Natural Rhythm:
Kristin Hanson finds beauty in meter

On a warm spring afternoon, Kristin Hanson rapidly diagrams a verse of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet on a chalkboard, breaking two lines down into their core components with a series of slashes and accents. The words read: “Hence ‘banished’ is banish’d from the world, /And world’s exile is death, then ‘banished.’”

We can see from the first line, Hanson explains, that in Shakespeare’s time “banished” could have been either two or three syllables, but in all the other lines in the passage the meter forces the actor to pronounce the word with three.

A scansion of Shakespeare from Hanson’s class

“A student of mine called my attention to this passage a few years ago,” Hanson announces to the 18 students in the class she teaches on the versification of Shakespeare. “Any reactions to this ‘banished’ business?’ What is Shakespeare accomplishing with this?”

A student answers, proposing that Shakespeare used the word choice to emphasize the action of the play, and a round of discussion begins. Hanson nods. “Do you see the way the meter is forcing you to reflect on Romeo’s banishment?” she asks.

For the students, Hanson, an associate professor in the English Department, is the master of meter. In addition to teaching this class, Hanson is working on a book on the subject, titled “An Art that Nature Makes”: A Linguistic Perspective on Meter in English.

With her book, Hanson says she hopes to provide literary critics untrained in linguistics a resource to help understand meter as a tool of literary analysis. “Advances in linguistics in the 1960s by people like Noam Chomsky really changed the way meter is thought about,” Hanson says. “Chomsky hypothesized that all language has a common structure, and that structure includes rhythm and underlies meter.”

Kristin Hanson

In fact, Hanson says, new discoveries in linguistics have revealed that meter has universal elements. Although these have developed differently in various languages, there are deep parallels in meter across languages. “You can make up a meter that doesn’t draw on those elements,” Hanson says, “but it will be artificial. It won’t have staying power.”

While linguists have deepened their understanding of meter since the 1960s, many on the literary side of language have not followed those developments. “A lot of literary criticism that discusses meter just describes the rhythmic structure of the line,” says Hanson. “That’s not capturing what is so special about that line. Meter in its own right is an art form. It should be treated like the brush strokes in painting.”

Hanson, who has a bachelor’s degree in English and a PhD in Linguistics, would like her book to bridge the two disciplines. In addition to discussing linguistic advances in the study of meter, Hanson traces the development of meter in the English language, including a discussion of how iambic pentameter evolved from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into our own times. A lot of thinking about meter has been “tacitly assumed,” Hanson says. Her book is not about going just deeper into discussing meter in literary criticism, but aims for a “total reconceptualization” of the relationship of meter to natural language.

Like ballroom dancing, poetry depends on intricate, underlying patterns, Hanson says

In addition to her class on Shakespeare’s use of verse, Hanson also taught a freshman seminar this year called “Reading the Dictionary,” which focused on what gets into the dictionary, why it does, and how to analyze it. In the class, Hanson drew from her own unique job history – while earning her PhD, she worked as a research assistant to the usage editor at the American Heritage Dictionary.

But it is clear that meter is her passion. “I really believe that aesthetic experience is a human birthright, and understanding meter can really contribute to the enjoyment of literature. Rhythm is acknowledged in music and dance, but we underestimate the role of rhythm in literature,” says Hanson.

“Meter is like walking,” she adds. “You assume you know everything you need to know. But once you start to analyze it, you realize that it’s richly complicated.”

-- Doug Merlino