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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:

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.

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

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