The Prosody Handbook

This guide to versification is immensely useful for anyone interested in poetry or in general poetic structure. Concise and informal, it offers a systematic study of meter, tempo, rhyme, and other components of verse.

A practical guide to versification: filled with examples from English and American poets of many periods.

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

The reconstruction of the prosody of a dead language is, on the face of it, an almost impossible undertaking. However, once a general theory of prosody has been developed from eliable data in living languages, it is possible to exploit texts as sources of answers to questions that would normally be answered in the laboratory. In this work, the authors interpret the evidence of Greek verse texts and musical settings in the framework of a theory of prosody based on crosslinguistic evidence and experimental phonetic and psycholinguistic data, and reconstruct the syllable structure, rhythm, accent, phrasing, and intonation of classical Greek speech. Sophisticated statistical analyses are employed to support an impressive range of new findings which relate not only to phonetics and phonology, but also to pragmatics and the syntax-phonology interface.

An indispensable guide for poets, readers, students, and teachers. "The Poem's Heartbeat may well be the finest general book available on prosody."--Library Journal (starred review) "A provocative, definitive manual."--Publishers Weekly Finally back in print, this slender, user-friendly guide to rhyme, rhythm, meter, and form sparks "intuitive and technical lightning-flashes" for poets and readers curious to know a poem's inner workings. Clear, good-humored, and deeply readable, Alfred Corn's book is the modern classic on prosody--the art and science of poetic meter. Each of the book's ten chapters is a progressive, step-by-step presentation rich with examples to illustrate concepts such as line, stress, scansion marks, slant rhyme, and iambic pentameter. "By the book's end," noted a rave review in The Boston Review, "Corn, magi-teacher and impeccable guide, has taught the novice to become artist and magician." The Poem's Heartbeat also includes a selected bibliography and encourages readers and students to carry their investigations further. The word "line" comes from the Latin linea, itself derived from the word for a thread of linen. We can look at the lines of poetry as slender compositional units forming a weave like that of a textile. Indeed, the word "text" has the same origin as the word "textile." It isn't difficult to compare the compositional process to weaving, where thread moves from left to right, reaches the margin of the text, then shuttles back to begin the next unit . . .