Poetry’s Measure

Symposium, 24–25 September 2026, St John’s College Oxford

Convenors: Mantra Mukim and Lochie Springett

Photo by Eric Weisser, via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Giebt auf Erden ein Maaß?

Es giebt keines . . .

‘Is there measure on earth?’ This vexed question, widely attributed to Hölderlin, finds a wryly anachronistic response in an untitled poem by John Ashbery. Rivetted to a bridge in Minneapolis as a work of public sculpture, but later published as a chunk of prose, the bridge-poem appears in situ as a single line of text, sprawling over 375 feet, 114 metres, and sixteen lanes of interstate traffic. At the same time, however, the subdivisions created by the bridge’s girders mean that a passer-by might just as easily construe this solitary line as a sequence of smaller units. Among the feet and metres of Ashbery’s poem, measure abounds in all its overlapping and contradictory forms. For Hölderlin, by contrast, finding such a measure remains impossible. Having asked himself if there might be some ‘measure on earth’, he arrives at a decisive conclusion: ‘There is none’. Caught between prosody, everyday life, and the imaginative horizons of the poem, these examples begin to tease out the possibilities and limits of ‘measure’ as a concept. 

This symposium aims to examine the many dimensions of ‘measure’ in modern anglophone poetry. Central to this event is an understanding of measure that combines questions of rhythm, cadence, and refrain, with those more elusive notions of limit and estimation that we approach through the language of metaphor, intuition, and l’informe. Tracing the changing fortunes of metrical forms from the late nineteenth century onwards, each paper will consider the ways that poems shape and skew our expectations of scansion, musicality, pattern, and scale. By placing these formal considerations in dialogue with conceptual and philosophical registers, we hope to illuminate how poets balance structure with indeterminacy, constraint with expansiveness, and measure with its own undoing.

Day 1 Sept 24th 

09:45–10:00 Introduction 

10:00–10:50 Hannah Sullivan (Oxford), —— 

10:55–11:45  Lochie Springett (Oxford), Pound’s Subtle Measure 

12:00–12:50   Andrea Brady (QMUL), Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles: The Measure of a Life 

14:00–14:50 Ewan Jones (Cambridge), Unfree Verse and the Liberal Subject 

14:55–15:45  David Nowell Smith (UEA), Public Measures: Ritual, Commemoration, Broadcasting 

16:00–16:50 Fiona Green (Cambridge), Moore, Pound, and Disproportion 

Day 2 Sept 25th 

09:00-09:50 Derek Attridge (York), Taking the Measure of the Sestina 

09:55–10:45 Stacey McDowell (Oxford), Metaphors for Metre 

11:00–11:50 Mantra Mukim (Oxford), The Return to Measure: Aurobindo’s Occult Metre 

Registration

If you would like to attend the symposium you can express your interest here. Please note that due to the size of the venue, and the collaborative nature of the event, we are only able to accommodate a small number of auditors for each session.

If you have any further questions, please email the convenors.

Poetry’s Measure is generously supported by St John’s College, the Oxford English Faculty, and the Leverhulme Trust.