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10 August 2005: I'm afraid I get ferociously tired of bullshit like the following about meter: "Progress in the field has been repeatedly diverted and obfuscated by vehemently defended by eccentric theories for over three centuries, and the result, to address the plain fact of the matter, has been that neither the structure nor the elements of versification is understood very well even today. We do not need any more talk of shorts and longs,
acephalous, acatalectic, or arsis, nor elaborate schemas categorizing
the types of off-rhyme, nor really any more student's manuals which
reduce subtle and highly complex systems of verbal dynamics to the
baldest imaginable terms and definitions. For though it is true that
metrical structure (the principal component of verseform) is in essence
an extremely simple pattern of extremely simple elements -- indeed,
elements which have been known and recognized widely for centuries --
it is a system which rests upon linguistic material that continues to
astound us by its intricacy, even for what little of it we understand."
Marcus Bales posted this but neglected to indicate who said it. (Possibly Terry Brogan, whose thoughts on rhyme were being discussed in the thread that Marcus stuck his quotation into). I replied that I don't go along "with the mystification of poetics by just too-ethereally-sensitive ignoramuses and propagandists of unreason. Of course, I understand that metrics is not just shorts and longs; I also understand that a verosopath can show anything whatsoever to be too complex for final definition. So what?"
To Marcus, this was just more evidence that "As usual, name-calling is all (I) can do."
My stand on meter is that it is little but shorts and longs (arranged in repeating patterns). Or, better, unaccented syllables and accented syllables. I don't recognize "pyrrhics" or "spondees," which are, respectively, two unaccented syllables in a row, and two accented ones. I think when two syllables adjoin, one will always be the stronger. I recognize iamb, trochees, anapaests and dactyls. Variety in repeating feet is due to the variety of iambs, trochees, anapaests and dactyls. Each iamb in a iambic pentameter, for instance, will ordinarily only partially repeat the rhythm of any of the others. Its repetition will be strong enough for one listening to the iambs (directly from an oral presentation or indirectly from hearing his subvocalization of what he's reading silently) to hear them as more the same than different, like all the members of a football team in uniform, but rarely quite the same. Of course, much more dramatic variety can be introduced by full change of meter.
For the life of me, I can't see where there's any mystery in this. The human mind enjoys repetition--up to the point where it becomes too expected. It's as simple as that. To prevent that from happening, "variety of sameness" can be used, with some true change; better, the larger things poetry can do can counter metrical predictability with ambiguities, complexities, unexpectednesses, and the like.
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