Eric Weiskott on his new book, Meter and Modernity

In this film Eric Weiskott tells us about his new book, Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 which explores English poetry across its forms and across time periods often divided up and isolated in conventional academic discussion. The book is, Eric tells us, an attempt to ‘get around the retrospective reading of form’.

The book traces three metrical traditions across 300 years: alliterative (that is, lines features words starting with the same letter), tetrameter (lines of usually 8 syllables) and pentameter (lines of usually 10 syllables). This historical and cross-metrical approach allows the book to identify iambic pentameter, in its earliest years, as a specifically London-based compositional practice.

Asked to define ‘literature’, Eric says that it recognises and responds to life, and invites us all to turn to the poem Piers Plowman as a poem about close reading practices.