[AZ Foreman]

Has anyone tried writing English poetry using the Old Latin saturnian meter?

[Douglas G. Brown]

Give us an example or two, and some of us might give it a try.

[Julie Steiner]

I'm pretty sure the answer is no, Alex. Can't say I'm tempted to try it, since most readers of English poetry--including myself--can't even recognize the most popular classical meters, except for dactylic hexameter (when the dactyls aren't too substituted-out) and sapphics (and then only thanks to the shorter fourth line making me take a closer look at the first three). And the saturnian meter seems to have been unpopular even in antiquity.

But I'm open to being convinced that it's been unjustly neglected, if your experiments are successful.

[Orwn Acra]

Just the uranian one.

[AZ Foreman]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

And the saturnian meter seems to have been unpopular even in antiquity.

It was popular, and indeed the norm for poetic composition (including the earliest Latin translation of Homer), before the introduction of Greek meters which completely ousted it.

[Ann Drysdale]

It's hard to look on something as a norm when there appears to be so little consensus as to its actual "identity". Examples seem to vary according to the poet to whom the fragments are credited. Is there a definitive "Saturnian"?

[Skip Dewahl]

Come on, you all want to be the first to crack the mystery saturnian, so, someone supply a textbook example of reasonable length indicating cadence, stress marks and metrics, then, have at it, y'all! Umm, on second thought, that attempt would be slightly easier than getting a selfie with God. Think I'll opt out.

[Julie Steiner]

I'm still open to being convinced of saturnian verses' value. I assume (perhaps incorrectly) the following, which may simply show my ignorance, but perhaps these thoughts will be useful anyway:

1.) Just as a lot of hymns can be sung to more than one old hymn tune, and French alexandrines' mid-line caesura makes perfect sense when one hears the mid-line rest in those verses' musical settings, so too classical Latin and Greek meters probably originated with certain tune structures (now lost). By the first century BCE, lyrics seem to have been presented as poems without music, but saturnian verses are older and may have been more closely wedded to that musical presentation. Anyway, if you present your saturnian lyrics within a tune that fits them, your saturnian experiment may be more successful.

2.) Part of the appeal of any form is the audience's recognition of it and of the tradition within which it fits. Perhaps the saturnian meter fell out of fashion because it was regarded as too common and accessible, while the Greek meters implied that both the Roman poet and the Roman audience were assumed to be members of a well-educated elite. If so, the move from saturnian meter to Greek meters in Roman antiquity was a "let me show off my erudition while flattering yours" thing, rather than a rejection of an inherently flawed form. Which would demolish my implication above, that a form that became unpopular during antiquity did so because it lacked merit.

[Julie Steiner]

This article may be useful, although to my great annoyance it pretty much torpedoes what I was saying about music in 1) above. (The gist is that a shift from accentual to quantitative meter in Latin may have made the meter of saturnians unintelligible to audiences.)