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Annie Finch

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

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University of Michigan Press, 1993
Arlt Prize for Criticism

“An indispensable analysis of the cultural history of metrics.”
—Boston Review

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.

REVIEWS

“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

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