Talk:Meter (poetry)

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Should this be moved to Metre (poetry), similar to Metre (music)? Opinions?


or "poetic metre" /"poetry metre", "musical metre" to avoid brackets? -- Tarquin
I think with poetic metre should redirect to Metre (poetry) as with the first suggestion. --Zippanova 06:39, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)


New posts at the bottom of the page please

Contents

[edit] scansion

I think the word "scansion" is too obscure for the introductory paragraph: I had to look it up! As it's a technical word which refers to the "analysis of verse" (according to dictionary.com), perhaps it should either be a link or be replaced by a more common word (such as "analysis").--Malcohol 11:49, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think dictionary.com is vastly overstating the technical-ness of this word. I consider it basic vocabulary for anyone who has taken a literature class of any kind. Since it's defined in the article, I don't think it's too obscure. Using "analysis" would change the meaning.Franzeska 20:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. 10-th grade word tops. --69.224.191.239 09:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I feel that the lists of feet and of hymn meters are detracting from this article's already strained readability. It might be best to move them -- the list of feet can happily reside at foot (prosody), which is fairly stubby right now, and the list of hymn meters could either be moved to hymn or to a separate article like list of hymn meters or hymn meter. Are there other opinions on this? -- Rbellin|Talk 14:38, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I went ahead and moved the list of feet to foot (prosody) and the list of hymn meters to hymn. Comments or changes are still welcome. -- Rbellin|Talk 18:30, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)


It seems to me, that this article would greatly benefit from an extremely simplistic break down of English Poetic Rhythm and Meter, i.e.

The meters with two-syllable feet are

   * IAMBIC (x /) : That time of year thou mayst in me behold
   * TROCHAIC (/ x): Tell me not in mournful numbers
   * SPONDAIC (/ /): Break, break, break/ On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

Meters with three-syllable feet are

   * ANAPESTIC (x x /): And the sound of a voice that is still
   * DACTYLIC (/ x x): This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock (a trochee replaces the final dactyl)

trimeter 3, tetrameter 4, pentameter 5, hexameter 6, heptameter 7, and o ctameter 8

iambic pentameter (5 iambs, 10 syllables)

   * That time | of year | thou mayst | in me | behold

trochaic tetrameter (4 trochees, 8 syllables)

   * Tell me | not in | mournful | numbers

anapestic trimeter (3 anapests, 9 syllables)

   * And the sound | of a voice | that is still

I did not write this, this is a breakdown I found on another site when this article proved to be too nebulous for a beginner. 195.113.65.8 07:07, 11 May 2006

I understand what you mean by "too nebulous" ... however, this article needs to address metre in general, not just in English lnaguage poems written in the accentual-syllabic tradition. Possibly the article Accentual-syllabic verse — which is currently little more than a stub — would be an appropriate place for the sort of outline you propose, which could then lead off to more detailed articles, such as the (still incomplete) one on iambic pentameter. — Stumps 08:45, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] languages

It's striking that the article explains the meter of only a few languages, all of them European. Even the closely related list of verse forms article mentions only a few non-European forms--mostly the famous Japanese forms.

Yes, I was disappointed to see that the "Greek and Latin" section only covers Latin. I followed a link here from the article on digamma, hoping to find an explanation of how Greek meter can demand that some syllables begin with consonants. --Darrell Manrique, 12.107.67.3 17:39, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inversion only refers to first foot??

What is the source for this. I can site sources - such as Milton's Prosody (book) which talk about 'the inversion of the second foot' and so forth. — Stumps 11:03, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Accentual-Syllabic Verse redirects to Poetry (Meter)?

Accentual verse has a category of its own and does not redirect to this article as does Accentual-syllabic verse. Were this article to discuss those areas more, it would not be as necessary, but seeing as there is hardly any explanation of it in this article, it ought to have an article of its own. Also, links both in this article and in other articles refer to Accentual-Syllabic Verse but are redirected back to this article, which doesn't help anyone.


Never mind, Problem solved. I've fixed all the links and redirected Accentual-Syllabic Verse to Accentual-syllabic verse TheNathanator

[edit] Syllabic and Quantatative Verse considered English systems?

I believe that because English is an accentual language only those meters which rely on accent can be considered "English". Quantatative verse has not been met with much success in English and is an attempt to apply latin rules to English poetry. English is not a syllabic language either because one does not hear the syllables in a line, but rather the accents. TheNathanator 02:11, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Poetry not human?

I am puzzled by the supposed belief attributed in the last section of this article to some famous proponents of free verse, "that meter was imposed into poetry by man." As opposed to the rest of poetry, which was ordained of God? What is this supposed to mean? Poetry is a human creation.

That's funny, I was coming here to question the same exact thing. I will go ahead and change the wording. Recury 22:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Latin scansion

"Vérgĭlĭūm vīdī // tāntúm, něc ămāră Tĭbúllŏ Témpŭs ămī cĭtĭáe // fātă dĕdḗrĕ mĕáe."

The caesura in this verse belongs AFTER tantum, not before. This is because "tantum" refers back to the preceding words and forms a phonological unit. Not all hexameters have a caesura in the third foot: a caesura in the fourth foot (as here) is almost as common.-jpb

[edit] Re: Ottoman Turkish meter section

I've added a section on poetic meter in Ottoman Turkish, and I will get around to adding examples of the meters shown as soon as I can, but I wanted to ask one question as well.

In the section, I included a list of the poetic feet used in Ottoman verse. I understand that, theoretically, this list might go better into the Foot (prosody) article; however, as that article is currently even slimmer pickings than this article, and moreover largely lacks the references to non-English languages (apart from Latin and Greek) that this article has, I thought it might be appropriate—at least for the time being—to include the Ottoman poetic feet here. Hopefully, the list of feet in the way it's currently arranged is not too obtrusive (it is, of course, rather specialist and technical, but I think that anyone who is actually willing to read about Ottoman verse structure probably has a good bit of general knowledge on poetic meter already).

Anyhow, any thoughts? —Saposcat 11:32, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Truly excellent and informative. I'd encourage you to copy the part relevant to poetic feet into that article directly, or in summary form with a cross reference. I also would encourage you to add a brief summary of this section to the Poetry article, and to expand this as much as possible - it may be that we should have a long-term vision of separating European, Ottoman, Vedic and other metric systems into their own page, and turning this page into a summary of the other pages. Sam 13:48, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Worldwide view"

Since meter in poetry relies upon and is relied upon by the language in which the poetry is written, NO AMOUNT of editing can give the Meter page a true worldwide view. Maybe it would be better to have a separate Meter page for each language for which there is a Poetry and/or Prose page posted in the English-language Wikipedia. Otherwise, that flag may never be removed from the Meter page. --Misterdoe 06:19, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I think you're right on ultimately spearating pages for each language, but disagree that this page can never have a true worldwide view. I think the worldwide view will end up being a broad-brush review of the linguistics ideas behind creating meter in different languages with a summary style paragraph devotes to the meter of each different language or language group (similiar to the Poetry article). Right now I see this as a place for the discussions of different meters to live and grow until a separate page gets set up; if you or someone else are game for it, it's a great project. Sam 15:32, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bug

Unless I am grossly mistaken, the notes on this page are no longer editable. Does anyone have an idea about how to fix this? Otherwise, I completely agree with Misterdoe, there is no way all metrical ideas can be crammed in a single article: this one should only apply to English, whereas, e.g. Italian prosody ought to be on it.wikipedia.org; in any case, people who are not able to read a language are certainly not able to appreciate its metres.

I had no problem editing. You should sign your posts, so we know who made the comment. It's not hard at all to discuss the way meter works in different languages, and can be quite important to understand what is imported or carried over from other languages. For example, the discussion of Ottoman meter is quite informative, and gives a good comparitive context. Classifying languages into different linguistic types (e.g., tonal languages, mora timed languages)and then seeing how meters are produced within each type, and how they move from, for example, the Arabic to the Romance languages, is quite interesting. Sam 23:30, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguous syllables

Weak position (grammar) currently talks about syllables that can be either long or short in Classical scansion (generally containing a short vowel followed by muta cum liquida). Here's an example (Metam. XIII):

et prīmō similis volucrī, mox vēra volucris

The first lu is short, the second one is counted as long by position. Is there a standard name for such syllables (because I don't think that "weak" is the right term)? I thought it might be "anceps", but that turns out to be something else. CapnPrep 03:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

"Anceps" usually refers to a position in the meter that may be filled by either a short or long syllable. What we want here is a name for a kind of syllable that may be counted either as long or short. But I think that "anceps" would be appropriate here as well, since the same words are usually used to describe syllables and metrical positions ("long" and "short"). The word means originally "doubtful" or "capable of two interpretations".--Gheuf 16:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A Linguistic Approach to Modeling Meter

I find most of this article to be rather outdated in its approaches to meter, primarily centering on its treatment of English meter (i.e., iambic pentameter). Many linguists have shown that the "traditional" approach to scansion, which includes iambs with random trochees and such mixed in, is an inefficient way of describing the native intuitions that a poet has about rhythm. Linguists have instead opted for a more generative view on meter, which includes rhythmic templates of weak and strong positions and correspondence rules for mapping syllables and linguistic stress to the metrical template. This way, we can nearly systematically analyze exceptions such as inversion in the metrical line; for example, inversion has been shown this model to happen always at the left-most boundary of a metrical constituent and never happens in the middle of one (Hanson 2003). For more information on this topic, I'd suggest reading Otto Jesperson's "Notes on Metre," Paul Kiparsky, and Kristin Hanson, who are all linguists working in the field of rhythm and meter. (posted by Expectfailure (talk · contribs) 03:30, 23 October 2006)

Jesperson's Notes — dating from 1900 — get a mention in Systems of scansion. The inversion of the first foot after a line-break or a ceasura mid-line (and the use of a feminine ending before either of these) was practiced by Shakespeare and early Milton (i.e. before Paradise Lost) .. see the section 'Rhythmic variation' in iambic pentameter. However this does not account for Milton's later use of meter, see Bridges' Analysis of Paradise Lost.
In general I agree that there is much recent material that could be incorporated into the article. I'd also recommend Principles of English stress by Luigi Burzio (Cambridge, 1994). Stumps 08:16, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removal of old dissent section

I've removed the poorly written and unclear 'dissent' section added in this change back in October 2005. I don't think this article is (or should) be 'advocating' the use of meter, and therefore 'dissent' seems misplaced. Links to other theories of rhythm of course are entirely valid, and maybe I've been a little too extreme in my surgery. Stumps 10:17, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Poetry in the Heavenly Spheres?

The last paragraph mentions poets who "believed that meter was imposed into poetry by man, not a fundamental part of its nature". Where does the "fundamental part of the nature of poetry" come from if not from man? from the Heavenly Spheres?--Gheuf 07:32, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] It isn't "metre" in British English

"Metre" is only used in English for the unit of distance. Everything else (thermometer, poetic meter etc) is spelled with an "er".--81.145.240.75 17:47, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] monometer, dimeter, etc.

On 5 Dec 07, I read this article and found that it lacked the basic information i sought in a clear, concise manner. I couldn't remember whether the meter form was called Tetrameter or quadrameter, and i expected this page would contain it.

I found it elsewhere, and so I added the succinct info:

The term monometer describes verse with one foot per line. Dimeter describes verse with two feet per line. Trimeter describes verse with three feet per line. Tetrameter describes verse with four feet per line. Pentameter describes verse with five feet per line. Hexameter describes verse with six feet per line. Heptameter describes verse with seven feet per line. Octameter describes verse with eight feet per line."

It was later deleted being called "redundant nonsense". Not sure why, since that info isn't given clearly elsewhere on the page (there's a lot of rambling examples).

I'd love to add the info to the page, as i believe people would find this rather essential to the discussion and understanding of poetic meter. but i don't have the energy to police the page.

wht is u talking about tel her she a bobble head and is good for tv. tell her she scared as hell thats why her dum ass dont want to fight. but tell her if she ready tell her i said wuz up she sorry any way tell her to jump when she feal at anytime froggy —Preceding unsigned comment added by 168.12.253.66 (talk) 23:56, 28 April 2008 (UTC)