Why did so many poets attempt English verse in Ancient Greek and Latin metres during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? And what was at stake in these attempts? The most immediate importance of these questions to literary criticism is the fact that they mark one of the most striking and consistent points of contiguity between the verse-forms — and poetic theories — of poets commonly categorised as ‘Modernists’ and ‘Victorians’. This study uncovers a lineage of experimentation with classical metres connecting Algernon Charles Swinburne to Ezra Pound and H. D., in the process challenging received periodizations of English verse-history. The assumption that vers libre and metrical verse constitute alternate and incompatible paradigms prevents us from being able to perceive, in either of them, the endless performative possibilities that rhythm offers us — possibilities which, as I intend to demonstrate, underpin some of the period’s most influential experiments in verse-form. My close studies of these poetic forms raise another question: what is the ontological status of these poetic forms that pass through multiple languages and millennia? I frame my readings of English poetry in classical measures through the metaphor of the ghost because English poetry can only encounter classical metres as a kind of spectral or incomplete presence. I refer to this encounter, borrowing a term from Jacques Derrida, as ‘hauntology’: a situation of temporal, historical, and ontological disjunction that occurs when a being or entity, apparently present, is revealed to be an absent or continually-deferred (non-)origin. The hauntological character of English poems in classical measures is due not only to fundamental differences between the syntaxes and phonologies of Ancient Greek, Latin, and English, but also to the loss of knowledge concerning the traditions and conventions of metrical performance in Ancient Greek and Latin. This is why writing English poetry in classical metres generally poses a far greater challenge — both technically and conceptually — than writing English poetry in the metres of a living language: recreating classical metres in English requires reimagining the very nature of the encounter between poems and bodies, while also facing up to the quasi-magical charge that ‘the classical’ holds in the English literary imagination.

This dissertation examines the importance of the concept of measurement to poets and literary critics in eighteenth-century England. It documents attempts to measure aspects of literary form, especially prosodic phenomena such as meter and rhythm, and it explores how these empirical and pseudo-empirical experiments influenced the writing and reading of poetry. During the Enlightenment, it argues, poets and critics were particularly drawn to prosody's apparent objectivity: through the parsing of lines and counting of syllables, prosody seemed to allow one to isolate and quite literally measure the beauty and significance of verse. Inquiries into the social and historical functions of literature routinely relied on this discourse, exploring questions of style, politics, and philosophy with the help of prosodic measurement. By drawing on works and artifacts ranging from dictionaries and grammars to mnemonic schemes and notional verse-making machines, and through close readings of poet-critics such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Johnson, "Poetic Numbers" contends that the eighteenth century's fascination with prosody represents a foundational moment in the history of literary criticism: a moment whose acute self-consciousness about literary critical methods, as well as about whether and how these methods can aspire to count and account for aspects of literary experience, anticipates many of the methodological questions that mark our own time.

This dissertation expands the familiar concept of literary history in order to argue for the historiographic function of literary form in early modern poetry and drama. I propose that the “literary history” of early modern England is not merely the history of literature, but also these writers’ methods of evoking history by means of the literary. For Christopher Marlowe, George Herbert, and many of their contemporaries, the formal capacities of poetry offered methods for describing relationships between events in time, interpreting those events, and mobilizing those interpretations—in short, the formal capacities of poetry become ways of doing history. In the most familiar critical sense, literary history denotes canon-formations, literary influence, and the development of genres, trends, and fashions in poetic style. I demonstrate that early modern poets themselves recognized this sense of literary history, understanding their formal decisions in light of the history of poetic form. When Tudor and Stuart writers adopted a particular style or set of conventions, I argue, they did so with an awareness of how easily these styles could become—or had become—dated. While critics have demonstrated the political valences of writers’ recourse to specific genres and styles, I also insist on the specifically temporal and historical implications of poetic form as such, arguing that poets’ formal decisions, irrespective of earlier uses of those forms, encode ways of looking at and interpreting the past. The temporalities of verse—the way its meter produces forward momentum, its rhyme recalls earlier lines, its lyric voice arrests time—become, for the poets and dramatists I study, tools for understanding historical events and periods. By attending to the inherent temporality of poetry, I uncover the historical arguments poets and dramatists make, even in texts not overtly concerned with historical topics. Indeed, I suggest that the very structure of poetry can become a way of thinking about the past and the passage of time.

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It is a pity that Old English poetry is not more widely known, not only because it is beautiful and powerful but because to read it is to experience a different way of thinking. It is also a pity - or opportunity - that many first-year Old English students express a "love-hate" relationship with the language. Therefore, it is worth trying to discover what there is in the poetry to interest the general educated public and create enthusiasts among undergraduates. The multitudinous answers, found herein, have one over-riding answer: the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking. Old English poetry opens a door into a dim past by disclosing, in puzzle-piece hints, that epistemological world, which becomes more fascinating the more one pokes around in it. This dissertation seeks to give the beginning student and the reader from the general educated public a chance to wander in this landscape where, generally, only scholars tread.

Includes bibliography.

[Typescript]

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 1896. / Prefatory note signed: A. S. C. [i.e. Albert S. Cook]

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English