The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse

The Ghost of Meter examines the relation between meter and meaning dating back to ancient Greece and provides detailed historical discussions of nineteenth and early twentieth century prosodic history. Its close readings through the “metrical code” combine semiotics and prosody, listening to the deep rhythms of poems by Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg to Audre Lorde, and showing how metrical patterns such as iambic pentameter can carry deep nonlinguistic information.

Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publish Date: December 21st, 2000
Pages: 192
Language: English
978-0472087099

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An indispensable analysis of the cultural history of metrics.

Boston Review

From The Publisher

A breathtakingly original—and highly readable— book, The Ghost of Meter develops a breakthrough theory that listens in a new way to the deep rhythms of poetry in our culture by combining semiotics and prosody.

Excerpt

An analysis of Dickinson’s iambic pentameters involves determining both the way the words comment on the meter and the relation between the meaning of these lines and that of other lines in the poem. Usually the two aspects of an analysis illuminate one another. Poem 1677 provides a good example:

On my volcano grows the Grass
A meditative spot-
An acre for a Bird to choose
Would be the General thought-

How red the Fire rocks below

How insecure the sod
Did I disclose
Would populate with awe my solitude

The first stanza of this poem presents a place that appears as quiet and unthreatening as does the hymn stanza that describes it. The place is an “acre,” a measurable, ownable place, a passive object: the grass grows on it; a bird may choose it. The atmosphere is deceptive, however, and the meter for which this “meditative spot” serves as a figure also conceals unexpected qualities. Though the poetic form of the hymn stanza is not threatening according to “the General thought,” the two-foot line both metrically and semantically “discloses” that the power rocking below the volcano is capable of explosion . . .

Awards

Arlt Prize for Criticism

More Information

What is the language that poets speak to themselves, in their unspoken conversations with their predecessors and contemporaries? What are the words they speak in their own bodies?

The Ghost of Meter examines the relation between meter and meaning dating back to ancient Greece and provides detailed historical discussions of nineteenth and early twentieth century prosodic history. Its close readings through the “metrical code” combine semiotics and prosody, listening to the deep rhythms of poems by Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg to Audre Lorde, and showing how metrical patterns such as iambic pentameter can carry deep nonlinguistic information.

An indispensable analysis of the cultural history of metrics.

Boston Review

As the rift in literary scholarship between cultural studies and formalist criticism appears to widen, this brave book sets itself the ambitious task of reconciling the two sides by means of what Finch calls the theory of the metrical code. . . Readers who have some familiarity with the technical terms of poetic form will follow Finch’s argument more easily, but much of the book will be accessible and valuable to anyone with an interest in American poetry.

Virginia Quarterly Review

[Finch is] a perceptive and aurally literate reader . . . I would bet that a whole generation of critics will learn from Finch how to hear the poems they read.

Style

Finch’s depth of research is admirable, and the book presents a point of departure for all kinds of lively arguments. The Ghost of Meter is the most impressive piece of pure scholarship by a poet that I have seen since Timothy Steele’s Missing Measures.

Sewanee Review

Is there such a thing as American prosody? The question has puzzled many . . . but until Finch’s book no-one, I think, has contributed significantly to the discussion.

Canadian Review of American Studies