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Is this also the case for avantgarde poetry/poetics MAs etc? I can't see it being the case. -----------------original message-------------- Drew Milne wrote: Traditional prosody is still taught in schools. Year after year I have to explain to students who have been taught some scansion at school that a song or ballad poem isn't in iambic pentameter, nor even in iambic tetrameter, and that a variable line of six, seven or eight syllables might just be a regular song or ballad stanza that isn't in classical feet. More sophisticated forms of prosody, Saintsbury versus Attridge etc, have been clogging up Cambridge practical criticism classes for years. I teach translations of metrical and nonmetrical psalms partly to plant the thought that there are different understandings of metre. There's more prosody taught in Cambridge English than Marxism or psychoanalysis. But because classical scansion is indeed essentially inaccurate and often misleading, the stresses and strains of English poetry tend to take second place to people tapping out binary patterns in search of feet. One more heave and we'll have done with ye olde classical clogs. Bring on the dance of the intellect. Drew