• List of Illustrations


• Preface


• Acknowledgments


• Introduction
  A Great Multiplication of Meters
  Jason David Hall


• One: Meter and Meaning
  Isobel Armstrong


• Two: Romantic Measures
  Stressing the Sound of Sound
  Susan J. Wolfson


• Three: Byron's Feet
  Matthew Bevis


• Four: "Break, Break, Break" into Song
  Yopie Prins


• Five: Material Patmore
  Jason R. Rudy


• Six: "For the Inscape 's Sake"
  Sounding the Self in the Meters of Gerard Manley Hopkins
  Summer J. Star


• Seven: "But the Law Must Itself Be Poetic"
  Swinburne, Omond, and the New Prosody
  Yisrael Levin


• Eight: Popular Ballads
  Rhythmic Remediations in the Nineteenth Century
  Michael Cohen


• Nine: Blank Verse and the Expansion of England
  The Meter of Tennyson's Demeter
  cornelia Pearsall


• Ten: Prosody Wars
  Meredith Martin


• Select Bibliography


• Notes
  on


• Contributors


• Index

Across the nineteenth century, meter mattered-in more ways and to more people than we might well appreciate today. For the period's poets, metrical matters were a source of inspiration and often vehement debate. And the many readers, teachers, and pupils encountered meter and related topics in both institutional and popular forms.
The ten essays in Meter Matters showcase the range of metrical practice of poets from Wordsworth and Byron to Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson; at the same time, the contributors bring into focus some of the metrical theorizing that shaped poetic thinking and responses to it throughout the nineteenth century. Paying close attention to the historical contours of Romantic and Victorian meters, as well as to the minute workings of the verse line, Meter Matters presents a fresh perspective on a subject that figured significantly in the century's literature, and in its culture.