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17 February 2005: Meter is the subject again, today. Below are excerpts (somewhat re-arranged) from a discussion I'm having at New-Poetry with Sam Gwynn:
Me: "I'm sure all you formalists will shoot me for saying it, but I consider 'accent,' 'beat' and 'stress' all the same thing.
Sam: "Who the heck would argue with this? They're just synonyms. You might as well call them 'thunks.'"
Me: "I thought you did, Sam, when you said meter has nothing to do with 'beats.' I thought that meant it had to do with something other than beats, but you apparently were suggesting it only had to do with--what? Metrical lineation?" Sam: "In verse, yes. Meter can have something to do with 'beats'--accentual meter, for example. Or it can have nothing to do with them--syllabic meter. Or it can have something to do with them--accentual-syllabic meter. Which is to say that roughly 1/4 of all iambic lines ever written really have only 4 'beats':
/ / / /
Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
"And a lot of them, with spondees, have more than 5:
/ / / / / /
And summer's lease hath all too short a date
"I won't get into matters of half-stresses or the 1/2/3/4 types of scansion that 'rank' the relative stress of syllables. Visual scansion is just a poor substitute for what should be heard, not seen, and I tell my students to call a syllable stressed or unstressed.
"Those who'd argue that 'in' deserves a full stress simply because it's in a position in an iambic pentameter line where it ought to have a stress have, well, no ear. But it's easy enough to write pentameter with no ear--the kind of leaden pentameters Pound was talking about in his metronome analogy."
Me: "I think those who would not stress 'in' believe in free verse. Pretty subjective matter whether 'in,' stressed, sounds better or worse than 'in,' unstressed. I prefer stressed because I find three unstressed syllables in a row almost always unpleasant. I find the stressing of syllables because they are situated where the meter says they should be stressed sometimes refreshingly non-prose--but too non-prose when they would not be stressed SOMEWHAT in prose. That is, 'in' would be stressed in prose, just not as stressed as the four main beats in the line. To me a main point of using meter is to make poems non-prose--to be artificial."
I also wrote, "I don't like the definition of meter as length of lines of regular rhythm, by the way. It seems to me that meter is a device concerned with repetition of beat patterns, line length--in metrical poetry--not a device but something to do with form.
"Lineation (to go to a topic in another post) is different from line length and a device. It is no more trivial than repetition of beat patterns. For one thing, it can prevent an aestheriencer from reading too quickly through an important idea or image or figure of speech. Used intra-syllabically as in Cummings it can disconceal extra meanings. Taken further, it can yield visual poetry. It also provides a climate when adventures seem easier to try.
"Aside from that, it 'simply' changes the appearance of a text. It says "poem." Since all poems, including free verse, have central tasks that prose does not (expression of beauty versus transmission of information, for instance), this helps aestheriencers enter them with appropriate expectations and attitudes. Which can be important.
"While opinionating, I'll add that I think regular beats or stresses entirely different from syllable or stress counting--more different from regular beats than free verse is from syllable or stress counting." Hence (as I did not write then but will now), I don't believe meter "can have nothing to do with (beats)--syllabic meter." That is, I don't believe syllabic "meter," or the like, should be considered meter.
"Apologies for going extraneous but I'm trying to get my thoughts in order on this."
One last word: I think the belief that we should not change any long-accepted definition of a term no matter how bad the definition has become moronic.
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