Poetry: The Evolution of
Meter
Greek Roots
 The western tradition of poetry rests upon a
Greek foundation
 Greek poets introduced the idea of meter,
which measure the stresses and syllables of a
poem.
 Consider the line:
 “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May”
 As you say the line aloud, count how many syllables
there are. How many did you count?
Shakespeare’s Meter
 “Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May”—how many
iambs do you count?
 This line, from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 contains 5 iambs. Since
there are 5 feet, the meter is referred to as Iambic Pentameter.
Shakespeare most often used this type of meter in his plays and
sonnets. Other kinds of meter are used as well by formal poets:
 1 foot: monometer
2 feet: dimeter
3 feet: trimeter
4 feet: tetrameter
5 feet: pentameter
6 feet: hexameter
7 feet: heptameter
8 feet: octameter
Meter
 Did you count 10?
Now say the line
again, this time
focusing on how your
voice rises and falls
with the natural
rhythm of the line:
“Rough winds do shake
the darling buds of
May”
“Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May”
 Did you notice a natural stress on the words:
Winds, shake, darling, buds, & May?
The most basic unit of meter is a foot. The most
common is the iamb, which is an unstressed
syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
The line above is made up of iambs. Say the line
again and notice the alternating pattern of
iambs.
Scansion: how to scan a poem for
meter
 Scansion refers to using your
pen and pencil and marking
up a poem to find its meter.
 Use the symbols to mark up
the following line: “We wear
the mask that grins and lies”
 Notice that the line is iambic
tetrameter because there are
4 iambs.
Types of feet!
 Trochee (trochaic): TUM te
ex: Rotten
 Spondee (spondaic): TUM TUM ex: grape fruit
 Pyrrhic: te te
ex: at the front door
 Anapest (anapestic): te te TUM
 Dactyl (dactylic): TUM te te
ex: intervene
ex: loveliest
 *Use the scansion symbols to mark the stresses on each example
Meter through History
 Syllable-stress meter was dominant from
Shakespeare in the 16th century to
Robert Frost and other formal poets of
the early 20th century.
 In modern poetry, however, other ways of
creating the line became popular.
 Nonmetrical verse, for example, is called
Free Verse.
Old vs. New
 Sonnet 18
 Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day? Thou art more
lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May, And
summer's lease hath all too
short a date: Sometime too hot
the eye of heaven shines, And
often is his gold complexion
dimm'd; And every fair from fair
sometime declines, By chance
or nature's changing course
untrimm'd; But thy eternal
summer shall not fade Nor lose
possession of that fair thou
owest; Nor shall Death brag
thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time
thou growest: So long as men
can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this
gives life to thee.
 William Shakespeare
it was just a little while
ago
almost dawn
blackbirds on the telephone
wire
waiting
as I eat yesterday's
forgotten sandwich
at 6 a.m.
an a quiet Sunday morning.
one shoe in the corner
standing upright
the other laying on it's
side.
yes, some lives were made to
be
wasted.
-Charles Bukowski
A Tip for the beginning poet 
 “A poems power
depends less on a
choice between metrical
and nonmetrical, fixed or
free, than on the poet’s
ingenuity and skill in
taking full advantage of
form as the poem takes
shape.”
 (Boisseau, Wallace, &
Mann, 33)
References
 Joel Harrison, ‘Gace 2’, 2005.
http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/online/ind
ex.cfm?S=OL_ENGLISH347
 Boisseau, Michelle, Randall Mann, and
Robert Wallace. Writing Poems (7th
Edition). New York: Longman, 2007.
 Ingrid Oz, ‘Exploding Pink buds,’ 2009.
 Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Fountain,’ 1917