Clive wrote something in a critique on the metrical board that surprised me. Rather than take over the poem's thread, I thought I'd quote it over here, and ask for elaboration from Clive, Alicia, and anyone else who cares to comment.
Clive wrote:
I wonder if you confuse stress with metrical beats. Accentual-syllabic and accentual metres depend on this distinction and on the related phenomena of demoted and promoted stress. Not every meaning-bearing word (what some linguists call "content words") in a line of verse will carry a metrical beat, even though it may be stressed. These four notions - stress, metrical beat, demotion and promotion - are fundamental.
While I knew this to be true for accentual-syllabic, I was very surprised at the statement that it holds true for accentual, as well.
My impression was that accentual verse used the stresses of natural speech as its metrical beats. That promotion and demotion may occur, as they do contextually in natural speech; but that the natural speech stress *was* the beat.
Is this really widely held not to be true? And if so, what would you call verse that does use the natural speech stress as the beat in this way? Would you lump it in with free verse?
I do note that Clive was contrasting the rhetorical stress with the metrical beat in his comment. I am not sure whether "rhetorical stress" and "natural speech stress" are actually the same thing.
Victoria Gaile
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