Some questions about meter
 

A question for the Metrical poets.

This forum's piqued my curiosity about metrical poetry and so I've been doing some reading about it. The sense I get is that a metrical poem typically uses any number of formal metrical types, and has a defined structure that is usually somewhat symmetrical.

My questions are:

1) If we're stretching the rules of meter, when would a poem be considered no longer metrical? What does the boundary between a non-metrical and metrical poem look like?

2) If we stay within the boundary of the above question, can a metrical poem essentially do anything, as long as it has a somewhat consistent form or pattern? Are there any other limits to what a metrical poem is or isn't? Styles or general rules that a metrical poet would adhere to?

3) Qualitative vs Quantitative Meter. I'm seeing this distinction being made on the Wikipedia page. Do writers at this forum typically use just one, or both of these methods?

Apologies if this takes too much time to answer, hopefully someone has the time to take a stab at it.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

(1) It's a matter of opinion and judgment, on a case by case basis.

(2) Unless you are writing for a contest or journal that asked only for "metrical" poems, don't sweat the definition. Find the way that sounds best to you. (And post in whatever forum you think best suits your poem).

(3) Metrical poems in English are almost invariably qualitative, which means that we go by patterns of stressed syllable. Quantitative meters go by the duration of sounds rather than their relative stress compared to the surrounding syllables. In qualitative prosody, a syllable like "a" has the same value as a syllable like "strengths", even though the latter takes much longer to say than the former.

Some poems posted in met keep me checking to make sure the meter is really there. I don’t personally find it as enjoyable as a good beat, but that iffy borderland is an interesting place to explore. And there was at least one non-met poem that I was certain had a meter hidden somewhere. If I thought I could repeat that effect, I’d try non-met.

On Form...
 

Hey Nick,

One of the things that the Covid pandemic forced me to do was to record my lectures for various classes. So, if you want to dig deeper into meter, you could check out this presentation HERE.

It should autoplay as you click through the slides. I think it takes about 45 minutes, and it should give you a good basic grounding in syllabic, accentual, and accentual-syllabic meter, as well as questions of flexibility/substitutions.

Enjoy, Tony

I've been around here so long and tried to take in what I could that now I write best in meter when I'm not trying. I can look at some, not all but a good number, of my poems that don't maintain a meter long enough to be on the metrical board, I suppose, and find passages, some longer than others but some quite long, of consistent meter. It's natural to fall into iambic and sort of float there. I've noticed that often at the end of a poem, partly because I have this not-so-good habit of not letting a poem simply end, I'll have a few lines that sound iambic to me. You can pick out quite long passages from Whitman and find passages in a meter that go on a good while. That's my best approach because focusing on it chokes me down and even if the poem passes through the meter gate it isn't good. I like following the words instead of placing the words.

Since you invoked Whitman...


Something I realized in the process of teaching "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" a couple years ago (and again last month) is that the first half of the poem is completely unmetered, and the lines just go on as long as they need to. But in the second half, meter shows up. Line 5 is almost iambic hexameter, line 6 is iambic hexameter, line 7 can likely be read a few different ways, but I comfortably read it as iambic hexameter...and then line 8 is perfect iambic pentameter. It's elegant, and to me it reflects the "poetry" of looking out at the night sky, in contrast to the heartless scholarship of the drawing room.

I've never loved Whitman, but this poem is a great example of how a typically free verse poet can have his cake and eat it too. And I think it's illustrative for the OP.

Thanks for the answers. So if I was writing for a contest that was asking for metrical poetry, what would my constraints be?

I'm not sure if I'll be writing much of it any time soon, but I am interested in getting a better understanding of it.

Thanks for this, I'll have to find some time soon to go through it.

This sounds similar to my approach. For the most part I just enjoy writing and let the poems happen.

Metrical sounds like it'd be fun to spend some time with, but maybe a little more constraining when you just want to mess around in Notepad for an hour.

Thanks for this. It sounds like I need to think of meter as a tool, rather than a strict set of rules. The end is the finished poem, not necessarily the way you got there.

(Isn't it just like me to speak about something I know little about?!)

I will take a shot at this — mostly just to see if I can. It always helps to articulate something in order to get to know it : ) I've asked myself the same questions. In short, I think, 1.) there are no hard and fast rules when writing metrical poetry. The real measure is in its degree of regular rhythm/musicality, and 2.) the answers vary depending on the expectations of the poet/reader. But formal poetry is a different beast. The rules are much more defined and confined, more or less, to the blueprint/rules of the particular form (sonnet, villanelle, etc.)

I've read poetry since I could read. I never gave much thought to the metrical aspects or the form in which a poem is written. I just knew what I liked. I missed many opportunities to become properly educated in the poetic tradition. I had my chances but never committed myself to learning (life happens). Instead, I have learned what I know through home-spun poetic instinct. Personally, I’m attracted to the sonics and imagery and rhythm and the alchemy those things create in my imagination. I listen for passion and conviction and look for light. I rarely bother with the "metrics" of writing poetry — although being here on the Sphere has helped educate/sensitize me to the power inherent in metrical and formal poetry. I remember being shocked to learn that Robert Frost wrote mainly metrical poetry. To me, his voice was so fluid I never thought of it as being anything other than natural speech. But I also think that all good poetry is metrical. I like to think I write with rhythm. I had some training in music composition and music as a written language. I find it most helpful to think of poetry as music in the shape of words. Just as music is written in a time signature (3/4, 4/4. 6/8, etc.) poetry dances on the page to a rhythm it invents that is all its own.

Since I arrived here on the Sphere I've grown to love good villanelles and cringe at bad ones, to love good sonnets and be nonplussed by mediocre ones, to be lured into the orbit of tightly rhymed poetry and thrown out of orbit by by poetry written in stiff, stilted language.

For the most part I've found writers here to be quite tolerant of what is posted to be metrical poetry. The metrical board certainly gets more notice.

If you are serious about learning to write metrically poetry and/or formal verse, you're in a good place here. There is a mountain of lessons to learn.

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Thanks for the comments. I'm definitely interested, but it's all theoretical at this point due to time constraints. I just don't have the time or energy to actually write.

I'm also at an inflection point where my motivation to write new poetry is dipping in general. Back in 2020 I self-published a book and it was eye opening. I didn't have much pretension about it, but the biggest learnable was that few people actually like or care about poetry, at all.

That's fine, but my motivation to go back in the black box and keep writing isn't as high as it once was. I'm still tinkering, and spending some time trying to push the last 25% of the aforementioned project forward, but other than that inspiration is sparse.

That might actually be where the interest in metrical is coming in. I know I've reached a point where I'm at least somewhat competent with poetry. So continuing to broaden that skill is one of few remaining motivators. And this place gives me somewhere to faff about and read / learn.

Sorry. Likely too much information, but it's fun to talk about.

For anyone who's also interested in this topic I managed to track down the following thread with some good answers on the subject:

On the terms "Metrical" and "Non-Metrical"

Hi Nick, a really good book that tackles these kinds of questions is Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance. It's a very digestible introduction to metrical poetry for both readers and writers and I think would give you a good foundation for further exploration. Your library system might have it, or otherwise you can find used copies (thriftbooks, abebooks, etc.) for less than $10.

Thanks for the tip. I've also searched through this forum and found some great suggestions, but Oliver would likely be more accessible than those I found.

I'm still waiting for the right time for books, I don't feel like I'm that committed yet, but Oliver's title might be worth picking up if I can find it at the library.

It's been fun just researching and tinkering online. I feel like I get it, but how metrical poets style and limit their poems is something that alludes me. Although I'm starting to think that it's not too much different than how I'd approach non-metrical, just that the structure is more formalized.

Nick, I think that 90% of what you need to truly understand the basic way that meter works in English prosody can be found by reading the first 15 pages of this chapter by Timothy Steele: Introduction to Meter.

Just 15 pages. Honest! But do take them slow and make sure you're following what he's saying. A lot of people who attempt to write in meter fail to do so competently because they don't understand the basic concepts you'll find in these 15 pages. (You might then be tempted to read on, and I'd encourage you to do so, but you apparently don't have a lot of time to devote to this at the moment, and the crux of the matter is in these 15 pages).

Thanks for this, I'll check it out.

Hello Nick,

I once wrote on this forum (to the offence of some) that skilled musicians take to meter like a duck to water, and perhaps even more effortlessly. The most important thing is to have an ear that can differentiate and apply rhythms at all levels of the spoken language; that is to say, the primary task when learning meter is to tune the ear to make and apply those distinctions. Skilled musicians already have a mind adapted for rhythm tasks, so it is only a matter of turning a cultivated ear to spoken rhythms.

Which is to say, your questions to me are entirely wrong-headed, like asking the best way to cycle a foot race, in that they appear to be asking for some kind conceptual classifications when the skill of sensory differentiation is the actual task, a task that each person has to learn for themselves. The only usefulness of the books to be a guide of what to pay attention to when listening to speech, considered poetic or not.

Once you have the ear, then just pick up anthologies spanning a few hundred years, and listen for yourself to the evolution of technique and accepted criteria. In Jazz, the improvisations of previous masters ask as a model of what has been done and what is possible, and so it is with poetry, with the past masters defining metrical practice, which you can either go along with or break away from.

The answers are in the poems themselves.

Yeah!

Thanks for this. And you've reminded me that I own a copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which should be up to the task.

Popping back for a moment to mention that this explanation did the trick, it's making sense to me now.

I tried to write a metrical poem this afternoon that was coherent, a good poem, and also tightly metered. It wasn't an easy task. But funnily enough I'm now realizing that a few of my earliest poems were close to metrical. Apparently I had an inclination for non-met and eventually moved away from it.