Fw: [Milton-L] "The Verse"

[Carl Bellinger]

Dear Kemmer,

       T. V. F. Brogan has made available -- online -- a fully indexed PDF 
text
of his magisterial "English Versification, 1570-1980, A Reference Guide."
http://www.arsversificandi.net/resources/evrg/readme.html
[Brogan's  index contains over 150 references to Milton]

Brogan, in the introduction, gives prominent notice to "Bridges' seminal 
_Milton's
Prosody_," which title has already mentioned in responses to your query. 
Bridge's text may be found online at
http://books.google.com/books?id=XxX26m2cbk0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=milton%27s+prosody#PPA2,M2
which reproduces an 1894 edition.  A 1921 edition is the most frequently 
cited in current scholarship; it may be found online at
http://www.archive.org/stream/miltonsprosodywi00brid/miltonsprosodywi00brid_djvu.txt.

This later 1921 edition --under the heading "rhythm divorced from 
scansion"--
contains what is billed as a clarification of Bridges' rather explosively 
controversial conclusion that "Milton came to scan his verses in one way, 
and
read them in another."

John Shawcross's reply mentioned Weismiller's essay in the Variorum ed. of 
Paradise Regain'd. In that essay Weismiller makes an observation which ( I 
would advise anyone intending to approach this topic) should be taken as a 
red flag warning:   "Analysts of verse form in English--many of whom have 
themselves been poets of some distinction--have been (variously) responsive, 
acute, learned,
and articulate. And still their writings contradict one another hopelessly."

Brogan owns the same opinion but expresses it with somewhat less politesse:

   [The study of versification is] "... a field which in historical terms 
has
been (it is not too extreme to say) a great mass of ignorance, confusion,
superficial thinking, category mistakes, argument by spurious analogy,
persuasive definitions, and gross abuses both of concepts and terms...
[I]n studies of the structure of verse the use of terms such as  poetry,
verse, accent, quantity, Numbers, Measure, rhythm, meter, prosody,
versification, onomatopoeia, and rhyme/rime/ryme,  historically and
consistently has been nothing short of Pandemonium. It was so in 1580 and it
remains so in 1980."

     If that ain't forbidding enough check the oblique angle of Sam 
Johnson's --crucial-- discussion of the blank verse of PL [easily found 
online, just put these on the search line: "measures," "English,""poet," 
"periods," "declaimer"]. Johnson's desire, in iambic pentameter poetry, is 
always to be hearing "the music of the English line;" but take away rhyme 
that marks each line's terminus, and then, and here is the fatal blow, be 
wantonly/giddily moving the caesura all over the place within the line in a 
cascade of multi-line enjambments, and you have entirely lost the measures 
of the English poet, and are left merely with the high periods of orational 
prose.

Cheers,

Carl



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kemmer Anderson" <kanderso at mccallie.org>
To: "John Milton Discussion List" <milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2009 12:18 PM
Subject: [Milton-L] "The Verse"