On Iambic Pentameter:

an Audio Introduction to Iambic Pentameter.

If you're like a lot of people, young people,
you probably don't care much for poetry,
don't like it, maybe even hate it.
Well there's a poem for that! or about how
one generation receives the cultural gifts
or baggage of the past. Its by Wallace Stevens.
In it he imagines himself long dead,
and imagines a group of future schoolchildren
creeping like snail(s) unwillingly to school.
They find the poet's bones lying around,
pick some of them up, trying to imagine
who the owner was. It's autumn and the smell
of grapes somehow sharpens the biting wind.
They'll never quess though, that the poet's generation
left more than bones; left what they felt, at what
they saw.
There's a mansion on the way to school.
The spring clouds blow above it.
Beyond its gate and the windy sky
an incomprehending nothingness cries out.
The poet knows he's part of history now.
The children may even recite his verse in class
yet never wholly comprehend it.
They see at best a flitting ghost
inhabiting a dirty house,
a mansion in disrepair,
yet somehow sparkling in the gold sunlight.

The poem by Wallace Stevens is called A Postcard from the Volcano .
[Please listen as I read it you.]
It's from Stevens's second book of verse, Ideas of Order, published in 1936. The poem is highly relevant to what I'm trying to achieve here, namely, to get some of you to take a deeper look at traditional poetry; the English Poetic Tradition; to take you part way through that abandoned house.
Take that house a part.

Postcard is in what might be called blank tetrameter. Blank, because the lines don't regularly rhyme, Tetrameter because there are four beats, or accented syllables to a line; most of the time.
All of poetry is divided into two parts. Free verse, in which, more or less, anything goes, and traditional, metric verse which is more structured or formal. I want to study here traditional verse, in part, I guess, because I like it better, maybe I find the greater structure as measure of its excellence. Maybe I need to believe in something about the past, a nostalgia, that once there was a golden age when folks were largely entertained by by their own craft and wit, unamplified and personal, live not canned, and measured by real laughter, and spoken verse had a vital role. something less insipid than tv, sports, gossip, gratuitous sex and violence, science fiction, or fantasy, vampires, haunted houses, ghosts.


Most of traditional, metric poetry, is divided into three parts, iambic tetrameter, iambic pentameter, and everything else, which is many oddities such as verse that uses a tri-syllabic foot, such as the anapest, which is used in Shelly's The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold.

Some Works in Heroic Couplets

Robert Frost's The Tuft of Flowers (1913)
Christopher Marlowe's little lecture on human passion and how we fall in love, is from his poem Hero and Leander. It builds to a memorable line:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
Romeo's O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
  is from Romeo and Juliet (1594—95) Act I. Scene V.
Friar Lawrence's The grey-eyed morn
  is from Romeo and Juliet, Act II. Scene III.
Robert Browning's My Last Duchess (1845)
William Butler Yeat's Adam’s Curse (1903)
Thom Gunn's Moly (1971)
Vladimir Nabokov    Pale Fire (1962)    first pages (local)

Andrew Marvell's To his Coy Mistress demonstrates the use of rhymed couplets in tetrameter.

Songs in Iambic Pentameter
Thomas Wyatt( 1503 — 1542 ) John Keats Robert Frost	They Flee From Me To Autumn Storm Fear

Sonnet Study

Shakespeare Keats Wordsworth Lines Composed Upon Westminster Bridge The World is Too Much With Us(1807) (Shelly) Frost Mowing The Oven Bird The Silken Tent Never Again Would Birds Songs be the Same

And also a Sonnet Study, why not? The history of the sonnet as a form is most obviously marked by an expansion of subject matter from the beloved to almost anything else, but usually a beloved or favored object. pre-Shakespeare?

Blank Verse
Shakespeare Alfred Lord Tennyson Samuel Taylor Coleridge Robert Frost Hart Crane T. S. Eliot Wallace Stevens	The Seven Ages of Man Ulysses Frost at Midnight(1798) The Woodpile Directive Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge Little Gidding The Idea of Order in Key West

So why study Iambic Poetry?
Pentameter, the poet's gait or gimp?

Iambic pentameter arguably is
the dominant form in English Poetry,
dating all the way back to Chaucer.

Studying it puts the focus on
traditional prosodic practices,

The predominant rhythm in metric poetry is
the iambic foot, and a line composed mainly of
alternating accented syllables.

There's some anapest:
and it has its brisk, breezy effect,

and even customized line rhythms that mix
various feet,

but most of English verse ambles along
in a two-step rhythm, as in the sound of walking;

and so, for the most part,
by Frost's observation that:
The Cremation of Sam McGee Robert Service
There are those, and I maybe one of them, who think that the concept of foot is a convenience that should not unduly impose an order that is may not be there. What there is in metric poetry is a stream of accented and unaccented syllables that are part of a recurring pattern. So one can state that there exists a prototypical iambic penta-metric line that consists of five iambic feet, and yet the set of useful and acceptal versions of its prosody might characterize and iambic line as more of less ten syllables with mainly alternating accents, And this works well over a lot of situations, and yet it too lacks subtlety and discerment. As in many other things, which I won't name, learning comes not just through the mastery of rules and definitions but through the careful observation of the practices of others, and thus learning by induction. The creation of a metric line while guided by rules must nonetheless admit those line that just sound right to the educated ear. and free verse metric verse Iambic tetrameter and pentameter non-iambic, mostly anapestic,

scansion, you can see,
and the simplist rhythm,
and the simple alternating accent,
and its exceptions, alterations;
the use of meter and a regular rhythm,
styles and forms,
things perhaps intriguing in themselves,
but also useful to inform and change
ones own particular writing style.

In the beginning was the beat.
The simple up and down of words,
with meaning going along, for the ride.

Well to start with,

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

On Chaucer's pentameter and Middle English

 ()  Middle English yields a medium
Of many syntactic structures that allow
for lines of verse to easily be drawn
into a rhythmic regularity
granting the heart sweet charity
of letting verse flow naturally.

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we note the beginning anacrusis... the http://www.bartleby.com/218/0903.html