Poetic meter

>Yes YOU fuckING scumBAG, eat SHIT and DIE.
Holy fuck we've got a new Shakespeare here

isnt is SCUM bag?

It is, and that contradicts his shitty iambs.

Depends a bit on the language.

Meter matters a great deal, however feet don't. Feet are just ways of categorizing patterns of stressed vs. unstressed syllables. For example, take a line of iambic pentameter:

| x / | x / | x / | x / | x / |

where each x is an unstressed syllable, each / is stressed, and each | denotes a foot boundary. We call this iambic pentameter because it's made up of 5 bisyllabic feet with a x / pattern, but if you take away the feet boundaries it's not like the meter is changed in any way.

tl;dr: the pattern matters, but organizing them into convenient groups of 2 or 3 syllables is inconsistent and unnecessary.

good troll (I hope)

Bumpbump

Read poetry outloud.
Try Homer outloud. Fagles or Lattimore. Metre and other poetic qualities will become intuitively known to you.

The Ode Less Traveled is apparently pretty good as well

Depends on what you're writing, for whom, and why. Free verse and blank verse are valid poetic forms, though they are easier and probably more common now so you might get more notoriety for reconforming to old standards.

The names don't really matter, they're just necessary formal definitions, as long as you understand what they mean and how to use them then it doesn't matter if you know the name for a "pyrrhic foot"

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, mate.

I bout The Ode Less Travelled the other week and I'm slowly making my way through it now. It's got lots of brilliants information in it. I would highly recommend it

posting feet

...

Indeed they are, and it is nice to know
That some still value meter, not just "flow"!
I scan your lines as iambs in five feet,
Each word well fitted to its chosen seat:
And sound from sound does naturally grow,
In delicate arrangements subtly sweet.

your iambs suck worse than that other guys

Are you a podiatrist/UFOlogist?

It could be an alien language, something to do with dances

I always felt whether something was stressed or unstressed was being made up in people's heads.

>I scan your lines as iambs in five feet
>- / - / - / - - / /

>Each word well fitted to its chosen seat
> / / / / - / - / - /

Nice effort, though

>I've never seen a spondee in IP before

try reading poetry instead of just posting about it

>i've never seen wood pulp in a tall glass of apple cider

???

Actually this is wrong

| / . . - | . / . . - . | . / . . - . | . / . . / | . - . . / |
Yes you fucking scumbag, eat shit and die.

Four substitutions, so it's very irregular, but it's still Iambic Pentameter. The second spoilered line is spondee, iamb, iamb, anapest, and a feminine ending.

>Four substitutions, so it's very irregular, but it's still Iambic Pentameter.
I'm not an expert on poetry, but how can you call that iambic pentameter? I could call it an "irregular" trochaic pentameter as well.

I think, if you're attempting to exemplify a given metrical pattern in line, it should be a regular line. Hence his forcing the meter to show how irregular it actually was.

Same here

Context, more than anything. If you have a Shakespearean sonnet you're anticipating the pattern, and searching for the significance when that pattern is broken.

Yeah, but here we have only two verses, neither of which respects the pattern of IP.

In this case it's the context of the thread. I agree with you, though, I think they're very poor examples.

Yes. It's a useful tool to understand.
People naturally speak in meter after all, so can't see the harm in analyzing the why.

Don't get me wrong, meter shouldn't be seen as a constraint either, instinct is also very important for a poet.

irregular doesn't mean wrong

the vast majority of great works in IP contain many substitutions

As for the other one you quoted, it's incredibly stupid to say there's something unusual about two spondees in an iambic pentameter line, but it's also not necessary to accent "each".

examples of other famous IP lines with more than one spondee:

Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd, I said, [ . . . ]

Five years have past; five summers, with the length [ . . . ]

As for a spondee at the end of a line, it's very common:

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

O helpe thou my weake wit, and sharpen my dull tong.

Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off

He trusted to have equal'd the most High

And thence in Heav'n call'd Satan, with bold words

Though chang'd in outward lustre; that fixt mind

Irreconcileable, to our grand Foe,

I could go fishing through every great IP work in the English language for more of them, but I'll stop there

I was joking when I defended him

obviously his lines sound nothing like a real iambic meter

...

Again, if you're trying to demonstrate what an regular line in iambic pentameter 'looks like' then it should probably be, you know, a regular line.

Apparently it takes more than a very basic knowledge of prosody to competently reproduce a famous and very common pattern, but ohe well. Take your L and move on.

four out of the six lines, including the first two, were exactly iambic though

if some user wrote out a thirty line iambic pentameter poem, and four lines contained the kinds of substitutions common in Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, etc., would you insist this was a flaw? that this had failed in its purpose?

let's not mistake the meaning of "regular" here: in the strict sense irregular does not mean "out of place". A line of two throchees and three iambs would be both irregular and unusual; a line of one trochee and four iambs would be irregular but in no way unusual. The poem has been charged with having substitutions—substitutions of the most common kinds in English iambic pentameter. This does not make the verse odd or unusual as IP; it only means a couple of lines are "irregular".

it is not clear that anybody was "attempting to exemplify a given metrical pattern in line"; if you reword that to (what I think is more correct) "attempting to exemplify a given meter in a verse", you have no case.

(You)

My daughter died yesterday. I don't really feel like playing this game with you. Good bye.

Nope, you're just an idiot with no sense of language

jajaja gran trolaso

Like were made of starlight ?

We should be dancin dancin