Was writing poetry in classical language and metre. In the second half of the 11th century, a humanist circle of clerical poets, living around the central valley of the Loire, Connections between poetic practice and the academic study of metre in antiquity are highlighted, and attention is also given both to Greek perceptions of the metres they bequeathed to Rome, and to the effect on Roman versification of the perception that these forms were irreducibly Greek. Also considered are sotadeans, priapeans, saturnians, elegiacs, and Horace's epodic structures. In four main chapters on representative metres or metre groups, this book considers how Roman poets exploited the connotations of metrical form: the 'Catullan' associations of the Flavian hendecasyllable the logic that produced the 'pure' iambic trimeter the sapphic stanza between Catullus, Horace, and Statius and the various strategies attempted by poets to subvert the superlative status of the benchmark metre, the dactylic hexameter. Powerful effects can be achieved by manipulation of the established characters of their metrical media: by giving the metre of classical Latin poetry its proper weight, critics can restore to that poetry a critical, neglected dimension. By the time Roman poets came to write hexameters, choliambics, and sapphics, these metres could all claim rich histories, and consequently brought a wealth of associations in their own right to the poems they carried. This book makes the case that metre was central to the Roman experience of literature, and should be restored to a central position also in interpretation of that poetry. Yet metre features only sporadically in contemporary criticism of ancient poetry. The wealth of metrical forms adopted by classical poetry is one of its characteristic features. The present paper studies this discrepancy between Anglo-Saxon prosodists' views on hiatus and the prevailing verse technique of the same period and suggests that some seeming idiosyncrasies in Aldhelm's use of elision are, in fact, probably based on certain less-known practices of Late Latin hexameter verse. Bede's reluctance to recognise hiatus for a contemporary rather than a pre-Christian feature reflects his attempts to show Christian verse in as favourable light as possible, although, in a roundabout way, he probably also tried to regularise the prosodic practices of Anglo-Latin verse. In his metrical treatise De arte metrica he went so far as to condemn hiatus as a 'pagan' feature, a view which he attempted to corroborate with examples of Vergil's artful deviations from the rules of elision. Bede took an opposite line in his strenuous avoidance of hiatus in his own verse. This is a noticeable feature, above all, in the verse of Aldhelm and his followers, although Aldhelm himself gives a detailed description of elision in his treatise on metrics (De metris). The avoidance of hiatus is a feature of most medieval verse, as well, but early insular verse forms a notable exception: hiatus is abundant in many rhythmical Irish and Anglo-Latin hymns, and even in much of Anglo-Latin hexameter poetry elision is not systematically observed. In classical Latin, hiatus is eliminated by a process known as elision, or synaloephe, where the final vowel of the preceding word is fused with the following one or left unpronounced. A central prosodic feature of nearly all Latin verse, classical and medieval alike, is the avoidance of hiatus, where a word with a final vowel, or in classical verse, a final m, is followed by a word with an initial vowel, (or, in classical verse, an initial h).
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