Poetic Metre

Abstract This chapter outlines the main forms of poetic metre found in this repertory, with emphasis on the different ways of counting metre in the various languages: that French syllable-counting ignores the enclitic -e in soft endings; that Italian syllable-counting includes that syllable, whether it is present or not; in Spanish the same obtains, though the prosody is otherwise entirely different. In English and German it is often possible to count syllables in the French manner though more often it makes sense to count in terms of feet that can have anything from one to four syllables. The discussion also covers the use of caesuras and the various kinds of elision.