English is really a fine language for poetry. It’s got a heavy stress — much heavier than the more evenly settled syllables in French or Italian — and that means that you needn’t always count the syllables in an English line. What matters for a lot of English poems is not the number of syllables, which can vary, but the number of STRONG BEATS, wi…
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Word & Song by Anthony Esolen to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
