Reviews for Principles of English prosody

The average rating for Principles of English prosody based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-13 00:00:00 David Meade Very good-- I have to admit that, having learned English at the linguistically precarious age of 11, I was never really familiar with nursery rhymes and so I had a hard time understanding his whole discussion of the four-beat verse (and I'm still a bit iffy about the whole virtual beat/offbeat concept to be honest, even after studying the relevant chapters and scouring the Internet for the examples he gives, plus doing the exercises in the book and checking my answers against the "suggested response" section at the back of the book'which, by the way, is super helpful). But putting that aside, thanks to this, I have a MUCH better understanding of meter and rhythm than before and MANY things I was baffled by in the metered poetry I've been reading (Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins) MAKE SENSE NOW (e.g., elisions and stress subordination in particular) and I'm able to enjoy/appreciate their poetry even more. Two gripes about this otherwise wonderful introduction to poetic rhythm. As much as the suggested answers to the exercises are uber helpful, there were a few instances of scansion that really confused me. He gives the same words (usually pronouns) a stressed beat in one line and a promoted unstressed beat in the next. Or sometimes he gives certain parts of a compound word a full demoted stress while in other instances gives them a secondary stress. Maybe it really depends on how the lines are read or I might have missed something, but I would've liked a little more discussion on their differences, if any. The second quibble about this book is that his discussion of "phrasal movement," while promising at first, proves to be a little too analytical/cumbersome for my taste (and I'm willing to bet for many poets). So if you're picking up the book, I'd either gloss over the section or skip it altogether. Overall, a solid book on rhythm.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-04-20 00:00:00 David Whitt This is the most straightforward and practical introduction to metrical verse I've read, chiefly because it starts with the importance of beats in the poetic line and distinguishes them clearly from stresses. I wish I'd started with this book ten years ago.