Peter: you have in mind the last paragraph of Coleridge's preface to
"Christabel". You're right to point to the syllabic regularity of verse
from the mid-16th century up to the Romantics; but this also goes in
conjunction with accent--so-called accentual-syllabic meter, the norm for
metrical verse in English up to the present time. My understanding of
purely syllabic verse is that such concepts as feet are irrelevant to it,
whereas from the mid-16th century the idea of iambic feet was well
understood--see Gascoyne's treatise on metre (from when? the 1560s I think)
which outlines the idea, e.g. --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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