![]() ![]() Even here, Bede consciously strives to create a consistently Christian literary norm. The work departs from previous grammatical tradition by incorporating syllable lengths into its discussion of poetic metres, a didactic solution necessitated by the linguistic conditions of Anglo-Saxon England. The main focus of De arte metrica is on hexameter verse and the problems inherent in its composition at a time when syllable quantity had disappeared from spoken Latin. This historical background, together with the author s Christian agenda, is present in virtually every aspect of the way the work discusses the Latin poetic heritage. It played a central role in the transmission of the classical literary tradition to the medieval audience, but, at the same time, constitutes one of the first efforts at creating a textbook on metrics that was primarily intended for the monastic curriculum. The Venerable Bede s eighth-century De arte metrica was the most important treatise on Latin metrics to emerge in the early Middle Ages. It also contends that the radical inventiveness of Wyatt’s contribution has been somewhat obscured by the traditional category of “accentual-syllabic” metre, which conflates merely ictosyllabic regulation, as in the case of poulter’s measure, with what might be called positional or footed (“ictothetic”) regulation. The strangeness arises from two causes: one is that he did not immediately see that in order to be intelligible as a metre, pentameter requires certain kinds of constraint on the metrical ordering of the line the second is that he explored the expressive possibilities of certain prosodic features such as catalexis and the silent beat that have largely been avoided in the literary tradition of pentameter for essentially prescriptive reasons, though they have been exploited in Shakespeare dramatic verse and in the more relaxed versification of certain C20 poets. The puzzle of Wyatt's metre was famously summed up by an early twentieth-century reviewer of a modern edition of his poems, who observed "at one moment he is the equal of the greatest in his command of rhythm and metre at another he seems to be laboriously counting syllables on his fingers - and getting them wrong sometimes This paper explores the origins of Wyatt's proto-pentameter in a misconstruction of the Italian endecasillabo, and tries to show that the mixture of familiarity and strangeness we find in his versification can be explained by the fact that he was writing as a pioneer at the very beginning of the modern English pentameter tradition. Syntactically based scansion is also more accurate, and able to identify a wider range of rhythms (including free verse and triple rhythms) in contexts where traditional scansion fails. Syntactically derived stress assignments are much closer to native-speaker assessments of stress and so produce more natural scansions. ![]() From this research, it is clear that referencing syntax improves the accuracy of scansion. This identifies the skill level of each application. A third experiment enters the applications in an online poetry contest against humans, allowing them to be measured against a critic’s actual criteria. This is used to estimate how far each application approximates human assumptions when it does not match expert scansion. The second experiment uses a survey of non-experts to determine the acceptability of the applications’ scansions and of expert scansion. The first experiment assessed the applications against expert scansions of a large corpus to determine which one identifies rhythm the best. In each of three experiments, three applications are tested: one does not use syntax (Scandroid), one uses it for stress assignments only (Revised Scandroid), and one, which I have developed, uses it to determine both stress and scansion (Phonological Scansion). The research seeks to evaluate the impact of syntax on scansion generally and computer scansion in particular. However, no current computer scansion program references it, and most recent research has overlooked it (Hayes, 2005). One improvement is proposed by recent linguistic research: according to Hayes and Kaun (1996), syntax is an essential component in both stress and scansion assignment. ![]() ![]() The best, including Scandroid (Hartman, 2005), only scan as well as the undergraduates they are designed to help, because they depend on unreliable procedures to identify the stress in syllables and the rhythm in lines. In the last decade a large number of computer programs have been developed to identify scansion in English poetry – that is, the intended rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. ![]()
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