I was told this is the proper forum to post this
discussion. While much of this is written as statements,
I would love to hear other's opinions, especially
those differing with my ideas.
I seem to have a more rigid concept of meter
than many of the posters on this forum, including
the moderators. Maybe it's is my scientific
background, I'm always looking for patterns.
Maybe I'm strange, but an anapest in an otherwise
iambic line grates on me a little. Trochees and
spondees are fine; they break up the rhythm nicely,
except at the end of the line.
Also, dropping the first unstressed syllable in an
iambic line seems OK to me; the single stressed syllable
still feels like a foot. However, when the unstressed
syllable is dropped in the middle of the line, the
single stressed syllable feels like toes without a heel,
sort of unbalanced.
Feminine endings are nice in a rhyming poem, but they
annoy me slightly in an unrhymed iambic poem, when I'm
expecting the line to end on that hard syllable.
I confess my ignorance, my knowledge of meter is
mostly self-taught, mechanical rather than scholarly.
|