[Tim Murphy]

This is a fascinating thread, which I've not read in its entirety. I never read a prosody until about 1994, when I finally devoured Fussell's. But Dick Davis once quipped, "What are the pagan poets arguing about in the Outer Circle? Why, prosody of course!" I think Clive has given us elegant examples of demotion and promotion, and we owe him our thanks for his erudite labors on this thread. In my own case, I think I first performed the role of Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream when I was eleven, but my mother had been reading us or having us read Shakespeare from a far earlier age. And before that, Milne, Dodgson, Mother Goose, and Lear. So I'm with Richard: for me it is almost entirely aural and/or oral. I love accentual meters and think the studies arguing that the Beowulf poet learned much of anything from Vergil are just plain silly. I also love studying and contemplating the beginning of accentual/syllabic. "Whoso list to hount, I know where is an hynde." Try making that fit the rules. And consider the extremes of elision in Donne. When I die and go to hell, I want to sit on the back bench and hear Wyatt, Shakespeare and Donne recite from memory.