[A. E. Stallings]

Dear MacArthur,

Thanks for posting this topic.

I often find promotion to have a very elegant and pleasing effect, sometimes even a little thrill (particularly in multisyllabic words, but also for little prepositions). But it seems I have most often seen it come in for criticism rather than praise. I think that is because people often assume, if a syllable is promoted, it is of equal weight with the other stresses, and the result would then be artificial, belabored. But the result is really much subtler than that. I like Bob Mezey's comment about the four strong, one lesser, stress line. This seems absolutely right to me, from my experience.

Alicia

[MacArthur]

Thanks Bob Mezey for mentioning Wallace Stevens...the Modern Master. The examples are innumerable:

Does ripe fruit never fall, or do the boughs..

Alone shall come fulfilment to our dreams...

(Sunday Morning)

For demotion? Perhaps Frost:

And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love...
(West-Running Brook)

Home is the place where, when you have to go there...
(Death of the Hired Man)

...and on an on. Clearly an important part of his style.

[graywyvern]

Originally posted by robert mezey:
(snip)
the
pentameter with four strongly stressed accents
and one weak accent, being the commonest of the
six or eight common pentameter patterns, is the
unlayable ghost of the old Anglo-Saxon line.

i agree, though sometimes it's only the ghost of a
"tumbling meter" line... one reason i don't like a
lot of promotion is, you wouldn't believe how many
lines their writers thought were iambic pentameter
(because they had the music in their head) scan better
& more naturally as an anapestic tetrameter.

but don't get me started...