Tim Steele:
"Meter is organized rhythm. The adjective in this definition is as important as the noun. Most speech is to some degree rhythmical. Basic devices of sentence structure—for example, antithesis and parallelism—impose a certain rhythm on language. But the rhythm of meter is regularly organized; traditional English meter, for example, entails arranging speech into a pattern of alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. The metrical unit repeats, and the scheme of repetition, once it is recognized, can be felt and anticipated as a kind of pulse in the verse."
So critics can be excused if, from time to time, they use the words "rhythm" and "meter" interchangeably.
The distinction is important, though, since it's worth keeping in mind that meter doesn't organize all aspects of rhythm, though it has a profound effect on all aspects. The quantity of syllables, for example, is a huge factor of rhythm that is not taken into account (for the most part) in our traditional notions of meter in English. Two poems with very similar scansion characteristics may have a completely different rhythmic feel to them because they employ syllables of different quantitative length.
Then there are the rhthmic effects created as a sort of ripple-effect of the meter itself, and here is where "meter" and "rhythm" are both implicated. For example, in heptameter verse, we frequently hear four strong beats per line, with the remaining three beats relatively subdued. This sort of dipodic counterpoint creates a rhythmic flow above and beyond the heptameter pattern. It's not entirely a matter of meter, since not all heptameter is dipodic.
There are also aspects of meter that inhere in a chosen form. For example, the rhythm of a villanelle is obviously different from a sonnet, even if both of them are in regular IP. I think the recurrence of a refrain is a rhythmic effect that stretches out along the length of the poem.
Just a few scattered thoughts. In short, I'd say that meter is a subset of rhythm, often the dominating rhythmic factor, but metrical scanscion cannot account for the wide varieties of rhtyhm that readers experience.
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