If it is true that in art only technical matters can be taught, then the evidence of Meter in English suggests that, despite a revival in formal verse, our graduate programs in poetry are teaching very little indeed. This book brings together the responses of fourteen distinguished poets and teachers to a target essay, in the form of ten propositions, by poet and teacher Ronald Wallace; it ends with a long reply by Wallace to his respondents.
Unfortunately, Wallace muddles things from the start, and his confusion infects virtually all the essays that follow. Ironically, his first mistake is one of form. Trying to strong-arm his complex subject into simple axioms, Wallace hands down ten pedantic boldface commandments. These range from whingeing terminological quibbles, “Instead of the term ‘feminine ending’ we should say simply extra-syllable ending,” to bafflingly obvious statements, “The spondee [a foot of two long stresses] is a good, and fairly frequent foot in English.” Though he may not realize it, Wallace is no Moses, leading the less enlightened masses into a land of prosodic clarity. He’d do better breaking his rigid tablets.
Far more damning than the form of his argument is its content. From the outset, Wallace fails to make two fundamental distinctions, the lack of which renders his observations precisely useless. First, he does not distinguish between prosody as description and prosody as prescription. The importance of this is evident in his last proposition. Does he mean spondees are “good,” which is