All rights reserved. This work may be used, with this header included, for noncommercial purposes within a subscribed institution . No copies of this work may be distributed electronically outside of the subscribed institution, in whole or in part, without express written permission from the JHU Press . This book is an instrumental investigation of a theory of rhythmical performance of poetry, originally propounded speculatively in the author's 1977 book, Perception-Oriented Theory of Meter . The theory suggested is based on Gestalt theory, speech research, and the hypothesis of limited channel capacity.
Most theoreticians attempt to make deviant stress patterns conform with metric pattern.
The book has ten chapters and two appendices. The first three chapters give the general theoretical framework of the study. Chapter 9 explores the ways in which music can throw light on poetic rhythm. Chapter 10 demonstrates that the same strategies found in the performance of English poetry are used, in a different theatrical tradition, to solve the considerably different problems that arise in Hungarian poetic rhythm. Appendix 2 gives a list of verse lines containing stress maxima in weak positions.