[New-Poetry] English Meter WAS: Some stuff about Alan Sondheim

[David Bircumshaw]

>         What obscures the issue is the failure to distinguish between
> (natural) speech stress and metrical stress (ictus).  Whether or not a
> syllable is *perceived as stressed in a poem depends on whether the
> surrounding syllables are more or less stressed.  Once this is grasped,
most
> confusion vanishes and we're left with only two things to worry about, not
> four.


Now, now, Mr Hamilton. You shoot yourself in your own metrical foot with the
phrase 'more or less'. It is not preferable to have only two things to worry
about, one should have at least four and, if the gods grant, more. It is a
metonym for the human condition. The more sticks the juggler has to cope
with the better the juggler.
Then we can all subvert Robert Frost and happily play tennis without a net
(excuse this promiscous miscegenation of metaphors)

Best

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin" <robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2006 1:02 AM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] English Meter WAS: Some stuff about Alan Sondheim


> From: <jfq at myuw.net>
>
> > English meter is easy once you understand that there are three levels of
> > stressed syllables, one level of unstressed syllable, and that stress
> > varies depending on syllable weight and intonation although it is
largely
> > fixed by vowel length and the presence and type of various terminal
> > consonant structures.
>
>         Is this the original Trager-Smith system, or a reinvention of the
> square wheel?  <g>
>
> > which i suppose means it's very complicated to explain, but really, just
> > notice the four different stresses and it will all start seeming very
> > intuitive.
>
>         I certainly don't find it particularly intuitive, and it's also,
of
> course, wrong.  No linguist and only the very rare prosodist pays it any
> attention
>
> > I think that the bivalent stress analysis really confuses the issue and
> > makes the whole thing seem much more obscure than it really is.
>
>         What obscures the issue is the failure to distinguish between
> (natural) speech stress and metrical stress (ictus).  Whether or not a
> syllable is *perceived as stressed in a poem depends on whether the
> surrounding syllables are more or less stressed.  Once this is grasped,
most
> confusion vanishes and we're left with only two things to worry about, not
> four.
>
>         This is the case in one of the five metres more or less commonly
> employed in English, syllable-accent.  Stress metre similarly only has two
> significant elements of stress, while stress isn't a *functional component
> of either syllabics or quantitative metre.
>
>         The one exception is Dipodic Metre, the metre of ballads and
nursery
> rhymes, which does depend on three degrees of stress -- unstressed, full
> stressed, and half-stressed.  (As, for example, "Humpty Dumpty".)
>
>         Syllable-accent metrics and scansion isn't that complicated once
> it's realised that "stress" there is contrastive rather than absolute.  I
> certainly find this more pelucid than trying to (unnecessarily) juggle
four
> (why four?) degrees of stress or lack of it.
>
> Robin Hamilton
>
>
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