what question they were asking, and what their answer was, in the total set of answers that are proper to questions in metrics.
