Studia Metrica et Poetica

The Roots of Shakespeare’s “Rhythmical Italics” and of Formulas in Literary Verse

Marina Tarlinskaja — 2025-10-25

The article deals with the origin of “rhythmical figures” serving as “rhythmical italics” to enhance meaning in English poetry from Chaucer to Frost (14th–20th centuries). In Surrey’s translation of The Aeneid (the first decades of the 16th century) the rhythmical figures already resemble their use in the later 16th-century poetry by Sidney and Spenser who were aware of the role of rhythmical deviations from the meter and used them to emphasize meaning, i.e., as rhythmical italics. Shakespeare inherited this device and widened its scope. Eighteenth-century Classicists (Pope, Thomson) confirmed the link between the “deviations” from the meter and semantics, while 19th-century Romantics (Shelley, Byron) in spite of their critique of Classicism used the same rhythmical figures on syllabic positions WS(W), the same grammatical patterns (“verb plus object”) and the same lexicon (the verbs “tremble, shake”) as Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare and Pope, turning them into formulas.

Russian Silver-Age Galliambic Verse:Form and Meaning

Andrei Dobritsyn — 2025-10-25

The article surveys the four known Russian examples of Galliambic verse – a syllabo-tonic counterpart of the Latin metre associated with the cult of Cybele, as in Catullus’ Attis: works by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Maximilian Voloshin, Nikolai Gumilev, and Georgij Adamovich – analyzing how metre, rhythm, and meaning interact in the rarest of Silver Age verse forms.

New Applications of Jakobson’s “Broad Metrics”: Sung Poetry and Dual-Metered Verse

Igor Pilshchikov — 2025-10-25

meter and rhythmThis article extends Roman Jakobson’s framework of “broad metrics” to sung poetry. Building on his dichotomies of verse design/instance (poetic meter and rhythm) and delivery design/instance (recitation rules and performance), it proposes an additional dyad: musical design/instance (musical meter and rhythm), which often diverge from verse patterns. The study also incorporates Mihhail Lotman’s concept of secondary meter to account for dual metricity in verse. Analysis of sung texts with dual-metered verse structures – such as but not limited to hyperpaeonic syllabotonic meters – shows how verse and music coalesce to shape delivery rhythms that may oscillate between multiple meters. Whenever this occurs, the choice of a particular rhythmic variant is conditioned by the delivery design (performance strategy). The model is substantiated by case studies of three Soviet-era songs.

The Russian Sonnet

Barry P. Scherr (1945–2024) — 2025-10-25

This article describes the Russian sonnet as a verse structure. Highlighting the many deviations and innovations poets introduced – from adapting Petrarchan and Shakespearean models to radical experiments – the study shows how the sonnet’s diversity has made it one of the most resilient forms in Russian poetry.

Foreword by Michael Wachtel

Antonina Martynenko’s dissertation: “Traditions and Innovations in Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 1830s: A Quantitative Study”. Readers reports

David J. Birnbaum — 2025-10-25

Antonina Martynenko’s dissertation: “Traditions and Innovations in Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 1830s: A Quantitative Study”. Readers reports

Frontiers in Comparative Metrics V. In memory of Reuven Tsur and Barry Scherr. Call for Papers

Maria-Kristiina Lotman — 2025-10-25

Frontiers in Comparative Metrics V. In memory of Reuven Tsur and Barry Scherr. Call for Papers