Metre and Oral Praxis

[jsburbidge]

Quoted from an actual classicist talking about the early CE in a Guardian article:

"Poetry was so important; everyone read Homer and all that sort of thing. But we know that spoken language wasn’t really appropriate to that kind of poetry.. "

Somebody has their wires crossed. If they'd cited, say, Callimachus it would be unexceptionable (except that I doubt everyone read Callimachus). But Homer was, very much, oral poetry. The ghost of Milman Parry is turning in his grave.

The speaker is trying to position accentual-metric verse as more natural than real metre, in Greek. But even in the days of Aristophanes the old-fashioned, pre-Sophist curriculum for the well-off young was mainly oral poetry (including composition) and not written. Metrical poetry.

Stressed poetry came in as the language changed and more syllables became short, and the claim underneath the article's actual text may be that the text being discussed is evidence of this transition earlier than previously thought. Germanic had already gone through that transition, which is why old Germanic poetry does not inherit Indo-European metrics but uses a stress-based alliterative metric.

Latin, by the way, was a different case - Greek metres had been grafted onto Latin and accentual-metric poetry reasserted itself early in the common era.

Comments

[ndrosen]

Please let me know whether I understand correctly: by “real metre”, I take it that you mean poetry based on long and short syllables (like Homer’s, if I am correctly informed), and by “accentual metric poetry”, you mean poetry based on stress accents, such as Vergil’s Aeneid).

[jsburbidge]

Metre (=measure) is based on long and short syllables. What we in English tend to call metre is accentual, treating accented and unaccented syllables as though they were short and long.

Thus iambics, in Greek and Latin classical literature, are verses composed of feet with one short and one long syllable; dactylic hexameter - the metre of Homer and of the Aeneid - are one long followed by two short syllables, varied by spondees (two long syllables).

But the "iambic pentameter" of Shakespeare and Milton uses feet of one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable.

You can write true metre in English, but the only example I know of is Campion's "Rose-Cheek'd Laura".

The Aeneid uses metre based on length of syllables, as do all the poets of the classical period in Rome. Mediaeval Latin verse uses accentual metres (e.g. the Pange Lingua of Thomas Aquinas).

[ndrosen]

As usual, I am impressed by your learning. When I was being dragged through the Aeneid, I heard it with stress accents, or perhaps combined stress and quantity accents, but perhaps the way my mother pronounced it was not the way Vergil himself would have done so.

[jsburbidge]

A lot of English speakers treat Latin in that way. (Hellenists tend to be more careful, though even there there's a wide gap between the really careful speakers and the slightly lazier ones; true classical Greek had tonal accents rather than stress accents; by Byzantine times they had become stress accents, which is partly why poetics changed.)

At the opposite extreme from all this is French, where the scansion is based on counting syllables and restricting where the caesura falls, because French stress is based on the phrase rather than the word and length isn't very important (except there's a very famous line of Baudelaire which is in true iambic, the last line of Recueillement).