What Michael said. As an exclusively fv writer, I've thought of going back to graduate school days and study meter again. Then I thought better of it. Kidding. Really though, even for those like myself pretty committed to free verse, meter is a good thing to know. Then forget, in the most meaningful way you can forget anything.

JB

Sorry, deleted some of the above. Misunderstood. Thought there was a metrical poetry writing computer. The rest is fairly off-topic, but I usually am anyway.

The interest would be in the programming and analysis. Whether it's possible to write a program that could sort through all the variables and identify a rhythm of stresses in a text is an intriguing question.

I can't picture a use a poet might make of such an app, but it's not impossible. Rhyming dictionaries help those who rhyme, and they do so without in any way removing the art from rhyming well.

If you want to play with one, try Scandroid; it's free to download. It does pretty well, but problems arise, inevitably, when the sense of the phrase determines which word or syllable the stress falls.

I would think that the visual of a .wav file would be interesting. I see these on the internet all the time accompanying recordings of poems, etc. Fussell mentions three kinds of scansion: graphic, musical, and acoustic. When he wrote Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, the last of these was in a fairly primitive state. I would be interested in seeing some examples of various meters in this acoustic/graphic format.

That said, I do think that any kind of attempt to convert poetic rhythm from one sense (sound) to another (sight) is going to offer a poor substitute. I always taught standard graphic scansion with the caveat that, no matter how many scansion symbols one used, you'd end up with only an approximation. Some meters (trochaic or anapestic tetrameter, for example) tend to be "louder" than others.

I've a poor ear for music but a perfect ear for meter; the converse often seems to be the case. Nature confers and withholds her gifts.