Practice question · Select all that apply
Which are true of iambic pentameter?
Hints
- Three describe the metre; one confuses English counting with Romance counting.
- English counts feet, each carrying a stress.
Show the answer
- B. A regular line holds ten syllables
- C. Each iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one
- D. It contains five metrical feet
Why
English metre counts feet, five stresses in a pentameter, while Romance verse counts syllables. The ten-syllable result is a consequence of five two-syllable feet, not the thing being counted, which is why substitutions can vary the syllable total without breaking the metre.
Practise Poetic Traditions III: Romanticism to Free Verse
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Poetic Traditions III: Romanticism to Free Verse
- Whitman’s lines have no fixed syllable or stress count. What organises them instead?
- At roughly what age did Rimbaud stop writing altogether?
- Free verse is verse written without any organising principle.
- Keats compresses dense sensory detail into strict pentameter, whilst Whitman structures his poems through…
- Sort each poet by whether they LOOSEN the metrical count or EXPAND the metrical repertoire.
- Arrange these publications in chronological order.
- Darío’s modernismo was the first literary movement to travel from Latin America to Spain rather than in the…