Author: Rhian Williams

For ten+ years I was a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. Now I write at my blog: rhianwilliamswriting.com

William Cowper: British Writers

Posted on by Rhian Williams
From Charlotte Mutsaer’s silkscreen illustrations for ‘William Cowper’s Epitaph on a Hare (1784)’, (1988)

Jay Parini asked me if I’d like to choose any figure to be included in the ‘British Writers’ series that he edited and I was really pleased to choose eighteenth-century poet, William Cowper (1731-1800). A gentle but tormented man, Cowper wrote mainly in blank verse and in ballad forms and was exceptionally sensitive to the everyday, to his pets (especially the hares Tiney and Puss) and other animals, to the violence of colonial rule (he protested slavery and the damages incurred by capitalist expansion through exploitative trade), the aggression of hunting animals for sport, and to the ‘natural’ landscapes of Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire. Although he wrote the famous Olney Hymns with Evangelical minister, John Newton, Cowper had a tortured relationship with faith and was convinced of his unworthiness in the eyes of God. As an adult Cowper suffered much mental anguish and made several attempts to take his own life, some of which is evident in his wrought poetry. But others of his works generate peaceful calm through their therapeutic engagement with his small community of friends, domestic habits, the changing environment and his ethical impulses to feel sympathy and empathy with all living creatures.

Rhian Williams, ‘William Cowper’, In: Parini, J. (ed.) British Writers Retrospective Supplement. Series: British Writers, III. Charles Scribner’s Sons, an imprint of Gale Cengage Learning: Farmington Hills, MI, pp. 35-52

Reciprocal scansion

Posted on by Rhian Williams

This was such a pleasure to write with Emma as we sat together with Wordsworth’s ‘There was a boy’ between us, annotating and chatting, and then passing the paper back and forth as we wrote it.

Abstract:

In this two‐voiced paper, we conduct an experiment in ‘reciprocal scansion’: a process in which prosodic investigation and labelling becomes a site, not for fixing the terms of a poem’s formal effects, but for communication and dialogue. The paper will overturn the assumed association between scansion and ‘naturalness’ (the iambic pentameter as human heartbeat, for example), one that often manifests as peremptory analysis based on cultural prescription (as implied in an Eton Latin master’s rhetorical questions in 1840: ‘if you do not write good longs and shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If you are not a man of taste, how can you ever be of use in the world?’). By renouncing openness and dialogue for rote methods of formal measurement, predetermined ways of scanning poetry serve to distance readers from, rather than draw them to, a poem’s formal effects. In order to undo this knot of formalism, we seek to locate dialogue, rather than singularity of effect, at the heart of our investigation. An examination of prosodic variations within larger frames of regularity allows us to access the different effects that prosodic choices enact upon readers. In particular, this paper illustrates how Wordsworth’s frequent emphasis on movements between the ear and the eye traces thematically vital transitions between sight and sound, and in doing so, allegorizes the process of scansion used in prosody. By bringing this treatment to bear on ‘There Was a Boy’, we critique the ‘naturalness’ of prosody and bring out the ways in which Wordsworth’s ‘intertexture of ordinary feeling’ involves the coalition of emotion and regulation through metre. This coalition also hints at meetings and encounters that, by virtue of prosody, can be reciprocally rewarding.

Rhian Williams and Emma, ‘Reciprocal scansion in Wordsworth’s ‘There was a boy’.’ Literature Compass, 6(2) (2009), pp. 515-523.