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Unread 07-17-2005, 01:28 AM
MacArthur MacArthur is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Portland, Oregon, U.S.A.
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Well...just to weigh in with my personal dogma - "loose iambics" involves more than one substitution per line, particularly if both subs consist of an extra syllable WITHIN the line.

This mostly applies to tetrameter and longer - shorter measures are inherently more forgiving.

An extra syllable at the end of a line is likely too innocuous to count...and an initial reversed foot is also too customary (and natural) to be very "loosening".

Two reversed feet - and perhaps even two anapestic substitutions - in some sort of parallel construction are probably OK also. eg:

Dance in a horse's hide. Dance in the snow.
(Weldon Kees - Farrago)

A "double iamb", "spondaic substitution" or whatever you want to call it (Minor Ionic?) isn't - strictly speaking - a substitution at all...the passage, in an iambic context, can nearly always reasonably scan as two successive iambs, or an iamb following a trochee. Try it...you'll see.
This is also WAY overrated (and over-used) as a source of rhythmic interest. Sounds prosey, really.

I just spent most of a year reading a whole passel of "Contemporaries of Shakespeare" BV dramas - as well as re-reading a fair amount of Shakin' Willie, himself.

The Elizabethians are all OK. Even Chapman and Jonson can escape being boring.

(BTW caesurae don't always mangle the rhythm:

Dost thou not feel me Rome? Not yet? Is night
So heavy 'pon thee, and my weight so light?

Jonson - Cataline)

The Carolines regained most of Shakespeare's smoothness, but without the lyric genius (Ford, Tourneur, Shirley)
(You want to learn how to enjamb on a blank IP line, read "The Atheist's Tragedy" Cyril Tourneur...although it's a ludicrously stupid drama, the verse is outstanding. Much the same for Ford's "Tis Pity She's a Whore"...and a better play.)

But the Jacobeans...Oh God, it's just sludge - even the much-overrated Webster.
(Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and Beaumont when he was writing with Fletcher. Middleton much of the time.)

Need a break afterwards? Dryden's "All For Love" is...well, sublime.
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