Quote:
Originally Posted by Tony Barnstone
What substitutions do you find jarring and inelegant?
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I'll volunteer one: in pentameter, a headless line that begins with a word that does not ordinarily take stress, such as a conjunction or preposition. These bother me even when they're preceded by a line with a feminine ending, and even though some people argue that the feminine ending should signal that the new line starts with a stress. Let me try making up a couplet like that on the fly--
I watched the snowflakes settle in the lamplight
with the sound of carols in the background.
Without fail, I read "with the" as the start of an anapest and end up tripping.
On the larger question--what were you taught about where substitutions are permitted?--very anciently, I was taught that in pentameter, trochaic substitutions are permitted in the first and third feet
only. I fell away from that strict observance many years ago. Too many substitutions can certainly muddy the meter, but if a reader can find our five stresses in a pentameter line, I think we might get away with anything. Ciardi would have agreed with me; Nemerov would probably not.