JOSEPH PHELAN was Educated at King's College Cambridge and King's College London, and is currently Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. He is the author of The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2005), and the editor (along with John Woolford and Daniel Karlin) of Browning: Selected Poems (2010).

Acknowledgements Introduction Note on Terminology and Metrical Marks Music and Metre 'Empty Times' and 'Double Accents': The English Hexameter in Theory and Practice Native Traditions: Anglo-Saxon and Alliterative Verse 'The Accent of Feeling': Towards Free Verse Notes Bibliography Index

Through its recovery of the metrical principles underlying the work of some of the century's major poets, this study highlights the intricacy of the relation between the 'music' of verse and its meaning, and helping us to understand the way in which the ferment of metrical experiment eventually led to the emergence of free verse.