difficulty with meter

[WICKES]

I've just read a book by a professor of poetry at Oxford (Tom Paulin) called 'The Secret Life of the Poem' (superb) and have myself attempted to mark out the meter of a few poems. But I find it very difficult. Will it come with time and practise? What is the best way to sensitize yourself to the rhythm of poetry? I mean, to get to the stage where you can tell, just by listening to a poem read aloud, whether it's iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter... or whatever?

[cacian]

I do not like meters.
I follow my instinct. rhyming is just like music just say it and you will hear it.
everyone does a bit of rhyming even in their daily speeches without knowing that is because our hearing register same intonation at every end of a word, sentence. hearing is synchronised if it was not we would not be able to hear.
memory is because sound is the rhymed. we tend to remember what rhymes
I hear you better because I see you ever
is easier to remember than a scattered sounded sentence.:)

[blank|verse]

WICKES - Reading or 'scanning' metre (British spelling) is something that comes over time. I seem now, after a few years' reading and writing poetry, to be able to spot a sonnet before I've read it, or instinctively feel a line of iambic pentameter - it's just practice and habit.

But I would strongly advise you to learn how to read feet and metre, as it has been essential to poetry through the years, and no self-respecting poet today would try to learn his or her craft - as writer or reader / student - by ignoring the past. And even though it's less popular than it was, you can still scan many free verse poems and find where the poet has used feet and metre - even if it's only a phrase, or a line. And if you do, then you can ask why, as it might give you a greater insight to the poem.

I've read the Paulin book you mention as well - I can't say I agree with everything he says about the poems he analysed, but I found it was worth reading nonetheless. I think he give a very brief key to poetic feet and metre at the start of the book. There are plenty of others if you want to study metre in more depth - Stephen Fry's 'The Ode Less Travelled' is an excellent place to start; Jeffrey Wainwright's 'Poetry: The Basics' is also very good, and he, unlike Fry, is actually a practising poet; and James Fenton's 'An Introduction to English Poetry' is also a good one for beginners. In fact, many of the chapters from the book can be read here, as they were published on the Guardian website (http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/jamesfentonspoetrymasterclass?page=2). Try the one on iambic pentameter for starters.

But yes, you've got the right idea otherwise - read, read aloud, listen to poets read their work, on the Poetry Archive and other places. It's like learning to play the piano or anything else - practise and you'll improve. Hope that helps.

[Hawkman]

I've just read a book by a professor of poetry at Oxford (Tom Paulin) called 'The Secret Life of the Poem' (superb) and have myself attempted to mark out the meter of a few poems. But I find it very difficult. Will it come with time and practise? What is the best way to sensitize yourself to the rhythm of poetry? I mean, to get to the stage where you can tell, just by listening to a poem read aloud, whether it's iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter... or whatever?

A good sense of rhythm helps. Being exposed to nursery rhymes at an early age is a good grounding, very similar to the way that singing to a small child "tunes" their ear to music. Of course, natural ability helps, and some people are born tone deaf. Sad but true. Likewise, some people have a poor sense of rhythm and just can't follow the beat.

However, there are some strong beats that the able, though unpractised ear can easily recognise.

Pure Iambic Pentameter goes di dum, di dum, di dum, di dum, di dum. Five stressed and five unstressed syllables with the unstressed syllable before the stressed. This is the iamb. Trochees are the opposite and go, "Dum di". Dactylic rhythm is best illustrated by the nursery rhyme, "hickory, dickory dock, the fist two words are dactyls, with the first syllable stressed followed by two unstressed syllables. An anapest is the opposite with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, di di dum, like the beginning of the William Tell tune. A pair of stressed syllables is called a spondee. Trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter just indicates that there are three, four, five, or six stressed syllables paired with unstressed syllables.

The tricky bit comes when the order of the stresses is played with, so that an iamb is followed by a troche or a dactyl. Just practice reciting a piece of verse with a known meter, and you will become accustomed to the sound of it, and learn to recognise the pattern.

Live and be well - H

[Whisper]

Use the dictionary. Look for the stressed syllables. Sometimes the stresses are relative, but the basics are simple. BAsic (trochee).

The stress is usually marked thus: ˈba-sic

Articles and preps are usually unstressed. If so many of them are being promoted that it scans awkwardly then it's probably not very good poetry anyway. Practice on the purest classics you can find. Oh, and read Paradise Lost...and anything by Shakespeare . . .

[MorpheusSandman]

Meter is like anything else: the more you immerse yourself in it--writing it, reading it, scanning it, speaking it, etc.--the more it will become second nature. I confess that meter is one of those things that I always felt at ease with, perhaps because my mother read me a lot of nursery rhymes as a child. I think if you grow up reading, say, Dr. Seuss then you tend to have a head-start on feeling meter and rhythm in your bones. I wrote a long, detailed post on the subject here (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?72711-Iambs-and-lexical-stress-%28ignorant-questions%29) that you might find useful. A more practical tip is to start paying attention to what words you stress in every day speech. Meter is based on the natural stresses of the English language, so becoming more aware of how you talk, how you emphasize certain words and skip over others, is a good way to become familiar with meter. I also cover many of the controversies in that post I linked to.

[tonywalt]

I've just read a book by a professor of poetry at Oxford (Tom Paulin) called 'The Secret Life of the Poem' (superb) and have myself attempted to mark out the meter of a few poems. But I find it very difficult. Will it come with time and practise? What is the best way to sensitize yourself to the rhythm of poetry? I mean, to get to the stage where you can tell, just by listening to a poem read aloud, whether it's iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter... or whatever?

I would just read virtually any modern or contemporary poetry and that should answer your question about meters. But I know this forum adores the traditional, as do I - but this question of meters and stanza length. I am surprised that it still holds out so strong here. Don't get me wrong- I like Keats and Yeats and Wordsworth, but stuff published or read now is overwhelmingly contemporary. There are exceptions, but few - whether you like it or not does not change the fact.

[Hawkman]

You have to know the rules before you know how to break 'em. That's the difference between good informal contemporary poetry, and total junk.

[qimissung]

He's right, Tony. It's like learning how to play the piano. You gotta know those scales.

[JBI]

I do not like meters.
I follow my instinct. rhyming is just like music just say it and you will hear it.
everyone does a bit of rhyming even in their daily speeches without knowing that is because our hearing register same intonation at every end of a word, sentence. hearing is synchronised if it was not we would not be able to hear.
memory is because sound is the rhymed. we tend to remember what rhymes
I hear you better because I see you ever
is easier to remember than a scattered sounded sentence.:)

This is just nonsense, and before you jump on me and call this a private jab and that I don't understand how you can magically get a feel for it, I would like to point out I have never read any of your poems in major anthologies.


As for metre, There are a lot of troubled rules that people write with, as writing with them was instinctive back in the day. Stress-syllabic meters like those dominant in English are trickier, because of the room poets have to play with English. Generally, to contradict every Cacian has said, English poetry is far more focused on having the right number of stresses per line (relative to syllables) than having perfect links of stressed and unstressed feet.

For example, in Latin prosody there are rules for trading syllables (for instance, trading one long syllable for two short ones) which in English make no sense. The term Iambic Pentameter is more confusing than it is helpful, when really it roughly means 10 or 11 syllables on a line with 5 stresses. So if you are scanning for 5 stresses now, just look for the number of stresses in the line - if you are dealing with the earlier poets, such as anything renaissance down to Wordsworth (Excluding a few tricky gamesters like Herbert) then you will, after reading outloud, pick out most of this.

Having not read your book, I don't know how well it covers such things. But English is generally a language that likes to substitute a trochee for an iamb, or a Pyrrhic-Spondee combination for two feet all the time. Occasionally we get an anapest or something thrown into the mix, or certain feet cut out, and a good book on prosody should take care of that.

Now, for more strange things - it's rare to see a trochaic tetrameter ever go for 8 syllables, as generally the last syllable is cut off for more of a punch (ending on an unstressed syllable is weak, and doesn't suit the short line punch of the trochaic line). Occasionally we also get weird stuff, but that is rather rare. Just look for the stresses in a word, and you'll do better. If you want a frame of reference, generally the first and last lines of a poem contain rather perfect lines of the meter of choice.

[MorpheusSandman]

...but stuff published or read now is overwhelmingly contemporary. There are exceptions, but few - whether you like it or not does not change the fact.Everything published now is contemporary by the definition of the term "contemporary." As for what's "read" now, I'd be willing to bet that the classics--Keats, Yeats, Shakespeare, etc.--are read FAR more than contemporary poetry, either metrical or free-verse. However, as for that discussion, the fact that you find far more free verse being published means relatively little regarding quality and what will be remembered. As I said to AuntShecky in another recent thread, probably 50% of the best poets of the 20th century used meter, rhyme, and classical forms. The notion that meter is dead, kaput, irrelevant, or whatever is just nonsense on every conceivable level.

[MorpheusSandman]

The term Iambic Pentameter is more confusing than it is helpful, when really it roughly means 10 or 11 syllables on a line with 5 stresses. So if you are scanning for 5 stresses now, just look for the number of stresses in the line What is confusing about iambic pentameter? A 10 or 11 syllable line with 5 stresses on the even numbered feet IS Iambic Pentameter, so I don't know what's "confusing" about that. Perhaps you mean to reference how poets typically use substitutions within IP? Even so, it's important to keep in mind that in the earlier years of IP the meter took precedent over lexical stress, so poets used the meter to dictate what words were stressed and what meanings emerged because of those stresses. Not understanding this leads many people to completely misread much early poetry. Here (http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/what-is-iambic-pentameter-shakespeares-sonnet-116/) is a good article/example from Patrick Gillespie on Poemshape using Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 as an example.

[JBI]

What is confusing about iambic pentameter? A 10 or 11 syllable line with 5 stresses on the even numbered feet IS Iambic Pentameter, so I don't know what's "confusing" about that. Perhaps you mean to reference how poets typically use substitutions within IP? Even so, it's important to keep in mind that in the earlier years of IP the meter took precedent over lexical stress, so poets used the meter to dictate what words were stressed and what meanings emerged because of those stresses. Not understanding this leads many people to completely misread much early poetry. Here (http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/what-is-iambic-pentameter-shakespeares-sonnet-116/) is a good article/example from Patrick Gillespie on Poemshape using Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 as an example.

I don't need a reference to 116 to teach me how to scan. It's simple. An Iamb in English, like other meters, is based on Latin equivalents. But Latin is based on syllable weight rather than on stress. So the term is not fitting for English. As substitutions go then, it is not the same as a Latin form - for instance, we are not trading in weight, but rather in positioning. Look for a "perfect" Sonnet by Shakespeare - talking perfect iambic pentameter, 14 Masculine rhymes, and no variation, and you will find that there is only one I believe, and it is not a particularly good one. Milton uses masculine ends more, but he plays with the stresses like the true craftsman he is, putting basically 5 beats per line in random places.

As for the core of English, it is still rooted, not in the iamb, which idiots argue has some cognitive effect, but rather in the stress side, such as in anglosaxon poetry, and the world of medieval poetry, that is essentially built upon the location of stresses and alliteration.

If we read Wyatt, for instance, we see the same thing in transition - the heavy base of stress-metrics - meaning the placement of 4 beats in a line, or more, being conflicted with a more regulated line - it's imperfect, especially in the early versions that are different than the works out of Tutle's miscellany.

Metric stress seems the thing moved and shifted, with a syllabic set length. Generally this means we first choose the length of the line, and then the stress pattern. This is most evident in the prominence of trochaic tetrameter for lyrics, in that they punch the stresses out one after another, and put a virtual spondee at the end and beginning during the line transition. Tiger tiger Burning Bright, in the Forests of the Night. Take that as an example, it is not the trochee that does the work, but rather the fact that we have 4 syllables with 2 stresses, and 3 syllables with 2 stresses as the metre - that is not the same as a trochaic meter, but we call it as such because it resembles something close to it.

Now, if we were to look for the "true" weight metrics in English, I can only think of Longfellow's Evangeline.

his is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

But even that is a weird creation that is idiosyncratic, in both that it is readable, and is metrically close to Roman metrics.

English is not Latin, and it's divisions are rooted in stress. That is the most important thing. We can try to look at a line as a creation of iambs and point out variations, or we can do what most people do, and merely pick out the stresses in the line - the standard lines at the top and bottom of a poem should generally guide the stress patterns for the readers, and they naturally will feel the spoken feeling of the stresses, especially in older poetry.

In newer poetry, the syllable takes off more than the stress, so it almost becomes a game of syllabic-meter (like Italian) rather than what we call traditional English metrics. still, there is always a tendency to want even stresses for different line lengths to give a sort of grid to a poem.

Now, for those scanning, this theoretical stuff is mostly nonsense. Like I said, first you count the number of syllables in the first line. If it is 10 or 11, it is almost definitely an "iambic pentameter" line, which means start searching from the second syllable for a stress. Rarely will a poet open with a "trochaic substitution" or a stressed syllable, though Pope likes to start lines with trochees for emphasis. then just look for stresses. If you feel there are two in a row, almost always there will be two stressed syllables (a spondee in agent scansion) almost always there "Pyrrhic" (or unstressed) foot after them. Still, just feel for the stresses.

If the line has 8 or 9 syllables, it most likely is iambic tetrameter, do the same, searching out the stresses.
If a line has 7 syllables, it is still most likely tetrameter, but it has been shortened to end on a stress. The line is most likely trochaic tetrameter, though watch out, as it may be the rare 7 syllable equivalent of an iambic trimeter line.

Iambic trimeter would mean 6 or 7 syllables, and the reader should search for stresses only. This meter is rarely used outside of some songs (most notably by Blake), though is easy enough to scan, as it is relatively regular. Remember, that this meter is also sometimes matched with longer lines, such as in many ballad formats and hymns.

anapests - kids poems love them, you feel the meter right when it starts, as it is a longer line, with less stresses than one is used to - twas the Night before Christmas when All through the House - (stresses capitalized). This one is easy, since it is so apparently verbose, and almost all substitutions in it are easily felt.

Dactyls - rarely used, but you will feel them with the heaviness of the line. See evangeline for an example.

Basically that's all you need to know to enjoy poetry - for technical lovers, get a book on poetry - I hear Hollander is good and this is the book I use(d)

http://www.amazon.ca/Poetic-Designs-Introduction-Meters-Figures/dp/1551111292/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1376152335&sr=8-5&keywords=poetic+design

Generally that could teach you everything you need to learn how to scan, and give you all the necessary information for English. Though I don't agree with much in there, in order to appreciate poetry from a personal, rather than a theoretical level, it is a good place to look.

You guys are lucky anyway, Chinese scansion is a nightmare - the people here used "ancient" readings of words (with different tones) for a thousand years just to preserve a traditional metric scheme. That none of them could read those works out loud properly didn't seem to bother them, knowing that they theoretically rhymed hundreds of years before. Now that is annoying.

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't need a reference to 116 to teach me how to scan. It's simple. An Iamb in English, like other meters, is based on Latin equivalents. But Latin is based on syllable weight rather than on stress. So the term is not fitting for English. As substitutions go then, it is not the same as a Latin form - for instance, we are not trading in weight, but rather in positioning. Look for a "perfect" Sonnet by Shakespeare - talking perfect iambic pentameter, 14 Masculine rhymes, and no variation, and you will find that there is only one I believe, and it is not a particularly good one. Milton uses masculine ends more, but he plays with the stresses like the true craftsman he is, putting basically 5 beats per line in random places.I'm sorry, but this is just nonsense. I'm well aware that English metrical terms come from Latin, but from the very beginning it was understand that English poets were trading weight for stress, and the switch works just fine, despite the various controversies about how to reconcile the conflicts between lexical and metrical stress. There's no reason for why the terms aren't "fitting" for English as long as one understands that stress takes the place of weight.

It's equally true that most all English metrical verse, including Shakespeare's sonnets, make usage of substitutions, but for many years there were rules (even if implied) regarding those substitutions. You may find plenty of inversions in the opening foot of a line (trochee for iamb), but you won't find them in, say, the third foot without a caesura. Similarly in Milton, Milton uses plenty of substitutions in Paradise Lost, but they are almost always immediately followed by a re-establishment of the iambic rhythm. The notion that Milton puts "5 beats per line in random places" is pure nonsense, and only someone completely ignorant of metrical studies on Milton and Renaissance poetry, in general, could claim such a thing.


As for the core of English, it is still rooted, not in the iamb, which idiots argue has some cognitive effect, but rather in the stress side, such as in anglosaxon poetry, and the world of medieval poetry, that is essentially built upon the location of stresses and alliteration.I don't think it's useful to argue what meter is at the "core of English." Iambic Pentameter came to the fore with Chaucer and remained there for over 500 years, only being "dethroned" by free-verse, not any other verse form. Alliterative (Anglo-Saxon) verse had its prominence from about the 7th to the 12th century. However, because we have so much more extant poetry from Chaucer onwards, I don't think it makes much sense to claim that accentual poetry only is at the "core" of English. Certainly such accentual verse has always been prominent in the earliest folk songs right down to the present day from Bob Dylan to rap artists, but how many canonical English poets used accentual verse primarily as opposed to accentual-syllabic verse?

I don't know what "cognitive effects" some have claimed IP is supposed to have, but there is a fundamental difference between it an accentual only verse; the latter is much more sing-song, much more strongly "felt," while the former can much better imitate the rhythms of natural speech, while steel maintaining a solid rhythm that is more faintly intuitive. The iambic line also allows for a richer writing style, as that extra beat can serve to utilize more adjectives, adverbs, and the like. Accentual verse naturally demands a simpler, more direct grammatical style, hence its popularity in ballads.


Tiger tiger Burning Bright, in the Forests of the Night. Take that as an example, it is not the trochee that does the work, but rather the fact that we have 4 syllables with 2 stresses, and 3 syllables with 2 stresses as the metre - that is not the same as a trochaic meter, but we call it as such because it resembles something close to it.That we have headless iambs at the beginning of lines or tailless trochees at the end of lines doesn't invalidate the entire notion of iambic and trochaic lines, though I would agree that the accentual aspects are rhythmically dominant over the syllabic aspects. However, dominance doesn't mean that the syllabic aspect is inconsequential. Take the Blake poem and finish the stanza, watch what happens:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Scanned: /-/-/-/ || /-/-/-/ || /-/-/-/ || -/-/-/-/

The "effect" of that last line comes entirely from its transformation of the asymmetrical meter of the three following lines into the "fearful symmetry" of iambic tetrameter, and it does that via a syllabic effect, even though the accents remain unchanged. Accentual meter disallows for such effects because the accents so dominate one's ear and sense of rhythm, hence the kind of balancing effect of adding syllabics to the equation.


We can try to look at a line as a creation of iambs and point out variations, or we can do what most people do, and merely pick out the stresses in the line - the standard lines at the top and bottom of a poem should generally guide the stress patterns for the readers, and they naturally will feel the spoken feeling of the stresses, especially in older poetry.The article I linked to and you dismissed argues convincingly why it's not enough to read older poetry solely by "picking out stresses in the line," as this assumes that our modern understanding of lexical stress is applicable to the reading/study of older poetry and poets writing in meter, and it's an ignorant, extremely flawed assumption that leads to people terribly misreading such poetry.


for technical lovers, get a book on poetry - I hear Hollander is good and this is the book I use(d)I've never read that book you linked to, but I have an entire shelf filled with poetry textbooks and another filled with books on meter and rhythm. I provided some links to my favorites in another thread:

Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521423694/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=) -- The best general introduction I've read on the subject.
Poetic Rhythm and Poetic Form (http://www.amazon.com/Poetic-Meter-Form-Paul-Fussell/dp/0075536064/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z) -- The best book I've read on the application of meter and form by poets.
The Ode Less Traveled (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1592403115/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=) -- A good, cheaper alternative.
Shakespeare's Metrical Art (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520076427/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=) -- A perfect introduction to how differently classical poets thought of meter.
Poemshape (http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/what-is-iambic-pentameter-the-basics/) -- A tremendous, comprehensive blog on the subject.

[JBI]

Iambic pentameter was never enthroned. How could it be dethroned? At any rate, Milton was not working as a pentameter line, but rather will a syllabic-stress line. Hence why there are so many variations in the line stresses, yet the line length almost consistently remains 10 syllables. Common prayer and ballads, a major force in English writing, are generally not in iambic pentameter, but rather in either Ballad form, or in trochaic tetrameter.

As for the blank verse tradition, it is a far more meditative line than it is a poetic line, and is far slower of pace than any shorter line length, especially those with four stresses on the line. That's why elegies are written in closed pentameter quatrains - it slows the pace to an almost solemn drone, such as in both Gray and Wordsworth, the two most famous elegies in the language.

I could go on, but there is no point. I am arguing with the likes of Fry, who, though great comedian, is a mediocre literary critic, and an even worse poet. His understanding of metrics is constraining rather than helpful, and therefore is promoting some strange fallacy of putting words to meter, instead of putting even stresses in a line, which is the standard English practice.

...................................
English poets did not trade weight for stress, since the rules are completely different. An example is very simple - take Virgil - a Spondee can be put instead of a dactyl almost everywhere, and the last foot of a line can either be a long or short syllable, given the penchant of brevis in Longo.

In short, in English we do not lengths based on stresses, and do not substitute two unstressed syllables for one stressed syllable - we merely shift the positioning of the stresses, which defies any concept of a fixed placement with "meter" simply put, the metrical requirements of English are not to have a proper length of a line based on the length of syllables, or even to balance things by trading, but rather just to have the right number of stresses, and the right number of syllables in a line. occasionally too, this is bent, so Milton, for instance, can add extra stresses to a line by sticking in "Spondees" instead of "iambs". But what we generally consider "pentameter" is merely a line that regularly starts on an unstressed syllable, and ends with a stress in the 10th syllable slot - combined with a total of 5 stresses throughout the line. That's the general rule, and that's how poets went about it, as very "perfect" lines of pure stress-unstress going on for 10 syllables line after line is almost impossible to find. In terms of Sonnets, Shakespeare wrote one like that I believe, and Milton broke "rules" all the time (such as in his famous Sonnet where he cuts a line in half thematically).

Take this as an example: Down in a | deep dark | hole sat an | old pig | munching a | bean stalk (from Wikipedia). This is a perfect dactylic Hexameter line - though it makes no sense by any sort of English scansion. Most people would not associate Down in a as the same length as Deep Dark in English, though in terms of any old sort of meters, this makes sense.

Now, if all lines were to read "Is this the Face that Launched a Thousand Ships - perfect unstressed stressed pattern running for 5 "feet" - I could believe there is some credence to this argument of a formal transition - simply put, if we were crafting lines like this, and then put substitutions uncommonly, this would make sense as a line.

But the first thing we notice, especially in pre-neoclassical works, is we often have an extra syllable - an 11 syllable line on a pentameter? Doesn't this go against the very definition of a metrical line based on stresses?

Then we ask the next question, when we substitute, are we purposefully counting it, or are we merely fitting around with a meter to suit a line length with word choice. In that sense, when poets write, do they consider it a "trochaic substitution" or do they merely just craft the line with the number of stresses marked in their head. Occasionally we get poets who put such diacritics above their lines - such as Hopkins, who loved to rework the stress patterns of words. However, I suspect most poets do not think dadum dadum da dum - and then consciously change things, they merely work a line out based on a gut feeling, and given the regularity of stress in English, such feelings manifest themselves into a regular pattern - need an extra syllable, no problem, just take it. Need a substitution, no problem, just stick it in as long as the line balances, which lines generally tend to do in English.

If we take Chaucer as an example, he comes out of French writing, which he masters first, and then moves on to a meter he more or less creates - overflowing couplets. So we think, this is the natural lyrical line of English, but we are wrong - the irony of Chaucer is completely dependent on the extra 2 syllables he affords onto a line of English, which is incredibly dominant by 4 stress patterns, or stress patterns marked by heavy cesura. Piers Plowman, almost contemporary with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and perhaps better received through the renaissance in England, is just that showing, as are almost all the middle-English works. Chaucer himself needs an extra-length to his line (of which was misread for many years, as evidenced by Dryden's discussion of the flaws in his metrics despite later linguists demonstrating a big misreading of such metrics, as they are rather balanced in Length).

What Chaucer's line does is create a rhyming form of couplets without caesura that spills over and allows for irony, given the longer line is more meditative. He did not try to create a sort of English equivalent to Roman metrical requirements, and that seems not a forethought, but rather a natural phenomenon in the evolution of literature from 4 stress Anglo-saxon to longer-lined french-influenced heroic couplets.

Now, lets show this in other genres - by all arguments, lyrics, hymns, and ballads are the dominant literature throughout the renaissance, despite the presence of Sonnets taking over around London. When we examine these other forms - lyric poetry outside of the pentameter line - or ballads, we notice the rather irregularity of a specific "foot" but the rather a marking of stresses with paired line lengths to give a form to rhymes:

I wish I were where Helen lies;
Night and day on me she cries;
Oh that I were where Helen lies
On fair Kirconnell lea!
(note, stresses of were and I can be switched for emphasis, though I opted for this reading, my understanding of the accompanying performance is lacking).
Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
And died to succour me!

Try scanning that with your metrics and you will find that extra-metrical syllables abound, stress patterns twist, but the general number of stresses remains the same.

For almost all these forms the best way to look at them is as stress-syllabic verse dominated by line length patterns rather than formal patterns.

Hymns and prayers, a major part of the English tradition, especially after the publishing of the Book of Common Prayer, contains the same sort of game, with shifting forms of meters. You yourself have also pointed out the extra-metrical feet in Blake's Tyger, as well as his playing around of stresses.

In general, a first year English class would be taught how to read Shakespeare, and when learning to scan, the professor would note that different people stress different things, and therefore use such a reading for their own interpretation. Scansion most certainly was also included on several of the tests I have written, including marking with a pen the stresses in a line, and pointing out substituted feet used for emphasis. But even then, when reading poetry, rather than use this more pedagogical than practical approach to structure, as taught by the likes of Fry, we should note that the rules of poetry were never so rigid, and in fact, the substitutions used were most likely not substitutions, but rather the nature of a metrics less thought of and more intrinsic to the writing itself. When Shakespeare substitutes, is he actually substituting, or is he merely following a convention that is natural to the process - in that sense, I would argue there is no substitution, as the metrical rules governing such things are merely pedagogy meant to teach students how to read things distant to them.

As for when we read then, the best thing to do, and the most standard, is to feel for ourselves where we feel stresses are, and if we so like, mark them with a line, or bold the text if doing so digitally. If one cannot feel the stress of a word, it is not that they cannot pick up the metre, but that they cannot put a reading onto the poem, or let the rhythmic requirements dictate for them.

To learn how to do this, we merely must read out loud. We have a general grid of most metrically rooted works - an "iambic pentameter" line, will if it has 10 syllables end on a stress and if 11 end on an unstressed syllable. In general also the first foot, which is prone to substitutions, is easiest to spot, given that it is highlighted, especially if the line above it is 10 syllables. The extra length makes it quite clear.

Other substitutions, though somewhat important in the way they allow for freedom, are less important in exactly how we scan things. Scansion is merely about picking things out, and in terms of iambic pentameter, rarely yields much, in that we should not need to point out every stress, unless there is an extra-metrical syllable added (or what some people call an anapestic substitution, or in the case of the Tyger, an amphibrachal substitution). But even that is not really worth pointing out, except when the poet makes a pun. Like I said, sometimes those puns are done for emphasis, such as in Pope putting the stress first for emphasis, but even then, is it that hard to pick one of those out? no, it's in the first foot. If it weren't, it wouldn't do much now would it?

[tonywalt]

Even if one knows the rules, this poetry forum couldn't give a damn - very little if any contemporary poetry is held in high esteem. Period.

Frank Sinatra hated the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. This is the best analogy that I can provide for any sort of debate on the resistance to change.

[MorpheusSandman]

JBI, I'll respond to your post at length when I have time. Right now, all I can say is that you're viewing English meter through the lens of 20th/21st Century lexical stress and not in a proper historical context. Poets from Chaucer through to the romantics had a very different view of the role of meter than we do today, and I'd highly recommend reading that blog post I linked to as an introduction to what I'm referring to. Shakespeare's Metrical Art is also a must read, as well as any studies on meter in Milton, as you couldn't be more wrong in stating that Milton was only an accentual-syllabic poet. THIS (http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/02/23/milton-blank-verse-iambic-pentameter/) is a good start. I'd have to dig through my Milton library though for more in-depth studies.


Even if one knows the rules, this poetry forum couldn't give a damn - very little if any contemporary poetry is held in high esteem. Period.This poetry forum is not a hive mind. I have subscriptions to 6 contemporary poetry magazines (Poetry, American Poetry Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Ploughshares), have several modern/postmodern anthologies, and have read the entire works of over two-dozen major poets from the second half of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as buying the new releases from several contemporary poets I admire. I'm certainly not resistant to change and, besides, free-verse is now over 150 years old; it's hardly "new".

Sinatra hated The Beatles, but that's not even an analogy, that's just an individual's tastes. I could name several "old-school" artists across multiple mediums who had an admiration/love for the "new school."

[tonywalt]

This poetry forum is not a hive mind. I have subscriptions to 6 contemporary poetry magazines (Poetry, American Poetry Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Poetry East, and Ploughshares), have several modern/postmodern anthologies, and have read the entire works of over two-dozen major poets from the second half of the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as buying the new releases from several contemporary poets I admire. I'm certainly not resistant to change and, besides, free-verse is now over 150 years old; it's hardly "new".

Sinatra hated The Beatles, but that's not even an analogy, that's just an individual's tastes. I could name several "old-school" artists across multiple mediums who had an admiration/love for the "new school."[/QUOTE]

I hear ya:nod: I only say what I observe: Contemporary poetry, unless it's Ted Hughes or Simon Armitage gets dismissed left, right, and centre in the poetry section - not by your goodself - but often and by alot of litnetters.

Same thing with books. I am really apprehensive about naming any western book written since 1945, there's exceptions of course. That's why I'm usually on the games thread.

I am impressed and happy to know that you subcribe to 6 poetry magazines!- and great taste in periodicals. I subscribe to Ploughshares and Rattle. I do like the short stories as well, which is a form that appears to be making a bit of a comeback.

[MorpheusSandman]

What I will say is that I think there's some truth to the adage that people left poetry because poetry left the people. Modernism, for all its positive qualities, really did damage in terms of making people associate poetry with art that was only for the educated elite and not for common readers, and there's too little great poetry from the century to dispel that stereotype. I don't know if such poetry is "dismissed" so much as it's simply unknown, perhaps avoided by "amateur" readers who don't want to feel stupid by reading poetry they don't/won't understand. I do my best to point them to Larkin, Frost, Hughes, et al, but it's not the easiest sell.

What I like about those periodicals is that they all have their own unique vibe/focus. Poetry seems the most varied in terms of form and content, with everything from the simple and traditional to the complex and experimental. I like APR because it's so "big" (in terms of content-per-magazine and section) that you often get a really good feeling for a poet's style after just encountering them once. APR is pretty much responsible for my discovering Tomas Transtromer (their latest issue had another lengthy section of Transtromer poetry and it was superb!). Rattle is more concentrated on narratives and exploring different styles with each issue. Tar River is really carrying on the imagist tradition. Poetry East is more on the experimental side. Ploughshares is quite varied as well, and I'm with you in appreciating their short stories as well.

[JBI]

How do you know what chaucer thought? The first person to write at length on the poetics of English Verse I believe was Gascoigne. Given the little Latin and less Greek of Shskespeare, we could also assume that it is impossible to say to what extent he understood metrics and in what terms.

As for other notions, I am not putting a new understanding to an old thought, in the sense that accentual syllabic is a newish term, though is mentioned in different terminology in the 16th century.

As for contemporary poetry, 99% is crap, but that is true of any age. Even Wordsworth wrote 90% crap. It's the job of history to filter the crap out, which most amateurs don't realize is a process.

[MorpheusSandman]

How do you know what chaucer thought? The first person to write at length on the poetics of English Verse I believe was Gascoigne. Given the little Latin and less Greek of Shskespeare, we could also assume that it is impossible to say to what extent he understood metrics and in what terms.We can't know what they thought, any more than we can know what any author thought (unless they explicitly tell us), but what we can do is infer based on extensive cross-textual research. In IP written from Chaucer until the Victorians, the vast majority of feet are perfect iambs. When we come to feet where there are ambiguities there are a few possibilities:

1. Pronunciation has changed between then and now (eg, different syllables are stressed/unstressed).
2. Punctuation has changed between then and now (eg, the common practice of elision is often incorrectly glossed in modern edition)
3. It's a metrical variation

If you read through Patrick's blog where he scans passages from Milton, Donne, Chaucer, Shakespeare, et al., one of the first things you realize is that a lot of the confusion from modern readers is the fault of editors not maintaining/explaining various punctuation (and even typographical) nuances. This is especially important in Donne who made liberal usage of syllabic elision to "make the meter work". A lot of editors sacrifice these metrical pointers in order to render it into modern English. Another thing you notice is that many pronunciations are simply different than they are today; eg, the stressing the second syllable in "discourse" in Milton. Finally, when punctuation and pronunciation doesn't "fix" the IP line, then it's likely we're dealing with a metrical variation; but keeping in mind pronunciation and punctuation we can often compile a fairly reliable list about what substitutions are/were acceptable to classical poets, which further aids us in understanding both punctuation and pronunciation (this is where having multiple examples of the same word in the same text comes in useful). By checking these three things against each other we can come to a better understanding of which one we're in the presence of when we encounter metrical ambiguities. But what we most certainly SHOULDN'T do is just to apply lexical stress from our own time to classical texts and assume that something like IP is a thing of fiction.

One thing too few readers today consider about meter is that the classical poets would've imposed metrical stress over typical lexical stress in order to bring out shades and nuances of meaning. That's why I linked to this reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 (http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/what-is-iambic-pentameter-shakespeares-sonnet-116/), because that poem changes dramatically when read WITH the meter as opposed to AGAINST it, and, IMO, reading WITH the meter makes it a much more Shakespearean work, and by Shakespearean I mean it sounds more rhetorical, conversational, argumentative, as if Shakespeare's speaker is talking to/arguing with an invisible interlocutor. It turns it more into a dramatic monologue as opposed to a meditative lyric, and which is more Shakespearean?


As for contemporary poetry, 99% is crap, but that is true of any age. Even Wordsworth wrote 90% crap. It's the job of history to filter the crap out, which most amateurs don't realize is a process.Very true; although, I think most amateurs just don't want to take part in the process because that requires wading through the crap to pick out the gems. It's easier to sit back and enjoy the gems that others pick out.

[JBI]

The vast majority of feet being unstress-stress in pattern does not make that a metre. Firstly, we would note that Dryden in his intro to Chaucer makes notes of how choppy Chaucer's metrics are (something disproved later by linguists). likewise, the very speech pattern of English facilitates iambs. It's natural to speak in such a way.

When we deal with renaissance poetry, the stresses are moved around a lot - that is not a metrics really of iambic pentameter, but rather parallelism in stress-line length. Shakespeare, Donne, Milton certainly, all do this.

When we deal with poetry as form, it is better to see it as "filling in" rather than "writing" a poem. However, English stress, and most importantly, the invention of "blank verse" have essentially bypassed this problem for English. Sure there are workers in Rime Royal and other forms - Octaves being the most successful other than couplets in English - but the vast majority of meditative works are in blank verse. Blank verse is simply 5 or so stresses on a 10 or 11 syllable line, without rhyme. We can play around, make use of rhetoric, and remove and conjoin syllables all we want, but the heart of it is essentially an accentual-syllabic form, with less rigid rules on "iambic pentameter" than more rigid rules on syllabic count, and line length. Generally it is impossible to get outside of the proper metrics in English, and most poetry written as 5stress 10 syllable lines will almost necessarily sound like pentameter. The same way in order to make up for a spondee, generally it is required, through the very nature of the language, to pull out a Pyrrhic foot, not through meter, but through the stress and breathe lengths.

Are we to say then that English is necessarily Iambic? No, but it necessarily has contours in the prosody, as do all languages with word stress. That is why English did not need to rely on rhyme the way French Alexandrins did - they had a naturally rhythm built it.

That being said, the poetic art of Shakespeare is not in his adherents to such rules, but how he bends the placement of stresses, or allows for the interpretation of things differently on an actors side. We are not going to limit ourselves to one reading based on punctuation and a "fixed meter" now are we? such a reading would limit the range of interpretation possible for a poem, and we wouldn't dare do that.

This being said, as a teaching tool, or a theory, iambic pentameter should be perhaps understood - as a theory though. In practice it is not a rigid form at all, and is broken and redone and perhaps does not even exist in some places. Take the first link Morpheus posted - his examples merely highlight the very strange nature of meter - it does not adhere much to fixed forms in English, and is rather, if it exists, a thin skeleton.

[MorpheusSandman]

JBI, I still think you're being far too cavalier with the notion of how much "stresses move around" in IP and that BV is really just a "10-11 syllable line with 5-or-so stresses." I'd be the first to admit that metrical variation is at the heart of metrical artistry, but variation must remain just that: a variation. Not just something that is thrown around haphazardly every few feet to the point we say "well, IP is really just 5 stresses in a 10-11 syllable line." Also, the rules for such variations WERE quite rigid for most of the time that BV/IP has been around. Growing up in an age of free-verse where lexical stress rules all and meter, if it's used at all, must give way to lexical stress for the sake of "naturalness," we miss out on much of the artistry with which the masters employed meter. As Patrick (from Poemshape) repeatedly stresses (no pun intended), reading classical poetry with the meter as opposed to against it yields shades and nuances of meaning that we otherwise miss when we foolishly and even arrogantly apply our 20th/21st century lexical stress at the expense of 14th-19th century meter.

I would agree that the poetic art of Shakespeare et al. is in how he "bends the placement of stresses," but this does not mean that his "bending" is capricious or reveals itself merely at the whims of our 20th/21st century lexicon. The notion of actors having interpretational freedom is probably another 20th/21st century invention which saw a rapid decline in the knowledge and ability of actors (and their teachers!) to read, understand, and act in verse, as opposed to treating the text no differently than prose. What you call "limiting ourselves to one reading based on punctuation and... meter" is what I call gaining an understanding of what Shakespeare actually meant for his characters to say/mean. No, that doesn't mean we HAVE to read it that way, but isn't just as much meaning lost when we ignore meter as opposed to strictly adhering to it? I mean, regardless of how well we understand how classical poets used meter there will always be ambiguities, places where we're not sure if there is a variation, if we're meant to apply metrical stress, or if we're missing something either in the change of pronunciation or punctuation. Any more, I find myself reading those ambiguities both ways to see what meanings are highlighted each time. Within reason, I don't think we have to "choose" one reading over another, and I especially find Shakespeare a master of manipulating those ambiguous metrical moments to allow for more than one reading. However, there must be limits to this, and completely ignoring punctuation, pronunciation, and classical rules to meter in favor of applying 20th/21st century metrical stress is going too far.

I don't know what you're referring to regarding the first link I posted: If you mean the reading of Sonnet 116, it's quite regular. Of the 70 feet in that sonnet, there are only 3 indisputable variations (a Pyrrhic in L4, feminine endings in L6 and l8). All of the others are, at best, ambiguous. IE, one can read "O no" as a spondee or an iamb, and the same is true of "Love's not," "time's fool," and "brief hours." With all of those, though, the primary stress is on the second syllable. So the poem is basically 96% in perfect/near-perfect IP, and I think 4-8% of variations is probably normal in the vast majority of IP poems from up until the 20th century. To me, that DOES make a meter. Nobody ever claimed that a poem had to be written in the same meter throughout 100% of a poem's length in order to be considered metrical. That wasn't even true of the ancient meters.

[tonywalt]

Why then do we rarely, if ever, discuss poetry written post 1945? (Ted Hughes and Auden, some Larkin being natural exceptions that spring to mind).

Even with "99%" of contemporary poetry being crap rule - a better part of a century is virtually dismissed in the Poetry section. We spend x times more covering the 19th century than the 20th century.

[MorpheusSandman]

Why then do we rarely, if ever, discuss poetry written post 1945? (Ted Hughes and Auden, some Larkin being natural exceptions that spring to mind).

Even with "99%" of contemporary poetry being crap rule - a better part of a century is virtually dismissed in the Poetry section. We spend x times more covering the 19th century than the 20th century.I tried to answer that above... Firstly, this poetry section isn't exactly the most busy, bustling section of the forum. I think most of those interested in poetry around here to begin with are more interested in writing than reading it. I could only name a handful of really widely read poetry readers around here, and several of them are not regulars of this sub-forum either. Of those that are regulars, most all of them are familiar with the classics, either from having been forced to read them in school, or because they felt comfortable reading "the classics." Then, if we narrow it down to those that HAVE read modern/contemporary poetry, it's still a matter of finding two or more people that have read THE SAME contemporary poetry, and then are interested enough to converse about it. I have a feeling that not many around here would know what to say about Ashbery even if they had read him (he even confounds me most of the time!). So I think there's a lot of factors that go into why contemporary poetry isn't discussed much, and I think there's more to it than all of it being "dismissed."

[tonywalt]

I tried to answer that above... Firstly, this poetry section isn't exactly the most busy, bustling section of the forum. I think most of those interested in poetry around here to begin with are more interested in writing than reading it. I could only name a handful of really widely read poetry readers around here, and several of them are not regulars of this sub-forum either. Of those that are regulars, most all of them are familiar with the classics, either from having been forced to read them in school, or because they felt comfortable reading "the classics." Then, if we narrow it down to those that HAVE read modern/contemporary poetry, it's still a matter of finding two or more people that have read THE SAME contemporary poetry, and then are interested enough to converse about it. I have a feeling that not many around here would know what to say about Ashbery even if they had read him (he even confounds me most of the time!). So I think there's a lot of factors that go into why contemporary poetry isn't discussed much, and I think there's more to it than all of it being "dismissed."

Here is your list of favourite poets, it's a great list!- I like them all, but none are (insert whatever word they or you may use for the much greater part of contemporary poetry published today, I am at work so forgive me if I missed one) and I include Auden and Merrill in that category, although their later works loosened up a bit.

But more importantly I did not know that James Merrill is the son of the founding partner of Merrill Lynch. Damn, that's money. It's no wonder he wrote so much (brilliant) poetry. Interesting!




I'll do a Top 20:

1. John Milton
2. William Blake
3. WB Yeats
4. James Merrill
5. John Donne
6. WH Auden
7. William Shakespeare
8. Virgil
9. George Herbert
10. William Wordsworth
11. Geoffrey Chaucer
12. Wallace Stevens
13. Percy Blysshe Shelley
14. John Keats
15. Robert Burns
16. Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
17. Alexander Pope
18. Du Fu
19. Geoffrey Hill
20. John Ashbery

[MorpheusSandman]

Ashbery and Hill certainly fit into "the greater part of contemporary poetry published today." In fact, Ashbery is largely responsible for much of what we see today in contemporary poetry. The thing with with lists, though, is that it's difficult to rank living, working poets with long-dead poets. The former's body of work is still being published, and it's not always apparent where they're going to end up. The latter also have the whole of tradition holding them up, so it's easier to evaluate their work. Keats' reputation and work was the same today as it was when I first read him almost a decade ago. Plus, it's only logical that only a handful of contemporary poets would deserve a place on such lists anyway. I think out of a list of 20, listing 5 poets who published primarily in one century is even a bit much, and I'm not sure there aren't other poets that don't better deserve that 19 and 20 spot. That list would probably be different if I wrote it today. Except for the top 7, the rest of it isn't very set in stone.

Regarding Merrill, yes, he was the son of the founding partner of Merrill Lynch, but he rejected his inheritance as a young adult and lived on a fairly meager income; most of his father's money went to charity after his death. Also like a lot of "rich kids" with absentee/divorced parents, he didn't have the happiest memories or relationship with them and wrote several rather melancholic poems about his childhood. He never did bring himself to tell his mother about his homosexuality (one of his more memorable poems is about his mother taking him to a bank vault so she can give him a family ring to propose to his "future wife," to which he writes "the only feet that patter here are metrical."), and he even wrote a long narrative fantasy poem where he imagined being kidnapped like the Lindberg baby and ending up preferring his kidnappers to his own parents.

[tonywalt]

[QUOTE][QUOTE=MorpheusSandman;1235953]Ashbery and Hill certainly fit into "the greater part of contemporary poetry published today." In fact, Ashbery is largely responsible for much of what we see today in contemporary poetry. The thing with with lists, though, is that it's difficult to rank living, working poets with long-dead poets. The former's body of work is still being published, and it's not always apparent where they're going to end up. The latter also have the whole of tradition holding them up, so it's easier to evaluate their work. Keats' reputation and work was the same today as it was when I first read him almost a decade ago. Plus, it's only logical that only a handful of contemporary poets would deserve a place on such lists anyway. I think out of a list of 20, listing 5 poets who published primarily in one century is even a bit much, and I'm not sure there aren't other poets that don't better deserve that 19 and 20 spot. That list would probably be different if I wrote it today. Except for the top 7, the rest of it isn't very set in stone.

Regarding Merrill, yes, he was the son of the founding partner of Merrill Lynch, but he rejected his inheritance as a young adult and lived on a fairly meager income; most of his father's money went to charity after his death. Also like a lot of "rich kids" with absentee/divorced parents, he didn't have the happiest memories or relationship with them and wrote several rather melancholic poems about his childhood. He never did bring himself to tell his mother about his homosexuality (one of his more memorable poems is about his mother taking him to a bank vault so she can give him a family ring to propose to his "future wife," to which he writes "the only feet that patter here are metrical."), and he even wrote a long narrative fantasy poem where he imagined being kidnapped like the Lindberg baby and ending up preferring his kidnappers to his own parents

Well then, you like contemporary poetry and so do I.