DOCSLIB.ORG

Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features Thomas Haider Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart [email protected] Abstract However, for projects that work with larger text corpora, close reading and extensive man- A prerequisite for the computational study of literature is the availability of properly digi- ual annotation are neither practical nor afford- tized texts, ideally with reliable meta-data and able. While the speech processing community ground-truth annotation. Poetry corpora do ex- explores end-to-end methods to detect and con- ist for a number of languages, but larger collec- trol the overall personal and emotional aspects of tions lack consistency and are encoded in vari- speech, including fine-grained features like pitch, ous standards, while annotated corpora are typ- tone, speech rate, cadence, and accent (Valle et al., ically constrained to a particular genre and/or 2020), applied linguists and digital humanists still were designed for the analysis of certain lin- rely on rule-based tools (Plecha´cˇ, 2020; Anttila guistic features (like rhyme). In this work, we provide large poetry corpora for English and Heuser, 2016; Kraxenberger and Menning- and German, and annotate prosodic features in haus, 2016), some with limited generality (Navarro- smaller corpora to train corpus driven neural Colorado, 2018; Navarro et al., 2016), or without models that enable robust large scale analysis. proper evaluation (Bobenhausen, 2011). Other ap- We show that BiLSTM-CRF models with syl- proaches to computational prosody make use of lable embeddings outperform a CRF baseline lexical resources with stress annotation, such as and different BERT-based approaches. In a the CMU dictionary (Hopkins and Kiela, 2017; multi-task setup, particular beneficial task re- Ghazvininejad et al., 2016), are based on words lations illustrate the inter-dependence of po- in prose rather than syllables in poetry (Talman etic features. A model learns foot boundaries et al., 2019; Nenkova et al., 2007), are in need of better when jointly predicting syllable stress, aesthetic emotions and verse measures benefit an aligned audio signal (Rosenberg, 2010;R osiger¨ from each other, and we find that caesuras are and Riester, 2015), or only model narrow domains quite dependent on syntax and also integral to such as iambic pentameter (Greene et al., 2010; shaping the overall measure of the line. Hopkins and Kiela, 2017; Lau et al., 2018) or Mid- dle High German (Estes and Hench, 2016). 1 Introduction To overcome the limitations of these approaches, Metrical verse, lyric as well as epic, was already we propose corpus driven neural models that model common in preliterate cultures (Beissinger, 2012), the prosodic features of syllables, and to evaluate and to this day the majority of poetry across against rhythmically diverse data, not only on sylla- the world is drafted in verse (Fabb and Halle, ble level, but also on line level. Additionally, even 2008). In order to reconstruct such oral traditions, though practically every culture has a rich heritage literary scholars mainly study textual resources of poetic writing, large comprehensive collections (rather than audio). The rhythmical analysis of of poetry are rare. We present in this work datasets poetic verse is still widely carried out by example- of annotated verse for a varied sample of around and theory-driven manual annotation of experts, 7000 lines for German and English. Moreover, we through so-called close reading (Carper and At- collect and automatically annotate large poetry cor- tridge, 2020; Kiparsky, 2020; Attridge, 2014; Men- pora for both languages to advance computational ninghaus et al., 2017). Fortunately, well-defined work on literature and rhythm. This may include constraints and the regularity of metrically bound the analysis and generation of poetry, but also more language aid the prosodic interpretation of poetry. general work on prosody, or even speech synthesis. 3715 Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3715–3725 April 19 - 23, 2021. ©2021 Association for Computational Linguistics Our main contributions are: In English or German, the rhythm of a linguistic utterance is basically determined by the sequence 1. The collection and standardization of het- of syllable-related accent values (associated with erogenous text sources that span writing of pitch, duration and volume/loudness values) result- the last 400 years for both English and Ger- ing from the ‘natural’ pronunciation of a line, sen- man, together comprising over 5 million lines tence or text by a competent speaker who takes into of poetry. account the learned inherent word accents as well as syntax- and discourse-driven accents. Thus, lexi- 2. The annotation of prosodic features in a di- cal material comes with n-ary degrees of stress, de- verse sample of smaller corpora, including pending on morphological, syntactic, and informa- metrical and rhythmical features and the de- tion structural context. The prominence (or stress) velopment of regular expressions to determine of a syllable is thereby dependent on other syllables verse measure labels. in its vicinity, such that a syllable is pronounced 3. The development of preprocessing tools and relatively louder, higher pitched, or longer than its sequence tagging models to jointly learn our adjacent syllable. annotations in a multi-task setup, highlighting msr iambic.pentameter the relationships of poetic features. met - + | - + | - + | - +| - + | rhy 0 1 0 0 0 2 : 0 1 0 2 : My love is like to ice, and I to fire: 2 Manual Annotation msr iambic.tetrameter We annotate prosodic features in two small poetry met - + |- + | - + | - + | corpora that were previously collected and anno- rhy 0 1 0 2 0 0 0 1 : The winter evening settles down tated for aesthetic emotions by Haider et al.(2020). Both corpora cover a time period from around 1600 msr trochaic.tetrameter to 1930 CE, thus encompassing public domain liter- met + - | + - | + - | + rhy 0 0 1 0 1 0 2 : ature from the modern period. The English corpus Walk the deck my Captain lies, contains 64 poems with 1212 lines. The German corpus, after removing poems that do not permit a Figure 1: Examples of rhythmically annotated po- metrical analysis, contains 153 poems with 3489 etic lines, with meter (+/-), feet (|), main accents lines in total. Both corpora are annotated with some (2,1,0), caesuras (:), and verse measures (msr). Au- metadata such as the title of a poem and the name thors: Edmund Spenser, T.S. Eliot, and Walt Whitman. and dates of birth and death of its author. The Ger- man corpus further contains annotation on the year of publication and literary periods. 2.1 Annotation Workflow Figure1 illustrates our annotation layers with Prosodic annotation allows for a certain amount of three fairly common ways in which poetic lines freedom of interpretation and (contextual) ambi- can be arranged in modern English. A poetic line is guity, where several interpretations can be equally also typically called verse, from Lat. versus, origi- plausible. The eventual quality of annotated data nally meaning to turn a plow at the ends of succes- can rest on a multitude of factors, such as the extent sive furrows, which, by analogy, suggests lines of of training of annotators, the annotation environ- writing (Steele, 2012). ment, the choice of categories to annotate, and the In this work, we manually annotate the sequence personal preference of subjects (Mo et al., 2008; of syllables for metrical (meter, met) prominence Kakouros et al., 2016). (+/-), including a grouping of recurring metrical Three university students of linguistics/literature patterns, i.e., foot boundaries (|). We also oper- were involved in the manual annotation process. ationalize a more natural speech rhythm (rhy) by They annotated by silent reading of the poetry, annotating pauses in speech, caesuras (:), that seg- largely following an intuitive notion of speech ment the verse into rhythmic groups, and in these rhythm, as was the mode of operation in related groups we assign main accents (2), side accents (1) work (Estes and Hench, 2016). The annotators ad- and null accents (0). In addition, we develop a set ditionally incorporated philological knowledge to of regular expressions that derive the verse measure recognize instances of poetic license, i.e., knowing (msr) of a line from its raw metrical annotation. how the piece is supposed to be read. Especially 3716 the annotation accuracy of metrical syllable stress While 0s are quite unambiguous, it is not always and foot boundaries benefited from recognizing the clear when to set a primary (2) or side accent (1). schematic consistency of repeated verse measures, license through rhyme, or particular stanza forms. 2.2 Annotation Layers In this paper, we incorporate both a linguistic- systematic and a historically-intentional analysis (Mellmann, 2007), aiming at a systematic linguistic description of the prosodic features of poetic texts, but also using labels that are borrowed from histor- ically grown traditions to describe certain forms or patterns (such as verse measure labels). We evaluated our annotation by calculating Co- Figure 2: Confusion of German Main Accents hen’s Kappa between annotators. To capture dif- ferent granularities of correctness, we calculated Meter and Foot: In poetry, meter is the basic agreement on syllable level (accent/stress), be- prosodic structure of a verse. The underlying ab- tween syllables (for foot or caesura), and on full stract, and often top-down prescribed, meter con- lines (whether the entire line sequence is correct sists of a sequence of beat-bearing units (syllables) given a certain feature). that are either prominent or non-prominent.Non- prominent beats are attached to prominent ones to Main Accents & Caesuras: Caesuras are build metrical feet (e.g. iambic or trochaic ones).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Birdsong in the Music of Olivier Messiaen a Thesis Submitted To
    P Birdsongin the Music of Olivier Messiaen A thesissubmitted to MiddlesexUniversity in partial fulfilment of the requirementsfor the degreeof Doctor of Philosophy David Kraft School of Art, Design and Performing Arts Nfiddlesex University December2000 Abstract 7be intentionof this investigationis to formulatea chronologicalsurvey of Messiaen'streatment of birdsong,taking into accountthe speciesinvolved and the composer'sevolving methods of motivic manipulation,instrumentation, incorporation of intrinsic characteristicsand structure.The approachtaken in this studyis to surveyselected works in turn, developingappropriate tabular formswith regardto Messiaen'suse of 'style oiseau',identified bird vocalisationsand eventhe frequentappearances of musicthat includesfamiliar characteristicsof bird style, althoughnot so labelledin the score.Due to the repetitivenature of so manymotivic fragmentsin birdsong,it has becomenecessary to developnew terminology and incorporatederivations from other research findings.7be 'motivic classification'tables, for instance,present the essentialmotivic featuresin somevery complexbirdsong. The studybegins by establishingthe importanceof the uniquemusical procedures developed by Messiaen:these involve, for example,questions of form, melodyand rhythm.7he problemof is 'authenticity' - that is, the degreeof accuracywith which Messiaenchooses to treat birdsong- then examined.A chronologicalsurvey of Messiaen'suse of birdsongin selectedmajor works follows, demonstratingan evolutionfrom the ge-eralterm 'oiseau' to the preciseattribution
    [Show full text]
  • Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics
    Mad River Review Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 9 2016 Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics William Wilborn Follow this and additional works at: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/mrr Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Wilborn, W. (2016). Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics, Mad River Review, 1 (1). This Criticism is brought to you for free and open access by CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mad River Review by an authorized editor of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact library- [email protected]. Wilborn: Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics WILLIAM WILBORN Your Feet’s Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics Classical English metrics, as in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, is a method of grouping the local rhythms of language into two ascending levels of organization, the foot and the line or verse. Unfortunately our understanding of this method has long been clouded by theory. That is because verse is more like dancing than computation. A gardener at Rydal Mount remembered watching Wordsworth as he composed. In his innocence he reveals the physical basis of practical metrics. Essentially he tells us that for Wordsworth iambic meter was walking: I think I can see him at it now. He was ter'ble thrang [busy] with visitors and folks, you mun kna, at times, but if he could git awa fra them for a spell, he was out upon his gres [grass] walk; He would set his head a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back. And then he would start bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum, bum, reet down til t'other end [of the walk], and then he'd set down and git a bit o' paper out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough right down and back agean.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Problems in Prosody
    1903·] Some Problems in Prosody. 33 ARTICLE III. SOME PROBLEMS IN PROSODY. BY PI10PlCSSOI1 R.aBUT W. KAGOUN, PR.D. IT has been shown repeatedly, in the scientific world, that theory must be supplemented by practice. In some cases, indeed, practice has succeeded in obtaining satisfac­ tory results after theory has failed. Deposits of Urate of Soda in the joints, caused by an excess of Uric acid in the blood, were long held to be practically insoluble, although Carbonate of Lithia was supposed to have a solvent effect upon them. The use of Tetra·Ethyl-Ammonium Hydrox­ ide as a medicine, to dissolve these deposits and remove the gout and rheumatism which they cause, is said to be due to some experiments made by Edison because a friend of his had the gout. Mter scientific men had decided that electric lighting could never be made sufficiently cheap to be practicable, he discovered the incandescent lamp, by continuing his experiments in spite of their ridicule.1 Two young men who "would not accept the dictum of the authorities that phosphorus ... cannot be expelled from iron ores at a high temperature, ... set to work ... to see whether the scientific world had not blundered.'" To drive the phosphorus out of low-grade ores and convert them into Bessemer steel, required a "pot-lining" capable of enduring 25000 F. The quest seemed extraordinary, to say the least; nevertheless the task was accomplished. This appears to justify the remark that "Thomas is our modem Moses";8 but, striking as the figure is, the young ICf.
    [Show full text]
  • On Translating Homer's Iliad
    On Translating Homer’s Iliad Caroline Alexander Abstract: This reflective essay explores the considerations facing a translator of Homer’s work; in par- ticular, the considerations famously detailed by the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, which re- main the gold standard by which any Homeric translation is measured today. I attempt to walk the reader Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/145/2/50/1830900/daed_a_00375.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 through the process of rendering a modern translation in accordance with Arnold’s principles. “I t has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage.”1 So begins Matthew Arnold’s classic essay “On Translating Ho- mer,” the North Star by which all subsequent trans- lators of Homer have steered, and the gold stan- dard by which all translations of Homer are judged. A reader will find Arnold’s principles referenced, directly or indirectly, in the introduction to most modern translations–Richmond Lattimore’s, Rob- ert Fagles’s, Robert Fitzgerald’s, and more recently Peter Green’s. Additionally, Arnold’s discussion of these principles serves as a primer of sorts for poets and writers of any stripe, not only those audacious enough to translate Homer. While the title of his essay implies that it is about translating the works of Homer, Arnold has little to CAROLINE ALEXANDER is the au- thor of The War That Killed Achil- say about the Odyssey, and he dedicates his attention les: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad to the Iliad.
    [Show full text]
  • Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
    ROBERT HAYDEN (1913-1980) “RUNAGATE RUNAGATE” (1962) √A highly moving—rhythmic—poetic evocation of the Underground Railroad: sights, sounds, fears, threats, the heroine Harriet Tubman, language from “WANTED” posters. Different VOICES. √ THE CONCISE OXFORD COMPANION TO AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE: “One of Robert Hayden’s most successful historical poems, ‘Runagate Runagate’ (first published in 1962), employs a montage of voices to portray the tumultuous world of escaped slaves, and ultimately the fundamental human impulse toward freedom. ‘Runagate,’ a term for a runaway slave, refers specifically to Harriet Tubman and by extension to a series of symbols suggesting freedom and emancipation.” [http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100433238] √ Cental Idea: Quest for Freedom, of slaves in the American South √ Poetic Meter: Utilizes a variety of meters: dactyl, iamb, amphibrach, cretic, anapest, spondee—yet is strongly grounded in the TROCHAIC. The poem’s opening line is in Trochaic Heptameter, with other major line-groupings of 6 trochees, 4 trochees, 3 trochees, pairs of trochees “bookending” another single meter; the “hoot-owl calling” quatrain near the poem’s conclusion has all 4 lines in Trochaic Tetrameter. The use of TROCHEE is, further, associated with moments of high drama. Three MOLOSSUS in highly emotionally charged moments. √ Historical, Evocative, Powerful, Personal √ Historical sources of some of the poetic language: spirituals, hymns, abolitionist songs, WANTED posters, voices of slaves, the voice of Harriet Tubman. √ Reiteration and Alliteration: “Catch them if you can….”; “she says”; “movering, movering”; “Mean (mean mean) to be free”; “brethren brethren”; “air”; “leaves”; “No more”; “Some go (some in)”; “for me”; “darkness”; “beckoning beckoning”; “and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing”; “and the night cold and the night long”; “keep on going”; “when you try to catch them”; “Many thousands”; “If you see”; “woman of earth, whipscarred, a summoning, a shining”; “Tell me .
    [Show full text]
  • The Poetry Handbook I Read / That John Donne Must Be Taken at Speed : / Which Is All Very Well / Were It Not for the Smell / of His Feet Catechising His Creed.)
    Introduction his book is for anyone who wants to read poetry with a better understanding of its craft and technique ; it is also a textbook T and crib for school and undergraduate students facing exams in practical criticism. Teaching the practical criticism of poetry at several universities, and talking to students about their previous teaching, has made me sharply aware of how little consensus there is about the subject. Some teachers do not distinguish practical critic- ism from critical theory, or regard it as a critical theory, to be taught alongside psychoanalytical, feminist, Marxist, and structuralist theor- ies ; others seem to do very little except invite discussion of ‘how it feels’ to read poem x. And as practical criticism (though not always called that) remains compulsory in most English Literature course- work and exams, at school and university, this is an unwelcome state of affairs. For students there are many consequences. Teachers at school and university may contradict one another, and too rarely put the problem of differing viewpoints and frameworks for analysis in perspective ; important aspects of the subject are omitted in the confusion, leaving otherwise more than competent students with little or no idea of what they are being asked to do. How can this be remedied without losing the richness and diversity of thought which, at its best, practical criticism can foster ? What are the basics ? How may they best be taught ? My own answer is that the basics are an understanding of and ability to judge the elements of a poet’s craft. Profoundly different as they are, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Dickinson, Eliot, Walcott, and Plath could readily converse about the techniques of which they are common masters ; few undergraduates I have encountered know much about metre beyond the terms ‘blank verse’ and ‘iambic pentameter’, much about form beyond ‘couplet’ and ‘sonnet’, or anything about rhyme more complicated than an assertion that two words do or don’t.
    [Show full text]
  • Phonetics and Phonology
    TRNAVA UNIVERSITY IN TRNAVA FACULTY OF EDUCATION PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY Selected Aspects of English Pronunciation Učebné texty Hana Vančová Trnava 2019 Phonetics and Phonology. Selected Aspects of English Pronunciation Učebné texty. © Mgr. Hana Vančová, PhD. Recenzenti: prof. PaedDr. Silvia Pokrivčáková, PhD. Mgr. Eva Lukáčová, PhD. Jazyková korektúra: M. A. Louise Kocianová Vydal: Pedagogická fakulta Trnavskej univerzity v Trnave Vydanie: prvé Náklad: elektronické vydanie Trnava 2019 ISBN 978-80-568-0178-9 2 OBSAH Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5 1 THE ACOUSTIC ASPECT OF LANGUAGE ................................................................................... 6 1.1 The development of human speech ................................................................................. 6 1.2 Interfaces of phonetics and phonology with other linguistic disciplines ......................... 8 1.3 English orthography and pronunciation ......................................................................... 11 2 PHONEMES AND ALLOPHONES ............................................................................................. 16 2. 1 Vowel sounds ................................................................................................................. 16 2.1.1 Vowels (monophthongs) .......................................................................................... 16 2.1.2 Diphthongs ..............................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Magis Rythmus Quam Metron: the Structure of Seneca's Anapaests
    Magis rythmus quam metron: the structure of Seneca’s anapaests, and the oral/aural nature of Latin poetry Lieven Danckaert To cite this version: Lieven Danckaert. Magis rythmus quam metron: the structure of Seneca’s anapaests, and the oral/aural nature of Latin poetry. Symbolae Osloenses, Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles, 2013, 87 (1), pp.148-217. 10.1080/00397679.2013.842310. halshs-01527668 HAL Id: halshs-01527668 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01527668 Submitted on 24 May 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Magis rythmus quam metron : the structure of Seneca's anapaests, and the oral/aural nature of Latin poetry 1 Lieven Danckaert, Ghent University Abstract The aim of this contribution is twofold. The empirical focus is the metrical structure of Seneca's anapaestic odes. On the basis of a detailed formal analysis, in which special attention is paid to the delimitation and internal structure of metrical periods, I argue against the dimeter colometry traditionally assumed. This conclusion in turn is based on a second, more methodological claim, namely that in establishing the colometry of an ancient piece of poetry, the modern metrician is only allowed to set apart a given string of metrical elements as a separate metron, colon or period, if this postulated metrical entity could 'aurally' be distinguished as such by the hearer.
    [Show full text]
  • Basic Guide to Latin Meter and Scansion
    APPENDIX B Basic Guide to Latin Meter and Scansion Latin poetry follows a strict rhythm based on the quantity of the vowel in each syllable. Each line of poetry divides into a number of feet (analogous to the measures in music). The syllables in each foot scan as “long” or “short” according to the parameters of the meter that the poet employs. A vowel scans as “long” if (1) it is long by nature (e.g., the ablative singular ending in the first declen- sion: puellā); (2) it is a diphthong: ae (saepe), au (laudat), ei (deinde), eu (neuter), oe (poena), ui (cui); (3) it is long by position—these vowels are followed by double consonants (cantātae) or a consonantal i (Trōia), x (flexibus), or z. All other vowels scan as “short.” A few other matters often confuse beginners: (1) qu and gu count as single consonants (sīc aquilam; linguā); (2) h does NOT affect the quantity of a vowel Bellus( homō: Martial 1.9.1, the -us in bellus scans as short); (3) if a mute consonant (b, c, d, g, k, q, p, t) is followed by l or r, the preced- ing vowel scans according to the demands of the meter, either long (omnium patrōnus: Catullus 49.7, the -a in patrōnus scans as long to accommodate the hendecasyllabic meter) OR short (prō patriā: Horace, Carmina 3.2.13, the first -a in patriā scans as short to accommodate the Alcaic strophe). 583 40-Irby-Appendix B.indd 583 02/07/15 12:32 AM DESIGN SERVICES OF # 157612 Cust: OUP Au: Irby Pg.
    [Show full text]
  • Early Modern Verse, Rhetoric, and Text Analysis
    Early Modern Verse, Rhetoric, and Text Analysis by Charlene V. Smith Artistic Director [email protected] 2016 Our Mission: Brave Spirits Theatre is dedicated to plays from the era of verse and violence which contrast the baseness of humanity with the elegance of poetry. By staging dark, visceral, intimate productions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, we strive to tear down the perception of these plays as proper and intellectual and instead use them to explore the boundaries of acceptable human behavior. Table of contents I. Welcome ...........................................................................................................5 A. Our Mission .............................................................................................................................5 B. Our Values ................................................................................................................................5 1. Text ................................................................................................................................5 2. Actor ..............................................................................................................................5 3. Women ...........................................................................................................................5 4. Audience ........................................................................................................................5 C. Our History ............................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • AN ANALYSIS of GEORGE SAINTSBURY's a HISTORY of ENGLISH PROSODY Ours Is a Time in Which Those Interested in Language and Literature Are Much Concerned with Theory
    AN ANALYSIS OF GEORGE SAINTSBURY'S A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSODY Ours is a time in which those interested in language and literature are much concerned with theory. I believe that, to understand our own theories, we can learn from studying the theories of those who have gone before us. In the field of prosody, George Saintsbury's 3- volume A History of English Prosody, which was written almost a century ago, is based on a remarkable theory of the English language, and of versification, which has never been methodically analysed, but which in my view still provides, in its very unsoundness, a provocative challenge to those of us who would like to describe the facts of English prosody more accurately today. Saintsbury's colossal work remains important because it has until fairly recently dominated much prosodic thinking, and because he covered a much larger range of writings (historically and otherwise) than any other prosodist has ever attempted to cope with. He cannot be accused, for example, of limiting his analysis to what literary scholars usually descibe as iambic verse. In what follows I shall try to lay bare just what Saintsbury's theory is, and what is wrong with it. I also intend to show why a fairly representative late twentieth-century `literary' approach such as my own will serve us better as a way of describing the varieties of verse-writing which Saintsbury discusses. Indeed, one central complaint I have about his method (and that of many theorists) is that he treats totally different kinds of writing as though they will, or should, all fit into his theoretical mould.
    [Show full text]
  • The Forms of Hebrew Poetry
    THE FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY CONSIDERED WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT BY GEORGE BUCHANAN GRAY D.LITT., D.D. PROFESSOR OF HEBREW AND OLD TESTAMENT EXEGESIS IN MANSFIELD COLLEGE AND SPEAKERS LECTURER IN BIBLICAL STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO MCMXV PREFACE IT is impossible to go far at the present day in any serious attempt to interpret the prophetical books, or the books commonly called poetical, or certain other parts of the Old Testament, without being faced by questions relating to the forms of Hebrew poetry. I was myself compelled to consider these questions more fully than before when I came to prepare my commentary on Isaiah for the "International Critical Comment- ary," and in the introduction to that commentary I briefly indicated the manner in which, as it seemed to me, the more important of these ques- tions should be answered. But it was impossible then, and there to give as full an exposition of the subject as it requires. In the present volume I have ampler scope. Yet I must guard against a misunderstanding. Even here it is not my pur- pose to add to the already existing exhaustive, or at least voluminous, discussions of Hebrew metre. My aim is different: it is rather to survey the forms of Hebrew poetry, to consider them in relation to one another, and to illustrate v vi FORMS OF HEBREW POETRY their bearing on the criticism and interpretation of the Old Testament. I have no new theory of Hebrew metre to set forth ; and I cannot accept in all its details any theory that others have elaborated.
    [Show full text]