Weiskott, Eric. Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. ISBN 978-0-8122-5264-4.

Reviewed by Landry Wood

Periodization has, for much of the twentieth century, been the scheme that defined the structure of English departments, making many disciplines out of one, many rooms in one house. At the same time, categorization necessarily prevents the inclusion of some items, similar, related, nearby, yet excluded. Eric Weiskott, a scholar of medieval and early modern English poetics at Boston College, recognizes that this division of literary history along the lines of political history has been the status quo of academe since the beginnings of English literary study in the early nineteenth century. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350–1650, he notices that this periodization, this forcing of one historical series into the “shap[e] of time” of another (pp. 11–3), is strange. He argues that periodization is a professional invention, not the natural way of things. What’s more, rather than being the neutral status quo, it is a situation that was always already actively participating in the alienation of medieval studies (and medievalists) from the prospective of modernity. The current periodization system is literary modernity’s tool for creating an other against which to define itself and is actually an insufficient lattice for constructing a thorough understanding of literature. Weiskott proposes a solution: to “fram[e] the question of modernity as a question of meter” (p. 3), thereby replacing the currently fraught structure with one that can be moved around and fruitfully interrogated.

Weiskott uses the three most popular meters of early English poetry—alliterative meter, tetrameter, and pentameter—to work out his fresh reckoning of English literary history. He lays out three new eras aligned not to the reigns of kings but with these metrical forms. The Age of Prophecy, spanning the tenth to thirteenth centuries, represents the ascendancy of alliterative meter in works containing political prophecy. The Age of Tetrameter commenced in the thirteenth century “under influence from French and Latin syllabic meters” (p. 74). The Age of Pentameter, brought on by Chaucer, saw stories of heroes and adventures increase in number and popularity. These ages overlap, and each metrical form is not at all restricted to its associated era, as Weiskott considers the importance of works that seem to bridge his categories, such as prophetic poems in tetrameter and adventure narratives that, despite their subject matter, alliterate. To accommodate the slipperiness of describing these new shapes of historical time, Weiskott approaches the task across four chapters that each focuses a moment of literary-historical overlap. He ultimately concludes that these shapes “offer a distinct experience of historical time” that complicates and, in fact, gives the lie to the narrative of modernity (p. 206).

Weiskott, as he admits, offers a familiar argument against political periodization’s dominance of literary studies. However, by offering a solution, and a well-reasoned one at that, he accomplishes novelty in a conversation that could run the risk of feeling tired. Weiskott is adept at making his complex and finely wrought historiographical-metrical analysis available to those who are not specialists in his subject eras, proceeding at a pace that neither rushes past the requisite background knowledge nor excessively halts. The expansive and well-prepared appendices also make this work an excellent learning tool for those interested in pursuing a deeper understanding of historical prosody. Perhaps the clearest encapsulation of this book’s effect is in his “one general conclusion about the texture of metrical time,” that “founding the metrical future meant haunting the metrical past” (p. 8); we must understand the past and future as understanding each other, that literature and those who make it think both forwards and backwards. Weiskott’s Meter and Modernity asks us to see literature as a space in which the past and future play off each other, sharing discourse rather than sitting in separate rooms.

Landry Wood is a student of English and Classical Studies at Rice University, interested in poetic form, phonology, and modernism.

Cover image: From the Archive of the British Library, Shelfmark Maps K.Top.45.26.b

This review was solicited by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. A review copy of Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) was provided by the publisher.