Essays on Meter in Poetry

What is iambic pentameter? Why write metric poetry? This on-going series of essays takes up these questions and more.

• Against Feet.

• Theory of Meter: Introduction to an Introduction.

• All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele: Review and Refutation.

• Poetry as Low-Grade Musical Material.

• Iambic Pentameter as Chicken Sexing.

• “Apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables...”: on blank verse.

• Naive Sprung Rhythm.

• Book Review: Shakespeare’s Metrical Art by George T. Wright.

• Donald Justice on Meters and Memory.

• Meter and Rhyme—Defended?

• A conversation with “Notes on the New Formalism” by Dana Gioia.

• Don’t you know that you can count me out? Timothy Steele on free verse.

• On Free Verse, with Applications to Walt Whitman.

• What is English meter?, dialogue with Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.