Talk:Metre (poetry)

message: Should this be moved to Metre (poetry), similar to Metre (music)? Opinions?
: or "poetic metre" /"poetry metre", "musical metre" to avoid brackets? -- Tarquin
: I think with poetic metre should redirect to Metre (poetry) as with the first suggestion. --Zippanova 06:39, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Very, very, old

message: I think the word "scansion" is too obscure for the introductory paragraph: I had to look it up! As it's a technical word which refers to the "analysis of verse" (according to dictionary.com), perhaps it should either be a link or be replaced by a more common word (such as "analysis").--Malcohol 11:49, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I think dictionary.com is vastly overstating the technical-ness of this word.  I consider it basic vocabulary for anyone who has taken a literature class of any kind.  Since it's defined in the article, I don't think it's too obscure.  Using "analysis" would change the meaning.Franzeska 20:03, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed. 10-th grade word tops. --69.224.191.239 09:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  scansion 

message: I feel that the lists of feet and of hymn meters are detracting from this article's already strained readability.  It might be best to move them -- the list of feet can happily reside at foot (prosody), which is fairly stubby right now, and the list of hymn meters could either be moved to hymn or to a separate article like list of hymn meters or hymn meter.  Are there other opinions on this? -- Rbellin|Talk 14:38, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I went ahead and moved the list of feet to foot (prosody) and the list of hymn meters to hymn.  Comments or changes are still welcome. -- Rbellin|Talk 18:30, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

text: I understand what you mean by "too nebulous" ... however, this article needs to address metre in general, not just in English lnaguage poems written in the accentual-syllabic tradition.  Possibly the article Accentual-syllabic verse — which is currently little more than a stub — would be an appropriate place for the sort of outline you propose, which could then lead off to more detailed articles, such as the (still incomplete) one on iambic pentameter. — Stumps 08:45, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: It's striking that the article explains the meter of only a few languages, all of them European. Even the closely related list of verse forms article mentions only a few non-European forms--mostly the famous Japanese forms.
:Yes, I was disappointed to see that the "Greek and Latin" section only covers Latin. I followed a link here from the article on digamma, hoping to find an explanation of how Greek meter can demand that some syllables begin with consonants. --Darrell Manrique, 12.107.67.3 17:39, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  languages 

message: What is the source for this.  I can site sources - such as Milton's Prosody (book) which talk about 'the inversion of the second foot' and so forth. — Stumps 11:03, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inversion only refers to first foot?? 

message: I believe that because English is an accentual language only those meters which rely on accent can be considered "English". Quantatative verse has not been met with much success in English and is an attempt to apply latin rules to English poetry. English is not a syllabic language either because one does not hear the syllables in a line, but rather the accents.
TheNathanator 02:11, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Syllabic and Quantatative Verse considered English systems? 

message: I am puzzled by the supposed belief attributed in the last section of this article to some famous proponents of free verse, "that meter was imposed into poetry by man." As opposed to the rest of poetry, which was ordained of God? What is this supposed to mean? Poetry is a human creation.
:That's funny, I was coming here to question the same exact thing. I will go ahead and change the wording. Recury 22:30, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poetry not human? 

message: I've added a section on poetic meter in Ottoman Turkish, and I will get around to adding examples of the meters shown as soon as I can, but I wanted to ask one question as well.
In the section, I included a list of the poetic feet used in Ottoman verse. I understand that, theoretically, this list might go better into the Foot (prosody) article; however, as that article is currently even slimmer pickings than this article, and moreover largely lacks the references to non-English languages (apart from Latin and Greek) that this article has, I thought it might be appropriate—at least for the time being—to include the Ottoman poetic feet here. Hopefully, the list of feet in the way it's currently arranged is not too obtrusive (it is, of course, rather specialist and technical, but I think that anyone who is actually willing to read about Ottoman verse structure probably has a good bit of general knowledge on poetic meter already).
Anyhow, any thoughts? —Saposcat 11:32, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re: Ottoman Turkish meter section 

message: Since meter in poetry relies upon and is relied upon by the language in which the poetry is written, NO AMOUNT of editing can give the Meter page a true worldwide view. Maybe it would be better to have a separate Meter page for each language for which there is a Poetry and/or Prose page posted in the English-language Wikipedia. Otherwise, that flag may never be removed from the Meter page. --Misterdoe 06:19, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you're right on ultimately spearating pages for each language, but disagree that this page can never have a true worldwide view.  I think the worldwide view will end up being a broad-brush review of the linguistics ideas behind creating meter in different languages with a summary style paragraph devotes to the meter of each different language or language group (similiar to the Poetry article).  Right now I see this as a place for the discussions of different meters to live and grow until a separate page gets set up; if you or someone else are game for it, it's a great project. Sam 15:32, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Worldwide view" 

message: Unless I am grossly mistaken, the notes on this page are no longer editable. Does anyone have an idea about how to fix this?
Otherwise, I completely agree with Misterdoe, there is no way all metrical ideas can be crammed in a single article: this one should only apply to English, whereas, e.g. Italian prosody ought to be on it.wikipedia.org; in any case, people who are not able to read a language are certainly not able to appreciate its metres.
I had no problem editing.  You should sign your posts, so we know who made the comment.  It's not hard at all to discuss the way meter works in different languages, and can be quite important to understand what is imported or carried over from other languages.  For example, the discussion of Ottoman meter is quite informative, and gives a good comparitive context.  Classifying languages into different linguistic types (e.g., tonal languages, mora timed languages)and then seeing how meters are produced within each type, and how they move from, for example, the Arabic to the Romance languages, is quite interesting.  Sam 23:30, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bug 

message: Weak position (grammar) currently talks about syllables that can be either long or short in Classical scansion (generally containing a short vowel followed by muta cum liquida). Here's an example (Metam. XIII):
:et prīmō similis volucrī, mox vēra volucris
The first lu is short, the second one is counted as long by position. Is there a standard name for such syllables (because I don't think that "weak" is the right term)? I thought it might be "anceps", but that turns out to be something else. CapnPrep 03:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Anceps" usually refers to a position in the meter that may be filled by either a short or long syllable. What we want here is a name for a kind of syllable that may be counted either as long or short. But I think that "anceps" would be appropriate here as well, since the same words are usually used to describe syllables and metrical positions ("long" and "short"). The word means originally "doubtful" or "capable of two interpretations".--Gheuf 16:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Ambiguous syllables

message: I find most of this article to be rather outdated in its approaches to meter, primarily centering on its treatment of English meter (i.e., iambic pentameter).  Many linguists have shown that the "traditional" approach to scansion, which includes iambs with random trochees and such mixed in, is an inefficient way of describing the native intuitions that a poet has about rhythm.  Linguists have instead opted for a more generative view on meter, which includes rhythmic templates of weak and strong positions and correspondence rules for mapping syllables and linguistic stress to the metrical template.  This way, we can nearly systematically analyze exceptions such as inversion in the metrical line; for example, inversion has been shown this model to happen always at the left-most boundary of a metrical constituent and never happens in the middle of one (Hanson 2003).  For more information on this topic, I'd suggest reading Otto Jesperson's "Notes on Metre," Paul Kiparsky, and Kristin Hanson, who are all linguists working in the field of rhythm and meter. (posted by  03:30, 23 October 2006)
:Jesperson's Notes — dating from 1900 — get a mention in Systems of scansion.  The inversion of the first foot after a line-break or a ceasura mid-line (and the use of a feminine ending before either of these) was practiced by Shakespeare and early Milton (i.e. before Paradise Lost) .. see the section 'Rhythmic variation' in iambic pentameter.  However this does not account for Milton's later use of meter, see Bridges' Analysis of Paradise Lost.  
:In general I agree that there is much recent material that could be incorporated into the article.  I'd also recommend Principles of English stress by Luigi Burzio (Cambridge, 1994). Stumps 08:16, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Linguistic Approach to Modeling Meter 

message: The last paragraph mentions poets who "believed that meter was imposed into poetry by man, not a fundamental part of its nature". Where does the "fundamental part of the nature of poetry" come from if not from man? from the Heavenly Spheres?--Gheuf 07:32, 5 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poetry in the Heavenly Spheres? 

message: "Metre" is only used in English for the unit of distance. Everything else (thermometer, poetic meter etc) is spelled with an "er".--81.145.240.75 17:47, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Untrue; see e.g. Chambers Dictionary. I agree, though, that "meter" with -er is more common in the poetic sense even in British English, whereas it is not widely accepted in BrE for the unit of length. 31.53.185.104 (talk) 02:31, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  It isn't "metre" in British English 

message: I think the various articles describing the different kinds of feet and their usage are naturals for merging into this.  If I'm looking for a list of feet and their uses, my first thought is to search for "Meter," and once here, it can be difficult to figure out that I need to find a tiny link to a separate page on feet, which in turn links to lots of stubs about those feet.  Merging these in and giving them each sections of this page, and then of course cleaning up what's here, could make this page great.  I'll do the merger in a week or two if no objections.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Quintopia (talk • contribs) 02:02, 28 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I would support this as long as it doesn't result in the loss of information from the individual articles. IMO the articles on the feet are very well written, so their content should be kept. Obviously this would result in this article being very long, so some stuff might need to be moved into other articles. The Ottoman section in particular seems particularly long, so it may be that there should be a separate article on meter in Ottoman poetry along with a short summary in this one. If a merger would result in a loss of all the useful examples and stuff, I would oppose despite the added convenience -- there's little point in changing something to make it easier to get if the change results in you no longer wanting to get it. Raoul (talk) 17:03, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

text: Against merger I believe the articles should NOT be merged ... there is much to be said on the individual histories of each of the many types of meter. There may indeed be a good case for refactoring some of the content to avoid repetition, and the general article on meter should no doubt contain a concise overview which points off to the most important examples of meter.  But once we get past the basic nuts and bolts explanation of what iambic pentameter means, and we get into the real substance of its historical use in various languages, various prosodic interpretations (e.g. Robert Bridges reading Milton as a syllabic writer), variations / developments I can't see how the main Meter article could possibly do it justice. Stumps (talk) 13:39, 22 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger proposal

message: The article starts with a "fundamentals" section; good.  But some of the fundamentals seem to be missing, whilst some distinctly advanced concepts are present.  "Feet" only mentions "iambic": should it not also include fundamentals such as the trochee and dactyl?  And should "metric variations" be regarded as a fundamental?  (At present  the poor novice is thrown into the deep water of catalexis without even a basic foot-hold.) I'm not quite sure yet what to propose instead. Feline Hymnic (talk) 18:13, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fundamentals non-fundamental? 

message: I think it should be mentioned that its Sonnet 18 that is being analysed "Da-dum" etc in the very beginning of the article. /Tense (talk) 11:43, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Add Sonnet 18

message: In poetry can a foot also be referred to as a meter? Since a pentameter is literally five meters, but in this article it calls a single set of syllables a foot. And it seems in non-English countries they wouldn't be using the word foot.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.105.7.183 (talk) 09:26, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  difference between meter and foot? 

message: I think that this page(and perhaps Wikipedia) could be improved by some subdividing.  Independent pages for the quantitative (classical) and accentual (modern) meters would be a good starting point. I would try to do this myself only I am not sure how.  Any thoughts would be appreciated Applechair (talk) 23:34, 5 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Potential Subdivision

message: I noticed this article listed Ottoman Turkish meters, but not the Arabic or Persian ones from which they were derived. I've taken a stab at remedying this by including a basic outline of Arabic metrics, and will probably do a Persian one later. Any suggestions as to what I should add and/or remove? Szfski (talk) 06:41, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arabic and Persian 

message: If you look at Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, the example given here is practically an exception, not the rule. Normally the only thing that counts toward getting the number five is the stressed syllables per line. Most lines will have at least one case where there are more that one syllable between each stressed syllable. This can be easily verified by reading some lines by Shakespeare. For this reason the definition should be changed, to something like... "each foot consists of one stressed syllable preceded or followed by one or more unstressed ones." The most famous example: to BE or NOT to be, THAT is the QUEStion -- The SLINGS and ARrows of outRAGEous FORTune, etc. etc. etc.AtomAnt (talk) 23:26, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  definition of foot/meter

message: Is there in English a word like metrisieren in German meaning "to change a text so that it fits to a prescribed meter"? (The relevance of this notion is obvious for anyone who translates a poem, see Notes on Prosody.) If there is already an article on that in en.WP, please insert an interwiki link into de.WP/Metrisierung. – Rainald62 (talk) 10:00, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question 

message: After suffering the inanity of an English education in which we were taught that certain syllables are "stressed," I hoped some headway had been made since those years but I find this nonsense repeated universally. "Stressed" suggests loudness, or even something undefined, where in reality, it is pitch or frequency. This distortion of meaning makes fools of everyone who retains this imprecise nomenclature and retards comprehension.
Mydogtrouble (talk) 19:07, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: If you are unhappy with the terminology used by professional linguists to describe these phonemoma, that is your prerogative, but don't expect the article to reflect your objection. --Pfold (talk) 22:29, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  There is no "stress" 

message: This example seems inappropriate: are not the commas markers of caesuras? And, while "All her feasts, her / actions honor," could be read with a pause (as marked by the "/") between the possessive pronoun her and actions, the noun which it modifies, this seems highly artificial. Is there some missing "Latin and Greek poetry" text, as mentioned in introducing this example, to which this is supposed to be a gloss? Dcattell (talk) 15:00, 28 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Caesurae 

message: This was rated b-class, but I've re-rated it c-class. It does not meet the b-class standards as per Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment#grades guidelines. The article is not suitably referenced, and is even tagged as needing additional sources. INeverCry  00:02, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Rating

message: Triggered by a discussion about Metre/Meter in music (see here), we came into discussion about Metre (poetry).
Based on my understanding the move from Meter (poetry) to Metre (poetry) (in 2011) was in contradiction of WP:ENGVAR without giving a reason for deviation. Here is why I think it was in contradiction with ENGVAR:
*Since back in 2001: This article used to be an all Meter article.
*Later it became somewhat more mixed between Metre and Meter.
*Then in Jun 2011, this edit came:
**I have attempted to put the word "met(re/er)" entirely in American English, for two reasons: 1: to duplicate the title. 2: It says somewhere in the rules that, unless the article is on a local subject, it should be written in the majority dialect.
**This change was for the wrong reason (majority dialect precedence) but with the correct change (because ENGVAR in case of mixed variants revert to variant of first non-stub article version)
*Then in Nov 2011, these edits
**First: Corrected spelling of 'meter' to 'metre' - British English takes precedence
**Then: moved Meter (poetry) to Metre (poetry) over redirect: British English takes precedence
**These changes were done without any explained reason for precedence and not correct (because ENGVAR existing variant should not change) 
I look forward for someone to confirm or reject my understanding. If my understanding is correct then I propose that this article is moved back to Meter (poetry) and contents changed accordingly. LazyStarryNights (talk) 22:33, 10 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Precedence goes to the British English "Metre" spelling, as per this, the second edit, which was made by the article's originator. The first edit didn't clearly establish his intent, but suggests the same. Note that "hexameter" and "pentameter" are long-accepted BrEng, as seen in "The plagiarisms of S.T. Coleridge", 'Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine', Volume 47, p.298. The spelling difference only pertains to metre vice meter. LeadSongDog come howl! 15:39, 30 July 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Keep Metre as per the original intent. It could legitimately be either but since this article,  Metre (music) and other related articles are currently all consistently Br.Eng there would have to be a very strong argument to go through the whole lot now and revise them all. Ex nihil (talk) : Ex nihil (talk) 18:45, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

text:  Keep Metre as it seems it got there first (& to save the hassle of changing it). Johnbod (talk) 02:53, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

text: I don't want to start a culture war, but for what reason would British English take precedence in a discussion of meter? If the rule is that the definition should be written in the majority dialect, wouldn't "meter" be the majority? Not only because American English speakers outnumber British by about 10 to 1, but also because Wikipedia itself was founded by Americans. The Poetry Foundation always uses the writing "meter," and since it's the most well-known poetry organization in the world (and regularly publishes poems from people overseas, including Britons), it would also represent the majority among poets. I was directed to the metre/meter page after doing some brushing up on prosody for doctoral research, and was fairly surprised that the British spelling was used since almost no books on the topic--including some published in Britain--use this spelling. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:a3c0:fdc0:88a0:3025:a456:32e8 (talk • contribs) 02:48, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: The reason is WP:ENGVAR which boils down to the fact that it is better to tolerate differences than to perpetually argue about them. Johnuniq (talk) 04:04, 24 September 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal to undo move from [[Meter (poetry)]] to [[Metre (poetry)]] 

message: I've just re-formatted the list of Classical Arabic meters into a table, which I think will be a little clearer and more useful. However, for the life of me, I can't get the Arabic script for Mutadārik to behave. Every time I paste it in, its RTL style infects other parts of the row, and gets the cells out of order. So for now, I've just left that cell blank. If someone can fix this, I'd be very grateful. For reference, the Arabic word in question (taken from the previous version) is:
 المتدارك
Thanks. Phil wink (talk) 17:39, 4 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arabic formatting 

message: This article seemed in considerable need of tidying up.  I have attempted to do some.  I hope it makes sense. There is probably scope for additional such work. Feline Hymnic (talk) 16:20, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tidy up 

message: The new material added on 5th November 2019 to the section "Classical Arabic", however true it may be, appears to be promotional, namely an advertisement for Dr Abdel-Malek's book. It also seems too long and out of place in an article devoted to a brief description of the main features of metre in various languages. I would therefore suggest it be deleted. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:02, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I've trimmed it. I've also moved the "modern English" section to the top - this is the (modern) English wikipedia, & few readers speak classical Persian or Sanscrit. Johnbod (talk) 15:08, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a good idea to put English at the top, although it will need a bit of editing I think. But the long addition to the section on Arabic is still not satisfactory. (a) It seems to be full of personal opinions rather than facts, and (b) it isn't relevant to metre as such but to Khalil's system of prosody and his terminology. Kanjuzi (talk) 06:19, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, I suggest you have at it then. Johnbod (talk) 13:31, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Promotional material?