Idiolexicon

Two of the main resources available to the poet writing in meter are the tension between the line and the sentence (this is available to the poet writing in free verse, but what poet and critic John Hollander calls the metrical contract of, say, the iambic pentameter line foregrounds the reader’s expectations of the shape of the line and thus also foregrounds violations of those expectations and deviations from that shape), and the tension between the meter and the speech rhythm (this is a resource that is largely lost to the poet writing in free verse).

# posted by Elliot : 8:39 AM