HumanitiesLinguisticsLiteratureLiterary CriticismLiterary StudiesPoetryPoetic LanguagePoeticsVerse StructureMetrical TypesPerformative StructurePerformative SystemsPoetic Text AnalysisProsodic ReadingProsodic Scansion
would aim at presenting schematically the whole ‘musical’ structure of a poem, whether this consists, in any particular case, of the prosodic features of the language in which it is written, the arrangement of elements completely foreign to that language (syllable counting in English verse for example), or even the arrangement of type on a page. A performative system of scansion, on the other hand, would present a series of rules governing a locutionary reading of a particular poem, before a real or implied audience. It would end up by describing not the poem itself, but the unstated canons of taste behind the rules. Performative systems of scansion, disguised as descriptive ones, have composed all but a few of the metrical studies of the past. Their subjectivity is far more treacherous than even that of reading poems into oscilloscopes and claiming that the image produced describes, or even is, the true poem.2