French Literature Reviews - 2026

B. Glaser, Modernism's Metronome. Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics
Poetry and Poetics

Ben Glaser

Modernism's Metronome. Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics

Johns Hopkins University Press

ISBN: 9781421439525

304 p.

$34.95

OVERVIEW

Although meter has often been dismissed as a rigid metronome, a diverse array of modern poet-critics rejected the formal ideologies of free verse through complex engagements with traditional versification.

In the twentieth century, meter fell into disfavor, reenvisioned as an automated metronome to be superseded by the new rhythmic practices of free verse. Yet meter persisted in the archives, poems, letters, and pedagogical writings of modern poets and critics. In Modernism's Metronome, Ben Glaser reexamines early twentieth-century poetics to reveal a rich spectrum of metrical theory and practice, overturning the conventional narrative regarding the "breaking" of meter and the rise of free verse.

CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter 1. Modernist Scansion: Robert Frost's Distorted Vernacular
Chapter 2. Penty Ladies: T. S. Eliot, Satire, and the Gender of Modern Meter
Chapter 3. "No Feet to Walk On": Pound's Late Victorian Prosody
Chapter 4. Metristes: Formal Feeling in Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Louise Bogan
Chapter 5. The Prosody of Passing: Jean Toomer and James Weldon Johnson
Chapter 6. Folk Iambics: Sterling Brown's Outline for the Study of the Poetry of American Negroes
Conclusion. Prosody after Form
Appendix. Scansion and Metrical Notation
Notes
Works Cited

The study of versification and poetic rhythm has long occupied scholars of English and American literature, particularly concerning the shifts from traditional forms to free verse during the twentieth century. Prosodic analysis examines how stress, meter, and stanza structure shape the reception and meaning of verse, forming a central component of modernist studies. Discussions in this field often revisit the transition from strict formal constraints to the open rhythms favored by twentieth-century writers, reevaluating how poets engaged with inherited conventions across letters, essays, and published poems.

Ben Glaser reexamines early twentieth-century poetics to reveal a rich spectrum of metrical theory and practice, overturning the conventional narrative regarding the breaking of meter and the rise of free verse. The book includes chapters on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Sara Teasdale, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Louise Bogan, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, and Sterling Brown. Readers interested in early twentieth-century literature may find it relevant.