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Thomson, Dabney and other prosodists have followed Lanier's general theory, without always agreeing with him as to whether blank verse is written in 3/8 or 2/4 time. See also Alden's English Verse, Part 3. T. S. Omond's words: "Musical notes are almost pure symbols.
But in truth the task of inventing an adequate system for notating the rhythm of prose, and securing a working agreement among prosodists as to a proper terminology, is almost insuperable.
The danger is that the lover of poetry, wearied by the quarrels of prosodists, and forgetting the necessity of patience, compromise and freedom from dogmatism, will lose his curiosity about the infinite variety of metrical effects. But it is this very curiosity which makes his ear finer, even if his theories may be wrong.
We agree, then, that in all spoken language and this is as true of prose as it is of verse there are time-intervals more or less clearly marked, and that the ear is the final judge as to the nature of these intervals. But can the ear really measure the intervals with any approximation to certainty, so that prosodists, for instance, can agree that a given poem is written in a definite metre?
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