Kent,
Actually the attempt to mirror classical quantitative meters is very much apposite to freie Rhythmen, which were more or less invented by Klopstock in the 18th c. to do just that, and were later taken up by Holderlin, whose intoxication with all things Helenic is well known (He used them in translations from Sophocles and Pindar, as well as in his own poems). The crucial point here is that languages like English or German, in which syllables have no <<inherent>> length, can nevertheless approximate the classical "long" and "short" syllables by a careful use of stress timing. A fairly crude example:
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum
where two shorts obviously equal two longs, in terms of timing. This, with infinitely more subtlety, is the sort of thing Holderlin does, and poets in English, from Campion to Tennyson to Dylan Thomas, have probably also attempted, with varying degrees of consciousness and consistency.
Alan
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