Culture · 6 pages · 12 min

How meter is a pattern of stress

Meter is a repeating expectation about which syllables take stress.

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From the opening

Meter is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that a line is heard against. The sentence has its own stresses from ordinary pronunciation, and meter is the grid those stresses are felt to meet, miss, or play against. The opening covers what a metrical grid expects, how speech stress meets the grid, and why feet are a hearing habit.

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Inside

What a metrical grid expects
How speech stress meets the grid
Why feet are a hearing habit
Where a broken grid stops being meter
Where the idea stops applying
A distinction worth keeping

Sources

Stress meter and the foot in English verse
Quantity meter as a grid built on syllable length

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How meter is a pattern of stress

From the opening

Inside

Sources

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