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Andrew Benson Brown‘s epic-in-progress, Legends of Liberty, chronicles the major events of the American Revolution. He writes history articles for American Essence magazine and resides in Missouri. Watch his Classical Poets Live videos here.

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27 Responses

  1. Richard Craven

    Here’s my sonnet-length tutorial on how to write a sonnet:-

    From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian

    Sonnet 93
    Sonnets? It is, always, a discipline.
    The fourteen lines, choice of Petrarchan or
    Shakespearean rhyme. And stuff your protest in
    the octet if you can, in order for
    line nine to play the volta or fly half.
    The resolution on the rhyme depends:
    in Petrarch mode, the sestet’s bitter laugh
    drags out the calvary of penitence.
    In the Shakespearean, ’tis brutely fact,
    that final couplet shall poignard disclose.
    Marry, it doth, and sentence eke enacts
    among super-abundant King James hose.
    Some bodkin’s stabbed up some unguarded arse;
    churned tragedy curdles as Whitehall farce.

    Reply
      • Richard Craven

        Thanks very much for the kind words, ABB. Regarding “To be or not to be …” it strikes me that the end of the line is susceptible of interpretation as a dactyl – “that is the” – followed by a trochee – “question”.

      • Richard Craven

        Also, in “than this of Juliet and her Romeo”, I would be tempted to
        (i) elide “Juliet” i.e. as “Jul-yet”, and
        (ii) stress “and”,
        which turns the whole line into a conventional iambic pentameter.

      • Richard Craven

        Alternatively, in case you’re comfortable with eliding “Juliet” but squeamish about stressing “and”, you could treat “and her Romeo” as an anapest followed by an iamb, and the line as a whole as an iamb-iamb-anapest-iamb tetrameter. Of course you end up with “…iet and her” as three unstressed syllables in a row, which some might regard as infelicitous, but I think it respects natural speech cadences.

  2. Mary Gardner

    Pronounce “Juliet” (6:08) as an iamb and stress “and,” and the line becomes true iambic pentameter. It also places Romeo and Juliet as equal characters instead of relegating poor Romeo to second place.
    Than THIS of JU-liet AND her RO-me-O.

    Reply
  3. James Sale

    Another wonderful clip from ABB. He focuses on the sonnet as the form in which to use the iambic pentameter line. Full of useful ideas and intriguing insights: do take a look. Well done Andrew.

    Reply
  4. Brian A. Yapko

    This is an excellent educational tool, Andrew, which gives us user-friendly information on the nature of meter in English poetry and its most important metrical tool — the iamb. Iambs are linguistically natural to spoken English but I had not thought of the heartbeat connection before — something which suggests that this rhythmic pattern is something we respond to deeply without necessarily being conscious of it. As for varying the use of iambs in poetry… I sometimes think of writing poetry as analogous to writing music. And iambic meter is similar to the 8 tone major scale we’re all familiar with. But how dull music would be if it did not incorporate the use of sharps and flats to give variety and a little spice to the piece. Otherwise, every piece of music would sound like a variant of Do-Re-Mi.

    Reply
    • ABB

      The heartbeat thing is actually something I first heard from James Sale. A poet on YT actually reached out to me for some coaching and I just re-used your musical analogy here in explaining some things to him, so thanks for that.

      Reply
  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    A detailed and serious introduction to iambic pentameter and its myriad variations. I would have liked to see more about natural elisions, which often must be taken into account in scansion. For example, in the line about Romeo and Juliet, if the name “Juliet” is pronounced JOOL-yet (a normal elision of the i-e vowels for many speakers), the scansion is perfectly regular.

    This brings up a problem with beginning poets, who often count syllables in words where some syllables are actually dead or barely functioning. They’ll think that the word “natural” is “NAH-choor-al” when almost everyone says “NATCH-rul.” Mistakes like this can cause problems in scansion, although an experienced poet can make use of either pronunciation in order to write his line, if one of them happens to be more apt. The general source of the problem is “spelling pronunciation,” which is the tendency of some people to think that English is like Spanish, a language where every syllable is written down exactly as it is pronounced in speech.

    Reply
    • ABB

      I’m planning on doing a video about poetic pitfalls to avoid for beginners and I’ve just put a note into the script to talk about natural elisions. Am also going to draw on your essay of the same name. Might be a bit before I get around to this, probably early next year. Thanks though, Joe.

      Reply
  6. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Andrew, this helped me better understand meter variations. For example, providing the inverse of iambic pentameter validates how I write and accent the words, especially the inversion of accent for which you provide a perfect example. My mother was an English teacher, as well as a drama and declamation coach. I often invert the accent on the beginning word for emphasis, especially when an article of speech is involved. I will stress the first syllable and maybe the second, as opposed to the weaker accent on the first word. I am not sure this is fully understood by others. Here is one example: THE GREAT-est… Furthermore, adding a comma after a dactyl is something I will try to remember.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Your practice seems like something that would only come out in performance, at least where articles of speech are involved. Have you thought of any writing techniques for making that come out on the page?

      Reply
      • Roy Eugene Peterson

        My effort has been to eliminate articles of speech to begin a line. I have written more than 350 sonnets that I hear perfectly when I read them to myself. I have perfect pitch in music and try to relate to that musical quality. I learned early in my poetry education that the first beat of a sonnet goes down, though that has not completely assuaged my taste for the more dramatic reading of a poem.

  7. Cheryl A Corey

    I learned something new in your “crash course” and hope to see more of them in the future.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Thanks, Cheryl. I’m sure someone on your level probably didn’t learn all that much, but you’ll make excellent use of what you did.

      Reply
  8. Paul A. Freeman

    So many sonnet variants, but time
    is not our friend, and that my friend’s a crime.

    I fear I’ll have to watch several times for my brain to fully engage.

    Thanks for posting, ABB.

    Reply
    • ABB

      Watch as many times as your brain can handle. Unfortunately on my end, YT does not count repeat views.

      Reply
      • Paul A. Freeman

        You’ll be glad to know I’ve thrown iambic-caution to the wind in my latest piece (an extract from the Hannibal Lecter Cookbook!). It’s a competition submission, but I’ll submit it to the SCP later.

  9. Cynthia Erlandson

    Thank you, Andrew. I really enjoyed your explanations and clear illustrations.

    Reply
  10. Danae Garriga

    So basically you can only “cheat” if you’re a dead and/or famous poet? I think I understand the iamb but I never know how much variation is too much variation and it still feels subjective to me- as you said- am I Shakespeare and can get away with it or am I some novice poet in a writing class? Where is the line between a “new variation” of a form vs an incorrect form? I’ve been writing a long time but I’m feeling like I did when I was a kid going into high school thinking I was good at art and realizing that I didn’t know anything about art haha!

    Reply
    • ABB

      It’s more like when you reach a certain level of reputation, people overlook certain faults. Even canonical writers have written plenty of sub-par stuff. In a similar way we might overlook their faults as a person, we remember them for the good stuff they wrote.

      In ‘the Ode Less Travelled,’ Stephen Fry analyzes these lines of William Blake from ‘Auguries of Innocence’:

      To see a World in a Grain of Sand
      And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
      Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
      And Eternity in an hour
      A Robin Red breast in a Cage
      Puts all Heaven in a Rage
      A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons
      Shudders Hell thr’ all its regions
      A dog starvd at his Masters Gate
      Predicts the ruin of the State
      A Horse misusd upon the Road
      Calls to Heaven for Human blood

      Fry goes on to “mock the scansion, syntax, and manifold inconsistencies” in the verse, but then says “I love them.” He notes, do we forgive him because he’s William Blake, “a Seer, a Visionary and an unique Genius? If I had never seen the lines before and didn’t know their author would I forgive them their clumsiness and ill-made infelicities? I don’t know and I don’t really care.” One might chalk up the messiness to the theme of innocence in the collection. In any case, it isn’t “fair,” as you say, that Blake gets away with this while others can’t. But he does.
      There are a lot of judgment calls you have to make with scansion, but with experience (and feedback) you come to get a feel for it. A good rule of thumb for variation within the pentameter line is to do it no more than once per foot in a given line. That way you don’t lose the overall scansion. As others noted above in the case of the Romeo and Juliet example, going with a natural speech pronunciation over the spelling pronunciation is also a good rule of thumb in determining how to stress a word.

      Reply
      • Danae Garriga

        Fair- I guess you need to establish that you can consistently deliver in the correct manner to be able to bend the rules a little or get more creative. Do you know of any online (or in person) communities of poets that share poems and provide feedback? Obviously this is one- however, the poems that are published need to already be in acceptable form and meter. The poems that need work are not published so it’s impossible to get feedback on those from this great community through comments. I don’t have anyone I know who can help me with constructive criticism and feedback on my writing. The only person who reads my poems is my husband but he doesn’t know the ways haha!

  11. C.B. Anderson

    The subject of this video happens to be one of my main proccupations. For quite a while I was puzzled by the metrical structure of the first line of Richard Wilbur’s clearly iambic pentameter “Blackberries for Amelia”. Here is the line:

    Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,

    I recently figured out that what he did was to substitute a trochee for the first foot and for the fourth foot. Notice as well that the line contains exactly ten syllables and five stresses, and that it is a perfectly euphonious poetic line. For the most part, the better one understands the (constitutive and the regulative) rules of meter, the more one is able to know when it is advisable to break these rules. And it doesn’t hurt to have a good ear.

    I am looking forward to an in-depth discussion of elision and other prosodical matters.

    Reply

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