Intro to Formal Poetry

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Overview and Goals — 0:00:01

Today’s topic is form in poetry—specifically meter, though the session closes with a brief look at non-metered received forms. The goal is demystification. Meter was the most confusing and unpleasant part of poetry units in high school for most of us, and it really isn’t as hard as it was made out to be. Most poetry today is written in free verse, but many contemporary poets occasionally write in form—and doing so opens a toolbox of effects that depend on using form and playing against the expectations it creates.

The Three Types of Meter — 0:02:00

There are three types of meter. Accentual verse counts only the number of stressed syllables per line, regardless of how many total syllables there are—nursery rhymes like “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” are a familiar example. Syllabic verse counts only total syllables, regardless of stress; haiku is the example most people know, even though most contemporary haiku writers no longer bother with the syllable count. Accentual-syllabic verse combines both: a fixed number of stresses and a fixed number of syllables per line, so the pattern of unstressed syllables between each stress begins to matter. This third type is the dominant tradition in English poetry.

The key concept underlying all of this is stressed versus unstressed syllables—something we do automatically in speech without thinking about it. The word potato can really only be pronounced one way: po-TAY-to. Meter takes those natural patterns and strings them together so accented syllables fall in a predictable scheme.

Feet and Line Lengths — 0:07:00

The repeating unit of stress within a line is called a foot. The most common feet in English are:

The iamb (da-DUM)—the most common in English, and the closest to the natural rhythm of everyday speech. The word content is iambic. The trochee (DUM-da)—the opposite, as in midnight. The dactyl (DUM-da-da)—three syllables, as in microwave. The anapest (da-da-DUM)—the reverse of the dactyl, as in by the book. And the spondee (DUM-DUM)—two stressed syllables in a row, as in don’t move. These names all derive from ancient Greek prosody, a system originally designed to scan long and short vowel sounds rather than stressed and unstressed syllables—which is why the system fits English imperfectly and has such strange names.

The number of feet per line gives the line its name, using Greek prefixes: one foot is monometer, two is dimeter, three trimeter, four tetrameter, five pentameter, and so on. In practice, tetrameter and pentameter are by far the most common. Tetrameter sounds obviously, almost irresistibly metrical—we hear four-beat lines so easily that we instinctively add a pause to fill out a three-beat line into four. Pentameter is less audible, which is partly why Shakespeare used it for dramatic speech: it’s metrical but not sing-songy, so characters can sound like they’re simply talking.

When analyzing meter on a page, the standard notation uses a small U for an unstressed syllable, a diagonal mark for a stressed syllable, and vertical lines to divide the feet.

Hearing and Writing Meter — 0:14:00

Learning to hear meter takes practice—it was easier for writers before Whitman because metered poetry was simply the norm, and people were immersed in it constantly. One participant who loves music noted that listening for where words fall on the beat in songs can help develop the ear for meter in poetry, and that’s exactly right. Tapping a foot or conducting with a finger while reading can also help.

A useful shortcut: articles (the, a), pronouns (me, you), and prepositions (in, on, of) tend to be unstressed. Punctuation can be ignored when scanning. When a particular line is hard to parse, skip ahead—once a metrical pattern is established, it tends to hold, so a later, clearer line can help you trace back to the ambiguous one.

Strict versus loose meter — 0:17:30

When meter is 100% strict, it tends to sound sing-songy. In practice, substitutions are common and expected: a poet might replace one iamb with a trochee or an anapest, and the line remains recognizably iambic as long as the majority of the feet still follow the dominant pattern. A rough personal rule of thumb: if at least half the feet in a line are iambic, the line sounds iambic enough. The syllable count also gets fuzzy in practice—swap an iamb for an anapest, and you’ve added an extra syllable to the line.

Examples: Strict Iambic Tetrameter — 0:23:00

Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — 0:23:00

This is one of the most strictly regular metered poems in English—there may not be a single substitution anywhere in it. Normally, such perfect regularity would just sound sing-songy, and one wouldn’t do it. But Frost does it here deliberately. The poem is widely read as depicting someone wrestling with suicidal ideation, or at least with a strong pull toward death—standing at the edge of these dark woods and feeling their lure before reluctantly turning back. The hypnotic, lulling meter enacts that pull. The reader is gently mesmerized by the same rhythm that mesmerizes the speaker.

Larkin, “This Be the Verse” — 0:27:30

This poem is also strictly iambic tetrameter—bouncy, regular, nursery-rhyme-like. And the argument it makes is comically nihilistic: your parents ruined you, their parents ruined them, and you should get out as early as possible and not have any kids. If Larkin had delivered this argument in free verse, the over-the-topness of it would probably just seem tiresome. But by wrapping it in this cheerful, childlike meter, he creates a stark ironic contrast that makes the whole thing funny. The saccharine sweetness of the form and the bitterness of the content play against each other, and neither lets the other win.

Example: Loose Iambic Tetrameter — 0:32:00

Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

This poem is still tetrameter, but with far more substitutions—a much more typical example of what metered poetry looks like in practice. The first line, Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, can be read with a spondee at the start and an anapest later, giving nine syllables rather than the expected eight. This is entirely normal. The key is that once you’ve read enough of the poem to catch the pattern, you can trace back to the ambiguous lines and hear how they fit. Different readers may also parse the stresses slightly differently depending on regional accent or personal inflection, which is fine—meter is more art than science.

Example: Loose Iambic Pentameter — 0:38:00

Pentameter is subtler. A sonnet written during the COVID lockdown offered as an in-class example illustrates both the freedom and the discipline of the form: the sentences wrap across lines rather than ending at each line break, multiple sentences appear within a single line, and slant rhymes (rather than pure rhymes) give the poet more room to maneuver. English is relatively rhyme-poor compared to Italian or Spanish, so insisting on pure rhymes like moon and June severely limits what you can say. Slant rhymes open the field considerably.

One practical recommendation: avoid what might be called the Yoda rule—don’t invert your syntax just to make the rhyme or meter work. Constructions like Once to the woods I did go sound awkward precisely because they’re obviously forced by the form. The form should shape the content, not strangle it.

Choosing and Sustaining a Form — 0:44:00

When choosing a meter, iambic pentameter and tetrameter are the most common options. Tetrameter emphasizes the meter; pentameter de-emphasizes it. Choose iambic unless you have a specific reason to want the meter to sound strange—as Tennyson did in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” where dactylic meter mimics horses galloping, or as Poe did in “The Raven,” where trochaic meter creates strangeness and dread.

Consistency matters. If a poem starts out with very strict meter and then loosens abruptly, that loosening will call attention to itself—which may or may not be what you want. The principle is: variation is emphasis. If you establish a pattern and then break it, the break gets noticed. Start the way you intend to continue.

Writing in form can actually feel liberating rather than restrictive: the technical puzzle of making each line work gives the mind something concrete to solve, which can quiet the more paralyzing question of what to say. The form shapes the content, and the content feeds back into the form.

Closing Recommendations — 0:56:00

• Ron Padgett, Handbook of Poetic Forms — an alphabetical reference guide with examples; useful for finding and trying new forms
• Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance — the best deep-dive treatment of meter, very detailed (perhaps overly so), but thorough
• Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, The Making of a Poem — covers a smaller number of forms but with many examples each; good for seeing what’s possible within a single form
• Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets — both excellent online resources for formal poetry and explanations of specific forms; Poetry Foundation is slightly preferred
• Common non-metered forms worth exploring on your own: villanelles, pantoums, sestinas, and ghazals