Thanks to Mr. Bottum for his learneed disquisition on classical alcaics. I must confess, though, that although I fancy myself alert to the most delicate subtleties in metrical verse in English, I can't for the life of me imagine how the
quantitative system would have sounded in Latin; nor were any of my teachers in classics able to read them in such a way that the metrical effects were audible. In any case, once one takes over the line-lengths and subsitutes stress & accent for quantity, the order of feet in Latin or Greek ceases to matter much--one's responsibility is only to the sound of the line in English. And by the way, the hendecasyllable (one of Catullus' favorite meters) has had a long life in Romance languages, up to the present day (though of course those languages too have been overrun by deaf freeversers). Almost all of Borges' many metrical poems are in hendecasyllables: the sonnets, the rhymed quatrains, the unrhymed "blank verse," etc. It's his basic measure, as pentameter is mine.
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