User:Phil wink/sandbox5

Notes on the history of metrical theory for iambic pentameter
Over 400 years of theorizing on the structure of iambic pentameter has not yielded consensus. Broadly speaking, metrical theories may attempt to describe — simply to notate various germane facts about a line of verse; to prescribe — to instruct readers how to write "correct" verse; to generate — to propose rules that can predict all possible "well-formed" lines and exclude all others; and to explain — to demonstrate (say) what cognitive or linguistic or physiological facts cause certain verse patterns, rather than others, to be common or rare, smooth or disruptive, within a given population.

C. S. Lewis suggests "that metrical questions are profitable only if we regard them, not as questions about fact, but as purely practical. That is... we are not, or should not be, asking which analysis of the paradigm is 'true' but which is the most useful."

Syllabicists:

On Bysshe: "English verse consists of syllables, arrange with undeviating regularity of accentuation[.]" and "Caesural pause is laid down as of equal necessity."

On Johnson: "In [iambic pentameter] the accents are to be placed on even syllables; and every line considered by itself is more harmonious, as this rule is more strictly observed." "Divorced from fact, [Johnson's theory] invented imaginary "laws", which were broken by even our most "correct" verse-writers, and whose observance would have killed all life in our poetry."

Timers "[T]he more one looks at the whole theory the more it seems one enormous category mistake."

Stressers:

A prominent segment of stressers have proposed a broad "foot theory" of verse, in which a normative verse line is composed of a given number of identical feet (for iambic pentameter, 5 iambs), but in practice each foot may be substituted with another foot. Thus the count of feet (however constituted) is primary.

× / |   × /   |   × /   |   × /   |   × /       (normative)

As advocated by prosodists like George Saintsbury, Enid Hamer, and Paul Fussel, often the poet's ear is the only constraint on which or how many feet may be substituted, and equivalent feet (those that may be substituted) often include all of the 4 2-syllable feet, the 8 3-syllable feet, the 16 4-syllable feet, plus a "foot" consisting of a single stressed syllable. The result is that many lines of as few as 5 syllables — and all possible lines of 9 to 20 syllables — qualify as theoretically acceptable iambic pentameters.

× / |   × /   |   × /   |   × /   |   × /       (normative) = × × / |     /   |  / × ×  |  / × /  |   × / × ×   (fully and radically "substituted")