Prosody
Images are sometimes not shown due to bandwidth/network limitations. Refreshing the page usually helps.
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
You are currently reading a thread in /lit/ - Literature
![HartCrane_NewBioImage[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/tByecMl.png "HartCrane_NewBioImage[1].png")
I find the process of scansion very difficult at times, is there something i could read to get better and more concrete understanding of it?
I was thinking of buying Stephen Fry's book, but it will take a while for it to get here,
"O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,"
I came across this line by shakespeare, and it's supposed to be in iambic pentameter, but is the last foot not a spondee?
Also, is scansion with syllable length only in mind something that is ever done in contemporary english? I find that infinitely more interesting.
Stephen Fry's book is pretty good. I recommend it.
>I came across this line by shakespeare, and it's supposed to be in iambic pentameter, but is the last foot not a spondee?
It's not metrical, IMO (and certainly not blank verse). But this is something Shakespeare does now and again. The kind of classical structure in English verse was fairly new around the time he was writing (and unprecedented in drama), so Shakespeare gave himself a great deal of flexibility in his prosody. Don't get too hung up on making every single stressed syllable fit a preordained pattern, every great poet will vary his metre. Paradoxically, what makes blank verse is the way the poet works against it, not how he conforms to it. Perfectly metrical poetry is boring as fuck (Wordsworth...).
>Also, is scansion with syllable length only in mind something that is ever done in contemporary english? I find that infinitely more interesting.
I don't know what you mean here. Do you mean ignoring stress and simply counting syllables? That's so rare as to be completely unheard of, because it creates completely turgid poetry.
>>8043126
>I don't know what you mean here.
I mean you don't focus on the stress, but on the vowel length, almost like you would in ancient greek.
Isn't Dante's inferno only counted syllables with terza rima?
>>8043200
>I mean you don't focus on the stress, but on the vowel length, almost like you would in ancient greek.
The poets who introduced the accentual-syllabic metre into English (Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, ~1 generation before Shakespeare) actually experimented in writing poems with metres based on vowel length at first, because they were trying to ape the classical languages Greek and Latin. Turns out it doesn't work very well at all in English because our language is just different, so they turned to stress instead.
>Isn't Dante's inferno only counted syllables with terza rima?
Yes, but Italian (and French too, which has a syllabic metre also) is a Romance language closely related to Latin. English, with its Germanic heritage is too rough, so stress has to be taken into account (Anglo-Saxon poetry was entirely metred by stress alone).
Hope I'm of some help
>>8043241
Yeah, this helps a lot, thank you.
Are there any modern or contemporary poets at all who experimented with vowel lenghts, do you know?
>>8043268
I don't know of any, sorry.
