Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (review)

In an overview of almost the entirety of pre-eighteenthcentury English verse, Woods presents a largely technical history of the contour of the metrical line in English, though George Herbert figures in only a small way in this account. There are perhaps two broad approaches one may take to the subject of versification. One seeks the systematic linguistic rules that account for the regular alternation of stress with little regard for meaning or poetic context (see Halle and Keyser, English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth and Its Role in Verso [New York: Harper and Row, 1971]). Another approach uses the Aristotelian literary tradition to explain how poets use meter to make language into an art imitating meaning or the spoken voice (see John Thompson, The Founding of English Meter [New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1966]).