SOURCE: "Meters and Memory," in The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody, edited by Harvey Gross, Ecco Press, 1979, pp. 269-76.

In the following essay, which is prefaced by commentary from Harvey Gross, Justice discusses the function of meter in poetry.

Donald Justice describes himself as "a rationalist defender of the meters." He is primarily concerned with the traditional metrical ordering of English verse and does not touch upon the larger question of rhythm and its significances. He is an eloquent spokesman for the mnemonic function of meter; however, his concept of memory is really a theory of the imagination. Meter serves as stimulus to the processes of creation: the meters "will have called back the thing itself—the subject—that became the poem." But the meters do not only stimulate imagination by helping to recollect the original experience; they also serve to transform and hence fix the...