Huh? Graywyvern, you can refuse all you want
to read weak or unstressed syllables as accented,
but you mangle verse in the process. And where
did you get the idea that the Victorians, any of
them, didn't promote syllables? It's not only
clear from their verse that they did, but some
of them wrote about prosody and understood very
clearly what they were doing. There is no way in
the world you can read
unCON-QUER / -a-ble SOUL
That couldn't be wronger. There is no caesura
in the line, none. It is impossible to
accent QUER. And whether you like the idea
or not, that tiny little schwa -a- gets a
tiny accent. It's an iambic line without any
substitution and that's how the ear hears it.
The end.
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