Polymetrical Dissonance: Tennyson, A. Mary F. Robinson, And Classical Meter (Essay‪)‬

What did g. Mary F. Robinson learn from her work as a translator of reek, Greek meter, and from her study of classical prosody more generally? What expressive possibilities did she garner from the study of a language whose prosody bears little to no resemblance to English, and whose adoption threatens to become less boon than boondoggle? What she learns, I will argue, is the power of irregularity and dissonance, of an English prosody which diverges from English metrical tradition and yet somehow remains rhythmically forceful. But beyond the technical achievement of her metrical translations, Robinson finds in her complex new prosodic technique a means of interrogating both her aesthetic and personal relationship to the world. Robinson's re-tuning of English meter, ordered in particular through Greek choral meters and Latin hendecasyllabics, diverges sharply from then contemporary accounts of both meter's form and its function. This essay will show how Robinson discovers the linguistic possibility of creating a form of metrical strain by importing classical schemes and bringing them into contact with traditional iambic meters; it shows, furthermore, how this strain is anticipated (sometimes nervously) by contemporary prosodists like Coventry Patmore and John Addington Symonds. The possibility of this dissonant prosodic form, adapted from classical meters, emerges in Victorian poetry most forcefully perhaps with Tennyson's experiments with quantitative verse; while Robinson follows his example, inviting the kind of metrical strain found in Tennyson's satirical and self-referential adoption of classical meters, she ultimately expands the value of this strain beyond the genre of riposte. In doing so she embraces not only a new form of dissonant meter but, perhaps most importantly, a new idea of how this dissonance can operate for the poet and her reader.