Eduard Sievers Eduard Sievers (; 25 November 1850 – 30 March 1932) was a German philologist of the classical and Germanic languages. Sievers was one of the '' Junggrammatiker'' of the so-called "Leipzig School". He was one of the most influential historical ...

developed a theory of the

meter The metre (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of ...

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...

alliterative verse In meter (poetry), prosody, alliterative verse is a form of poetry, verse that uses alliteration as the principal device to indicate the underlying Metre (poetry), metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly s ...

, which he published in his 1893 ''Altgermanische Metrik''. Widely used by scholars, it was in particular extended by Alan Joseph Bliss.Bliss, Alan Joseph. ''The metre of 'Beowulf' ''(Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) Sievers' system is a primarily method of categorization rather than a full theory of meter. It does not, in other words, purport to describe the system the '' scops'' actually used to compose their verse, nor does it explain why certain patterns are favoured or avoided.

Summary of Sievers' categories

A line of Anglo-Saxon verse is made up of two half-lines. Each of these half-lines contains two main stresses (or 'lifts'). Sievers categorized three basic types of half-line that were used. Here a stressed syllable is represented by the symbol '/' and an unstressed syllable by the symbol 'x'. He also noted that three possible types of half-line were not used: */ x x / */ / x x *x x / / However the first two of these can be used if one of the 'dips' is changed into a half-stress (or 'half lift' ... notated here 'x́'):

Influence

Regardless of how successful a description of Old English metre Sievers's system is, it was most likely the theory of Anglo-Saxon prosody that

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...

would have been familiar with, and influenced Pound's verse.

References

Sources

* Brooke-Rose, Christine, '' A ZBC of Ezra Pound,'' Faber and Faber, 1971. {{ISBN, 0-571-09135-0 (page 88) Poetic rhythm Old English poetry