Unsettled Scores: Meter and Play in Two Music Poems by Browning.

Abstract

You are about to read – and to hear as well, if you like, on a visit to the Critical Inquiry website – a pretty shamelessly self-interested talk. I prepared it for two reasons. I wanted to get a more inwards understanding of a couple of Browning poems that have been favorites of mine for forty years. I also wanted to give a sort of extreme road-test to a mode of critical understanding, prosodic analysis, that has at least until quite recently forfeited not just its prestige but its very academic currency, within the study and the classroom alike