From: "Michael Snider"
> According to Robert Wallace, it's pyrrhics that don't exist, so consider
> what you'd win by using your amphibrachs too soon.
Neither pyrrhic nor spondee exist in English verse, if you accept the
metrical-stress-is-contrastive-rather-than-absolute, a la Wimsatt.
Mallof, in _A Manual of English Meters_, reduces it all to
iambic/trochaic/anapaestic/dactyllic, which I'd go with. The kinds of
metrical pattern that +can+ be produced in a qualitative-based metric don't
always map on to a quantitative one.
(And with the usual [bugger factor] proviso for the lesser ionic ascending
foot -- X X / /)
But haven't we been here before? Or was that another List?
Should these posts start to carry a health warning? -- "Avoid, if
discussions of scansion want to make you puke." (My own position, up until
my mid-thirties, so I can sympathise. Honest.)
Robin
(Carefully refraining from introducing, useful term though it is, "ictus",
into the discussion)
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