Brennan O'Donnell, The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0873385101. Price: US$35.

Wordsworth has been a poet nearly ubiquitously decried as a one-time revolutionary who turned conservative, but Brennan O'Donnell's study should help teach us how deeply conservative Wordsworth always was—at least, that is, in matters of the metrical arts. If we associate orthodoxy with rigidity and rule, however, and expect to find here a younger Wordsworth who fits the stereotype of the older Wordsworth, O'Donnell corrects our preconception: he argues persuasively that throughout his career, Wordsworth's reliance on tradition is balanced by an infinitely inventive and dynamic use of forms, and that his verse provides 'unexpected sources of interest . . . creative tension . . . and sensuous patterns' (6). Further, lest a study of prosody seem rarified, O'Donnell also remedies that preconception: readers will be pleased to discover how widely he contextualizes his argument, helping us place metrical practice within 'a wide range of verse forms' as he 'traces significant relationships between [Wordsworth's] management of the minutiae of his versification and some of the larger tendencies and concerns of his poetry as a whole' (6). This masterful book thus fills in a gap 'largely unexamined' and 'virtually untouched' in studies of the poet: Wordsworth's 'metrical theory and practice—his understanding of the part played by meter in general or by particular metrical forms in the writing and reading of poems and the rules and habits underlying his management of metrical scheme, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and other patternings of sound in relation to sense' (2) O'Donnell historicizes this gap in Wordsworth studies by pointing to several likely causes for the waning interest in such a 'quaint' topic as prosody: metrical experimentation in modern poetry ('calculated unmetricality or arhythmicality,' [3] for instance), as well as critical theories which subsume distinctive voice to a concern for the poem as a text or which favor cultural contextualization. Such influences have discouraged an 'approach that values literary language as a consciously and intentionally shaped medium significantly set apart from other kinds of discourse' (3). There has also been one other obstacle to a full appreciation of Wordsworth's metrical subtlety. O'Donnell argues that in disregarding the poet's versification, many readers have in fact taken their cue from Wordsworth himself, who seemed in his definitions of poetry in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to diminish the importance of the 'rules, conventions, effects, and peculiarities of . . . metrical art' (2). After all, he is the one who defined poetry as the 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' (3). Regardless of Wordsworth's radical manifesto, however, the poet, as O'Donnell successfully argues, 'was in matters of versification a deeply traditional poet from the start' (4), and that sense of tradition was nowhere more apparent that in his astonishing metrical versatility. The study is divided into two parts, 'The Passion of Meter' and 'The Versification of Poems'; the first part explains Wordsworth's theories of prosody found in the prefaces, letters, notes, and conversations, while the second deals more specifically with the metrical intricacies of particular poems from throughout the poet's career. In Part One, Chapter 1, 'Similitude in Dissimilitude,' O'Donnell helps us reevaluate the revolution announced by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads by showing us that while Wordsworth is committed to significant changes in diction and subject matter from eighteenth-century practice, he is also, even here, rather conservative in his ideas about meter. Historicizing Wordsworth's metrical premises by comparing them to Thelwall's, O'Donnell demonstrates that the poet in fact resists contemporary developments in prosodic theory: 'during a time of theoretical and practical loosening of constraints on the English line, . . . Wordsworth's decidedly syllabic definition of his pentameters …