From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Feb 10 00:53:16 2002 Received: from mailscan6.cac.washington.edu (mailscan6.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.14]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with SMTP id g1A8rEMr027634 for ; Sun, 10 Feb 2002 00:53:14 -0800 Received: FROM mxu1.u.washington.edu BY mailscan6.cac.washington.edu ; Sun Feb 10 00:53:14 2002 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (mail.ups.edu [192.124.98.111]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.01) with ESMTP id g1A8rApj020808 for ; Sun, 10 Feb 2002 00:53:14 -0800 Received: from [207.207.116.56] (wyatt1dhcp56.ups.edu [207.207.116.56]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g1A8r8B30949 for ; Sun, 10 Feb 2002 00:53:08 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200202100547.AIP02905@simail2.ist.suac.ac.jp> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 00:53:09 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: English Sapphics (was: Re: Isaac Watts?) Steve Willett writes: >Derek is completely wrong here as he is occasionally in REP when >riding his four-beat theory (mentioned by David below) too hard. Well, in this instance I guess malim cum Derecco errare quam cum Stephano bene sapere---at least, until the latter offers clearer and more cogent arguments. >I detailed a number of these mistakes, especially his attempt to >explain metrical variations as temporal effects, in a paper at the >Toronto MLA on a panel he himself chaired. So sorry I missed it. May we assume that he promptly groveled a public retraction? > I might add that Marina >Tarlkinskaja disagrees strongly with him on this score. Good for her. Where may we read *her* arguments on this? Or should we just be cowed by the portentous invocation of her name? The scansion >above is mistaken historically, linguistically and aesthetically. Well, I haven't noticed that you have bothered to offer an *historical* argument yet. My suggestion (not by any means mine only, of course) is that accentual reading of Horace's Sapphics provides a plausible historical explanation for the English Sapphic---which, by the way, I take to be a largely 18th-19th cent. phenomenon. (The Elizabethan Sapphic, as somewhat variously practiced by Sidney, Greville, and Campion, was a very different thing, having been more a more valiant attempt to reproduce the rules of classical quantitative meter in English. I regret that I don't have access to Attridge's "Well- Weighted Syllables," to which you referred earlier, so I am at a disadvantage here. But since the Elizabethans were not trying to write *accentual* Sapphics, and Watts and Cowper *were*, your opening gambit in your earlier posting remains irrelevant.) As for aesthetics, I would like to go on record here as denying that I have ever claimed that Watts' English Sapphics are great poetry. (Few English Sapphics are, for that matter, though the Cowper cited by you and the Watkins cited by me aren't too bad.) > The little experiment suggested by David >betrays an inability to understand the plain meaning of what I wrote. >Watts cannot be shoe-horned into the strict sapphic meter because >he's writing, as I detailed, a variant. Very true. He's writing a "variant" that just happens to be the pattern identified by Attridge in "The Rhythms of English Poetry" and by me in my earlier posting (though, again, I hadn't consulted Attridge before posting). >The issue under discussion was the derivation of the meter. David's >account is simply wrong. But yours, so far, is simply nonexistent. > The extent of its error can be seen in the >remainder of his English scansion following the first four syllables. >My explanation gives the historical rationale for the contour of the >whole hendecasyllable line. So even if he has an opening choriamb, >that's meaningless. I did not, by the way, say that a choriamb had >been shifted to the head of the line. I was borrowing the term "choriamb" here from you. I agree that it has no valid place in what had become an English accentual stanza. In fact, I am happier with your characterization of this line-beginning as "an extremely common opening variation in the iambic meters of both [sc. English and German] poetic traditions." That strikes me as much more accurate and precise than all this talk of "choriambs," much less their "bisyllabic hearts." Clearly, the English poets who perpetrated "English Sapphics" in the 18th-19th centuries were trying for something that would sound both familiar to ears used to English iambic/trochaic accentual verse *and* would reflect Horatian Sapphics. It was a step back from the more rigorous (but sometimes rather bizarre) Elizabethan experiments. >My terminology is precise. (a) In German the bisyllabic heart of the >choriamb is called a Doppelsenkung. Impressive. I'd tend to call it two short syllables (in quantitative verse) or two unaccented syllables (in accentual verse). What is gained, excactly, by intoning the phrase "bisyllabic heart"? > The point here is not magniloquence, but >clarity in showing how the Greek meter became an accentual template >and then how the accentual template changed form under linguistic >pressures. One does want to keep the structural elements clear, >since versification is not everyone's cup of tea. I would like to record that I do not consider myself an enemy of clarity. >I made no statement about what happened to the Latin accent by >accident in Horace's imitations of Greek Aeolic meters. Well, I wish you would. Would you please comment on the interesting fact that Horace's word accents in the hendecasyllables of his Sapphics tend to fall on syllables 1, 4, 6 and 10 and that that just happens to be the pattern identified by me, Attridge, and just about everybody else (as far as I know) as the accentual pattern of 18-19th cent. English Sapphics? This has been all along the crux of my contention, and all your fancy-footwork continues to dance well shy of it. >The Latin >accentual pattern is not the origin of the accentual sapphic, and it >is no good falling back on Derek here, because he's wrong (in part >because he doesn't know Greek, Latin or the German history of the >sapphic stanza and in part due to the four-beat theory). All right, I won't fall back on Attridge for the derivation from Horace, for in the only (and very brief) discussion of the English Sapphic by him upon which I can lay hands at the moment he doesn't mention Horace. I was appealing to him as someone who has enough ear to distinguish what the accentual English Sapphic rhythm actually *is*. I do admit that the fact that you had cited him approvingly in your posting encouraged me to so cite him. But even apart from that I must say that he strikes me as a metrician with at least as good an ear as you or I. >This adds nothing. Steele is probably following Derek here. He may be, but I doubt it. Steele's point about Horace is not derived from anything by Attridge that I have to hand, and yet his point is by no means new to me. Let me reiterate that the notion of a Horatian origin of the English Sapphics is not *my* idea. I think I know where I first heard it (a distinguished scholar of classical metrics whom I shall not dare to inject into this debate, especially since my memory may be faulty). I rather thought it was a communis opinio. Now, I cheerfully admit that that doesn't make it *right*, but Steve has not yet convinced me that it isn't. It still strikes me as the most economical and also the most historically plausible (think of British and German schoolboys conning their Horace) explanation. David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .