2 oct 2010

Saintsbury is the greatest historian of prosody, the one who best captured the shape and development of English verse. I don't think he's the best theoretician of prosody or scanner of lines. He was firmly in the foot-sub school.

3 comentarios:

Zed dijo...

I think Saintsbury simply lived too early and didn't have enough data to construct a good theory of prosody. As for his talents as a scanner, I think he's intermittently very good indeed -- e.g. on Wordsworth's immortality ode.

Jonathan dijo...

Fair point. I think I would have to devote a lot more time to looking at his theories and analyzing his scansions before I made a definitive judgment. My point was that his history can be valid even in many respects even if we end up not agreeing with him on theoretical points.

Jordan dijo...

I've been daydreaming about what a prosody based on modern phonology would actually look like.