Hearing the Measures: Shakespearean and Other Inflections

Front Cover
Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2001 - 327 pages
An eminent scholar's guide to hearing poets' work

When we listen to the words of a poet in the theater, or read them silently on the page, what is it that we hear? How do such crafty writers as Shakespeare or Donne, Wyatt or Yeats, Wordsworth or Lowell arrange their rhythms to make their poetry more expressive? A gathering of perceptive essays written over twenty-five years, this book by a distinguished scholar and poet helps us hear the measures poets use to conjure up strangeness, urgency, distance, surprise, the immediacy of speech, or the sounding of silence.

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Contents

Trope Tense Measure
1
Hendiadys and Hamlet
3
Simple Present Verbs in English Poems
44
Supposing a Measure for Measure for Measure
73
Lines of the Poets
97
Wyatts Decasyllabic Line
99
Donnes Sculptured Stanzas
123
Yeatss Expressive Style
134
A ReviewArticle
154
An Exchange with X J Kennedy
203
Troubles of a Professional Meter Reader
214
Oral or Literate Silent or Sounded
233
Shakespeares Language on Stage
250
Notes
285
Index
319
Copyright

Lowells Pentameter Line
144

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About the author (2001)

George T. Wright is Regents' Professor of English emeritus at the University of Minnesota and has published widely as both a scholar and a poet. His books include Shakespeare's Metrical Art and Aimless Life, a collection of poems.

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