Isosyllabic verse

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Peter Lewis Groves (Monash University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Domains

Poetic/ rhetorical term

Dates

Places

Resources

Save to Bookshelf

Also known as syllabic verse: a verse in which each line has a fixed number of syllables. In some languages such as Japanese this is sufficient to create metrical form, as in the case of the haiku, but English metre counts beats rather than syllables, and so isosyllabic verse in English has functioned (in the work of poets like Marianne Moore and W. H. Auden) as a modernist alternative to metre, a way of providing more structure to the writer in the process of writing even if the result is, as Thom Gunn remarked in abandoning the technique, “indistinguishable from free verse”.

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

102 words

Citation: Groves, Peter Lewis. "Isosyllabic verse". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 June 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=5515, accessed 21 November 2024.]

Isosyllabic verse

Domains

Dates

Places

Resources

Save this article

Leave Feedback