Studia Metrica et Poetica

Philip Larkin and the Stanza

2023-01-25T14:56:41+02:00

Philip Larkin, one of England’s finest poets among the generation that came of age during World War II, maintained a strong interests in the formal features of verse throughout his career. This article marks the first comprehensive overview of his highly varied and frequently original use of one such feature, the stanza. A set of tables provides overall data about the relative frequency of different stanza lengths – in his four published poetry collections, in poems that he either published or planned to publish but did not appear in one of those collections, and in the unpublished verse. He turns out to have been a strikingly innovative master of stanza form. If many poets rely heavily on the quatrain as their favored stanza, Larkin makes that only one of several stanza lengths that he turns to regularly. More importantly, he composes stanzas in innovative and imaginative ways. His forty sonnets – only eight of which appeared in his four collections – reveal a variety of rhyme schemes and, occasionally, unusual placement of the breaks between portions of the sonnet. In other poems, the rhyme schemes are often irregular, making the rhyme scheme difficult to detect, particularly in those cases when he employs highly approximate rhyme. Much of his verse is also marked by frequent enjambement, even between stanzas. He occasionally links his stanzas and sometimes creates a rhyme scheme that has a different number of lines than the actual stanza length, resulting in markedly complex compositions. In all, Larkin regularly uses his stanzas to highlights key aspects of a poem’s meaning, while the intricacy of many stanza structures forces his readers to consider poems more intently.

A Byzantine Poetic Form in a Ninth-Century Bulgarian Poem

2023-01-25T14:56:40+02:00

The paper measures the extent to which the most characteristic features related to the so-called Byzantine dodecasyllable are applied in one of the earliest Old-Bulgarian poems – Azbuchna molitva (‘Alphabetic Prayer’) noted to be written in dodecasyllabic verses. This alphabetic acrostic is dated back to the very end of the ninth century and is attributed to Constantine of Preslav. In this article its text is given after its earliest copy, MS Syn. 262, as it is the only representative of the version closest to the Glagolitic archetype, now lost. The piece is studied in comparison with St Gregory the Theologian’s alphabetic acrostic (as published in PG 37) which Constantine of Preslav quotes just after the end of his poem and which is considered its rhythmical model. The main conclusions are that the Alphabetic Prayer is an early replica of the Byzantine dodecasyllable, follows its rhythmical peculiarities to an extent similar to St Gregory’s alphabetic acrostic, all the previously supposed deviations are motivated by genre peculiarities and rhetorical requirements, which reveals Byzantine schooling of the Old-Bulgarian writer. Nevertheless, the content and intention of the poem indubitably target the neophyte Slavonic audience.

Alliteration and Rhyme in the Traditional Kakataibo Chants of Emilio Estrella

2023-01-25T14:56:40+02:00

This paper studies alliteration and rhyme in the traditional Kakataibo chants of Emilio Estrella Logía, one of the most important Kakataibo sabios of the present era. For alliteration and rhyme, consonants which are able to be in coda position according to Kakataibo syllable structure play a central role. Alliteration is sporadic and based on the repetition of fricative consonants in passages of indeterminate length. It occurs in syllable onset and freely within a line and across lines, the latter by adjacency. Kakataibo rhyme is also sporadic, its domain is the final syllable of the line and the nucleus of it; only the nasal consonant /n/ can occupy coda in end-line syllables. Kakataibo true rhyme, as opposed to rhyme in lists created by repetition or semantic parallelism, is by adjacency and within vowel passages of indeterminate length.

The Meter of the Ophni and Phineas Insertion in Piers Plowman

2023-01-25T15:03:59+02:00

The C version of Piers Plowman has yet to earn much attention from metrists relative to the outgrowth of research into fourteenth-century alliterative meter since 1986. Langland’s relationship to metrical tradition is idiosyncratic, a judgment that involves both this author’s divergence from conventions characteristic of other alliterative poems and the recognizability of his own metrical habitus across his career. Scansion of an inconsistently alliterating passage new in C (Prol.95–124) illustrates in miniature the unusual problems thrown up by Langland’s metrical practice and suggests that his metrical signature persisted over the years of his writing life. The Ophni and Phineas insertion is of special interest because it has been thought an unfinished draft.

Plotting Poetry 5: Popular Voices, 4–6 July 2022, Tartu, Estonia

2023-01-25T14:56:39+02:00

Plotting Poetry 5: Popular Voices, 4–6 July 2022, Tartu, Estonia

Frontiers in Comparative Metrics IV, 16–17 September 2022, Tallinn, Estonia

2023-01-25T14:56:39+02:00

Frontiers in Comparative Metrics IV, 16–17 September 2022, Tallinn, Estonia