University of Michigan Press, 1993
Arlt Prize for Criticism
Original cloth edition, one of only three new copies remaining.
“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? A breathtakingly original—and highly readable— book born out of poet Annie Finch's Ph.D research at Stanford University, 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.
In a nutshell, the theory of the “metrical code” developed in The Ghost of Meter says that the rhythms (meters) of poetry are meaningful. In close, attentive discussion of poems by a range of poets over two centuries, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Allen Ginsberg and Audre Lorde, Finch shows how metrical patterns–such as iambic pentameter, for example– can carry deep nonlinguistic information.
The Ghost of Meter not only traces patterns of metrical connotations through the work of different poets; it also uncovers significant changes in the attitudes that poets hold towards meter's meanings from one century to the next. The book provides detailed historical discussions of nineteenth and early twentieth century prosodic history, and its first chapter is the most thorough history of the relation between meter and meaning, dating back to ancient Greece, available.
Written with a poet's care for language, this book is unique within prosodic criticism because of its combination of prosody with structuralism, feminist theory, and semiotics; because of the audacity of its groundbreaking claim about the importance of meter to poets and readers; and because of its approachable and passionate style.
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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