Curious crustiness

Since I've finally caught whatever sickness has been going around, but because I still want to keep to regular posts, I'm going to declare it Metrical Riddle Time! and get back to the promised poetic Woodstock in the week to come.

The last section of Hill's Speech! Speech! begins: "English Limper | after the English Sapphic. This/ has to be seen.” Focus on the word “This” that ends the line and contains the first accent mark of the section. The line is describing itself: it begins with a perfect Sapphic (a hendecasyllabic line, composed of two trochees followed by a dactyl and then two more trochees), and then “Thís” drags after, with a twelfth syllable that ends the line on a full-beat. The word “Thís” and the next word “has” – both with accent marks – would certainly already take a full beat in any reading of the poem. Caesuras largely control the syntax here and make us hit those words quite hard. But the accent marks point up the failing comedy of the line’s movement, and so the initial inversion of the second line gets a sort of boost from the marking that conveys incredulity (as in “you have GOT to see this”). It also acknowledges the necessity of literally seeing the word “Thís” – as in, we have to see that beat in order to understand the play of the line, and to see the redemption of deformity with which the poem wants to end. The “limper” is thus weirdly, to use Hill’s pun, “sure-footed”, controlled. “But what a way to go” – the next sentence – means both ‘this is no way to die’ for the raging speaker and ‘this is a long way to go for a joke about meter.’

Obviously the line is also a dirty little chase: limp old limper shuffling after Sappho. What made me think about this line recently was reading William Carlos Williams's epigraph to Book II of Paterson (1948) and finally finding an actual reference to the "Limper" that is perfectly appropriate to Hill's book:

"N.B.: In order apparently to bring the meter still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure. These deformed or mutilated verses were called...(lame or limping iambics). They communicated a curious crustiness to the style. The choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting meter, the Greeks displayed their acute aesthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt - the vices and perversions of humanity - as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist. Deformed verse was suited for a deformed morality.
- Studies of the Greek Poets, John Addington Symonds, Vol. 1, p. 284"

Does anyone know of other places in which the Limping meter (or particularly the "English Limper") has been discussed or defined? I'd love to imagine Hill reading WCW over Symonds, but could anyone make the case that one allusion is more likely than the other?

[There's also an interesting quotation to be found in The Tatler, Oct. 5 1709. And though I'd reckon this passage a lot less likely to have informed Hill's verse directly, some approximation of 18th cen. chatter pervades S! S! and well, it's kinda funny so why not link to it. See the part that begins, "a jaunty limp is the present beauty."]