On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 07:19AM, Joanna Boulter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>anyone tell me where the notion came from, that the iambic pentameter should
>consist not of four or five stresses and a varying number of lighter
>syllables, but of a set ten syllables per line?
>
Well, a Greek (or Latin) iambic foot isn't the same as an English iambic foot, theirs being based on syllable quantity (something like our long and short) and ours on stress, but both are two syllables long, so an English iambic pentameter line, by definition, is ten syllables of alternating stress. Any other organization (ignoring traditionally accepted substitutions in the line) is something else, just as cricket and baseball are different by virtue of essentially arbitrary rules.
Just why that particular set of rules was adopted to represent the Greek epic line, and how from there it came to be the dominant meter in English poetry for four centuries, is not at all simple or certain. To some degree it was an attempt to imitate the ancients, but the epic line was hexameter, after all, and most classical meters involved mixtures of different kinds of feet (as in the Sapphic line and stanza). Chapman's Iliad is not pentameter; his later Odyssey is (and Keats's sonnet was about the Iliad). It probably had something to do with Italian models, but then, not all of Petrarch's sonnets are pentameter.
A few more or less random notes: There were attempts in the 16th century (and again in the last) to base English feet on quantity, but quantity just isn't stable enough or noticeable enough to organize English rhythms (Bridges disagreed). The earlier English alliterative line was basically trochaic in feeling--not that it used trochaic feet but that it was a basically falling rhythm--as English lost most of its inflections during the 11th-13th centuries and came to depend more heavily on word order and prepositions, it's basic feel changed to a rising patttern. Many people believe (and I'm one of them) that iambic pentameter became dominant because it was rhythmically and expressively more flexible than the shorter lines, and that longer lines were hard to hear as lines.
Best,
Michael
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