S&S 12: Notes

• Rhythm = practical, meter = ideal
• Accented produced by stress ("force of utterance"), duration, pitch, juncture (by pos. in Latin)
• Rhetorical stresses: to make intentions clear in speech/prose
• End-stopped line vs. run-on line: by punctuation vs. natural pause or no pause
• Caesuras: mid-line pause, grammatical nor not
• Free verse: no meter, typical today; prose poem: ignores even line, like prose
• Feet --> Lines --> Stanzas; identification = scansion
• Foot Types
• Duple: Iambic (iamb), trochaic (trochee), spondaic (spondee)
• Triple: Anapestic (anapest), dactylic (dactyl)
• Spondee never used entirely, trochee rare, dactyl only in Latin
• Line Types:Monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter
• Regularity vs. metrical variations
• Substitution (swap foot)
• Extrametrical syllables (adding at edge of line)
• Truncation (cut off, as int() in CPU)
•  Virtue
• Some lines clearly have identifiable pattern
• Added stress from tradition; not three consecutive unstressed, but rather artificial meter
• Extra syllables not counted: extrametrical syllable
• Adjust: some swapped for trochees (don't force a fit)
• Words can be broken easily
• Main points
• Not always necessary, even for rich understanding, but can emphasize and identify
• Scansion reveals meter, not rhythm properly, because oversimplified
• Feet have no meaning other than separation within lines
• Perfect meter != good poetry
• Expected rhythm vs. heard rhythm (self-explanitory)
• Grammatical vs. rhetorical pauses (commas vs. no comma)
• Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; typical for old English poetry