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16 February 2005: Today the subject is meter. It's a subject that comes up a lot at New-Poetry. To be candid, I don't know much at all about all the esoteric meters the Greeks and other ancients used. In fact, I have to admit to being a Philistine about meter. I find the way some formalists pick through Frost or others to uncover fifteen or twenty different meters that are supposed to exemplify poetic brilliance ridiculous. I also find the many free versers who defend their poetry against the idea that meter is necessary for superior poetry by showing all the different kinds of meter their works have ridiculous. I say, in my continuing ignorance, that meter is the repetition for a reasonable length of a work of two- or three-syllable chunks of text containing one stressed syllable always in the same place, or of some regular pattern of such chunks. (I allow, as almost all critics do, for a few lapses here and there.)
A stressed syllable in poetry is simply a syllable which is common usage would be (or unstrainedly could be) more vigorously pronounced than the syllable before it, if there is one, and the syllable after it, if there is one. For me, there are only stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Yes, I know there's a continuum of stressedness, but not for scanning poetry. In other words, I think it silly to claim, as Eliot Weinberger recently has, that "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is not strict iambic because (I assume) "to" would not ordinarily be stressed as much as "pare"--and because "Shall" or some other word in the line could be stressed. In the latter case, the poem as a whole tells the reader what to stress.
This is a hot topic again at New-Poetry, so I'll probably return to it tomorrow. So those bored by it might do well to skip me then, and probably on Friday, as well. I think meter can be wonderful. But it isn't the be-all of poetry, or close to it.
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