The Automatic Flow of Verse

Abstract

This Chapter assesses meter in relation to contemporary thinking about the “man-machine.” In particular, it shows how meter in the nineteenth century became a topic of interest to phrenologists, physiologists, physicians, and surgeons, who assessed metrical ability and deficiency from the perspective of their specialist fields. Their pronouncements about meter—often grounded in the materiality of the body or the embodied mind—advanced a new vocabulary and disciplinary frameworks for engaging with question about prosodic agency and volition, as well as organic metrical determinism. Not only was versification considered by some a “mechanical” practice that might have little to do with genius or a predisposition to rhythmical composition; further, it might be the consequence of “mechanistic” or “automatic” somatic and cognitive processes. While some saw meter as a measure of a person’s ability to impose his or her will over the unruly forces of the body—for example, exercises in spoken scansion might effectively enable one to govern the tongue and other elements of the “speech mechanism”—others, in particular advocates of an increasingly materialist agenda, suggested that meter, along with other human linguistic capacities, might in some cases be a manifestation of the body’s or brain’s mechanics: an individual’s respiratory rhythms, as Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted, or cerebral health, as postulated by Frederic Bateman and other physicians, might have more to do with his or her versified speech than any conscious thought process or formal training in metrics.

Physically, a human being is a machine …. The perfect action of the steam-engine depends upon the quality, form, and adjustment of its several parts. These conditions being defective, the action of the machine is imperfect. The same principle applies to man.

—D. P. Butler , Butler’s System of Physical Training (1868)

Mark time with the hand and foot, march in time, count time both verbally and mentally, in short periodicize every moment of the body and mind, in harmony with all the varieties of English versification …. The speech-apparatus should be disciplined by going through a course of rhythmical training for the voice ….

—“Stammer,” The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1842)