[Nick McRae]

A question for the Metrical poets.

This forum's piqued my curiosity about metrical poetry and so I've been doing some reading about it. The sense I get is that a metrical poem typically uses any number of formal metrical types, and has a defined structure that is usually somewhat symmetrical.

My questions are:

1) If we're stretching the rules of meter, when would a poem be considered no longer metrical? What does the boundary between a non-metrical and metrical poem look like?

2) If we stay within the boundary of the above question, can a metrical poem essentially do anything, as long as it has a somewhat consistent form or pattern? Are there any other limits to what a metrical poem is or isn't? Styles or general rules that a metrical poet would adhere to?

3) Qualitative vs Quantitative Meter. I'm seeing this distinction being made on the Wikipedia page. Do writers at this forum typically use just one, or both of these methods?

Apologies if this takes too much time to answer, hopefully someone has the time to take a stab at it.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

[Roger Slater]

(1) It's a matter of opinion and judgment, on a case by case basis.

(2) Unless you are writing for a contest or journal that asked only for "metrical" poems, don't sweat the definition. Find the way that sounds best to you. (And post in whatever forum you think best suits your poem).

(3) Metrical poems in English are almost invariably qualitative, which means that we go by patterns of stressed syllable. Quantitative meters go by the duration of sounds rather than their relative stress compared to the surrounding syllables. In qualitative prosody, a syllable like "a" has the same value as a syllable like "strengths", even though the latter takes much longer to say than the former.

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Nick McRae

What does the boundary between a non-metrical and metrical poem look like?

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Find the way that sounds best to you. (And post in whatever forum you think best suits your poem).

Some poems posted in met keep me checking to make sure the meter is really there. I don’t personally find it as enjoyable as a good beat, but that iffy borderland is an interesting place to explore. And there was at least one non-met poem that I was certain had a meter hidden somewhere. If I thought I could repeat that effect, I’d try non-met.

[Tony Barnstone]

Hey Nick,

One of the things that the Covid pandemic forced me to do was to record my lectures for various classes. So, if you want to dig deeper into meter, you could check out this presentation HERE.

It should autoplay as you click through the slides. I think it takes about 45 minutes, and it should give you a good basic grounding in syllabic, accentual, and accentual-syllabic meter, as well as questions of flexibility/substitutions.

Enjoy, Tony

[John Riley]

I've been around here so long and tried to take in what I could that now I write best in meter when I'm not trying. I can look at some, not all but a good number, of my poems that don't maintain a meter long enough to be on the metrical board, I suppose, and find passages, some longer than others but some quite long, of consistent meter. It's natural to fall into iambic and sort of float there. I've noticed that often at the end of a poem, partly because I have this not-so-good habit of not letting a poem simply end, I'll have a few lines that sound iambic to me. You can pick out quite long passages from Whitman and find passages in a meter that go on a good while. That's my best approach because focusing on it chokes me down and even if the poem passes through the meter gate it isn't good. I like following the words instead of placing the words.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by John Riley

You can pick out quite long passages from Whitman and find passages in a meter that go on a good while. That's my best approach because focusing on it chokes me down and even if the poem passes through the meter gate it isn't good. I like following the words instead of placing the words.

Since you invoked Whitman...


Something I realized in the process of teaching "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" a couple years ago (and again last month) is that the first half of the poem is completely unmetered, and the lines just go on as long as they need to. But in the second half, meter shows up. Line 5 is almost iambic hexameter, line 6 is iambic hexameter, line 7 can likely be read a few different ways, but I comfortably read it as iambic hexameter...and then line 8 is perfect iambic pentameter. It's elegant, and to me it reflects the "poetry" of looking out at the night sky, in contrast to the heartless scholarship of the drawing room.

I've never loved Whitman, but this poem is a great example of how a typically free verse poet can have his cake and eat it too. And I think it's illustrative for the OP.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

(2) Unless you are writing for a contest or journal that asked only for "metrical" poems, don't sweat the definition. Find the way that sounds best to you. (And post in whatever forum you think best suits your poem).

Thanks for the answers. So if I was writing for a contest that was asking for metrical poetry, what would my constraints be?

I'm not sure if I'll be writing much of it any time soon, but I am interested in getting a better understanding of it.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by Tony Barnstone

Hey Nick,

One of the things that the Covid pandemic forced me to do was to record my lectures for various classes. So, if you want to dig deeper into meter, you could check out this presentation HERE.

It should autoplay as you click through the slides. I think it takes about 45 minutes, and it should give you a good basic grounding in syllabic, accentual, and accentual-syllabic meter, as well as questions of flexibility/substitutions.

Enjoy, Tony

Thanks for this, I'll have to find some time soon to go through it.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by John Riley

I've been around here so long and tried to take in what I could that now I write best in meter when I'm not trying. I can look at some, not all but a good number, of my poems that don't maintain a meter long enough to be on the metrical board, I suppose, and find passages, some longer than others but some quite long, of consistent meter. It's natural to fall into iambic and sort of float there. I've noticed that often at the end of a poem, partly because I have this not-so-good habit of not letting a poem simply end, I'll have a few lines that sound iambic to me. You can pick out quite long passages from Whitman and find passages in a meter that go on a good while. That's my best approach because focusing on it chokes me down and even if the poem passes through the meter gate it isn't good. I like following the words instead of placing the words.

This sounds similar to my approach. For the most part I just enjoy writing and let the poems happen.

Metrical sounds like it'd be fun to spend some time with, but maybe a little more constraining when you just want to mess around in Notepad for an hour.

[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by E. Shaun Russell

Since you invoked Whitman...


Something I realized in the process of teaching "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" a couple years ago (and again last month) is that the first half of the poem is completely unmetered, and the lines just go on as long as they need to. But in the second half, meter shows up. Line 5 is almost iambic hexameter, line 6 is iambic hexameter, line 7 can likely be read a few different ways, but I comfortably read it as iambic hexameter...and then line 8 is perfect iambic pentameter. It's elegant, and to me it reflects the "poetry" of looking out at the night sky, in contrast to the heartless scholarship of the drawing room.

I've never loved Whitman, but this poem is a great example of how a typically free verse poet can have his cake and eat it too. And I think it's illustrative for the OP.

Thanks for this. It sounds like I need to think of meter as a tool, rather than a strict set of rules. The end is the finished poem, not necessarily the way you got there.