or “stress verse.” Verse organized by count of stresses, not by count of syllables. Many prosodists of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th cs. looked upon most medieval verse, a goodly amount of Ren. verse, and all popular verse down to the present as loose, rough, or irregular in number of syllables and in placement of stresses; from this assumption (not demonstration), they concluded that regulated count of stresses was the only criterion of the meter. Schipper for example effectually views most ME and ModE 4-stress verse as descended from OE alliterative verse. But in this he misconceived the nature of OE prosody and other prosodists who ought to have known better have lumped together verse of very different metrical textures drawn from widely different social registers and textual contexts, treating all of them under the general rubric of “a. v.” But it is not that easy. In other metrical features the several varieties of 4-stress verse vary considerably, as they do also in register and derivation: ballad meter (q.v.), for example, uses only a relatively few rhyme schemes and stanza forms, and 4-stress song lyrics derive from very different sources than early ME accentual verse. These facts suggest that stress-count may not be the only or even the most important characteristic of a. v. as a genus. Iso-chronism (q.v.) has sometimes been suggested as a criterion, but some metrists hold that this can only be a feature of performance (q.v.), not of meter.
If, consequently, a. v. is to be retained as a distinct metrical category at all, we must isolate the similarities among the species in order to identify the differentia of the class; and then we must show either different features or else gradations in strictness of form which differentiate the species within the class. Though most of that work has not yet been done, several varieties of a. v. have been proposed in the Western langs.: (1) folkverse as opposed to artverse, i.e. the large class of popular (e.g. greeting-card) verse, song, nursery rhymes (q.v.), college cheers and chants, slogans, logos, and jingles—both Mal of and Attridge rightly insist on the centrality of the 4-stress line here; (2) ballad and hymn meter, specifically the meter of the Eng. and Scottish popular ballads and of the metrical psalters in the Sternhold-Hopkins line; (3) literary imitations of genuine ballad meter such as the Christabel meter (q.v.); (4) popular song —an extremely large class; (5) genuine oral poetry (q.v.), which indeed seems to show a fixed number of stresses per line but in fact is constructed by lexico-metrical formulaic phrases (6) simple doggerel (q.v.), i.e. lines that hardly scan at all except for stress count, whether because of authorial ineptitude, scribal misprision, textual corruption, or reader misperception—there are many scraps of late medieval verse which seemtobe so; (7) literary verse (often stichic) which is less regular than accentual-syllabic principles would demand but clearly not entirely free, e.g. the 4 stress lines which Helen Gardner has pointed out in Eliot’s Four Quartets (The Art of T. S. Eliot, 1949); (8) Ger. Knittelvers (q.v.), both in a freer, late-medieval variety subsequently revived for literary and dramatic purposes by Goethe and Brecht, and in a stricter, 16th-c. variety ( Hans-Sachs verse) in octosyllabic couplets; and (9) Rus. dol’nik (q.v.) verse, a 20th-c. meter popularized by Blok, mainly in 3-stress lines: interestingly, this form devolved from literary verse, not folk-, as in Eng. and Ger. In definitions of all the preceding varieties there has been an assumption that a. v. is isoaccentual; if one defines it more broadly (organized only on stresses but not always the same number per line), one would then admit Ger. freie Rhythmen and freie Verse (qq.v.) and possibly Fr. 19th-c. vers libéré (q.v.). But these verge on free verse (q.v.).
Beyond typology, there is evidence to suggest that there is something more distinctive about the metrical organization of a. v. than mere regularity of stress count. When Robert Bridges, the Eng. poet and prosodist, studied a. v. at the turn of the 20th c., he discovered a paradox in claims that a. v. works by counting the natural stresses in the line. For example, despite Coleridge’s claims that Christabel is in a “new” meter and that every line in it will be found to have exactly 4 stresses, the poem actually contains a number of problematic lines, like “How drowsily it crew,” which cannot by any reasonable standard carry 4 natural accents. Of this line Bridges remarks: “in stress-verse this line can have only two accents . . . but judging from other lines in the poem, it was almost certainly meant to have three, and if so, the second of these is a conventional accent; it does not occur in the speech but in the metre, and has to be imagined because the metre suggests or requires it; and it is plain that if the stress is to be the rule of the metre, the metre cannot be called on to provide the stress” (88; italics added). For Bridges, as for everyone else, the definition of true “a. v.” is that it operates on only two principles: “THE STRESS GOVERNS THE RHYTHM” and “THE STRESSES MUST ALL BE TRUE SPEECH STRESSES” (92; caps original). This is not true in accentual-syllabic verse, where it is the function of the meter to establish and preserve in the mind’s ear a paradigm, an abstract pattern, such that if the line itself does not supply the requisite number of accents in the requisite places, the pattern shall supply them mentally. But if we must do this in Christabel, either Christabel is not a. v. (but rather accentual-syllabic) or else a. v. does not work by simply counting stresses. If the former, and if that proved true of all the other 8 types enumerated above, then a. v. simply does not exist. If the latter, then a. v. is not a meter, but rather something else, or less, than metrical. But in effect these amount to the same thing: a. v. is not a meter in the same way that accentual-syllabic verse is meter. Bridges concludes: “Just as quantitative verse has its quantitive prosody, syllabic verse has its syllabic prosody, and a. v. will have its a. prosody. All three are equally dealing with speech-rhythm, and they all approach it differently, and thus obtain different effects. It might be possible, perhaps, as it is certainly conceivable, to base the whole art of versification on speech-rhythm, and differentiate the prosodies secondarily by their various qualities of effect upon the speech. But no one has ever attempted that” (110-11).
Schipper; R. Bridges, “Appendix on A. V.,” Milton’s Prosody (1901, rev. 1921); G. Saintsbury, Hist, of Eng. Prosody (1906-10); W. Kayser, Kleine deutsche Versschule (1946); J. Bailey, “The Stress-Meter of Goethe’s Der Erlkönig” Lang&S 2 (1969); J. Malof, A Manual of Eng. Meters (1970), chs. 3-4; M. G. Tarlinskaja, “Meter and Rhythm of Pre-Chaucerian Rhymed Verse,” Linguistics 121 (1974), Eng. Verse: Theory and Hist. (1976); Scott; Brogan, 319-37; D. Attridge, The Rhythms of Eng. Poetry (1982); Scherr.
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