Talk:Dactylic hexameter

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"Heart Beat Poetry.", ABC News, July 28, 2004. (details)

I hesitate to make statements about how common thy terminology is, but I can say that all of the noteworthy poets at least one prominent United States university use the terms "stressed" and "unstressed" rather than "long" and "short." I haven't thought of a way to add the other terms without making the entry unwieldy, so I'll leave it to your discretion. :-) --Koyaanis Qatsi

stressed & unstressed are right for English, but Greek and Latin poetry work somewhat differently -- though they both HAD syllable stress, the poetry is better thought of in terms of sung music with the lengths of notes. Greek also had pitch, but that's a different matter and not perfectly understood, anyway. So, think of long syllables as half notes and short syllables as quarter notes and you're not too far off - and it will help you remember that the poetry was mean to be performed orally even when it was composed on the page. This system was somewhat artificial for Latin and had been adopted wholesale from Greek metrics, but it worked. We should distinguish this on the entry. --MichaelTinkler

You're right; I was thinking only of English; and it's best to keep that distinction. I have no experience with Greek or Latin poetry, aside from reading them in mediocre to good translations; I think I'll defer to you. --KQ

What about "heavy" and "light"? Some academics use these terms to avoid confusion with vowel length (long vowels [or diphthongs] make a syllable heavy but short ones don't necessarily make it light).

Also, can anyone vouch for the reasoning given for the ill repute of the Cicero line? I thought it had more to do with the cacophonous repetition of the syllables "natam" (and the unbelievably arrogant sentiment). Ou tis 23:00, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

I like the terms heavy and light. And I agree with you about Cicero. Overuse of spondees was bad, and their use in both of the first two feet in a line was generally frowned upon. But the heavily spondaic line was admissable and even preferable in certain circumstances - an author might wish, for example, to create a sort of spoken equivalent of a dramatic pause - and I think it's alright in this Cicero line provided he didn't do it too often (which he didn't). Cicero's metrical style is usually condemned as forced and repetitive, containing technically proficient lines but with little enjambment or interesting variation in word order, metre or placement of hiatus. In fact Cicero seems to have established many of the conventions used by later poets. For really bad lines look to Ennius where there are examples of almost everything that was avoided by the later poets.--Lo2u 15:30, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

1 is there any way we can hear these?
2 Unicode notation?
3 Better Arrangement and Explanation
4 Metamorphoses

[edit] is there any way we can hear these?

are there english and greek examples online, that could give foreigners a rough idea how they should sound?

[edit] Unicode notation?

Instead of using the clumsy use of "U" to denote two-shorts-or-one-long, we could use Unicode to get the proper signs, like this:

–⏕ | –⏕ | –⏕ | –⏕ | –⏑⏑ | –⏓

However, while this looks fine to me, I suspect some may lack the proper fonts and get squares or something else instead of the intended signs, so I'm a bit wary of making the edit. Are there guidelines for things like this? Alatius 20:02, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Better Arrangement and Explanation

Several comments regarding the caesura were incorrect, and the section on the Greek was very thin. I thought I'd clean this article up to show the point of many of these rules regarding word placement, caesura, etc. and thereby underscore the counterpoint between accentual and metric rhythm which is a hallmark of dactylic hexameter.

In contrast to Homeric epic, Latin epic is highly rhetorical, and the meter plays an important role. Virgil is particularly important in this trend so I thought it was fair to expand this section and explain how the meter can be used to create verbal effects. I also just had to include the quote from Horace; though comical in its own right, it also shows how seriously these rules--which seem rather artificial in the modern age-- were taken by Roman writers.

The hexameter was also employed by late Latin and Medieval writers, sometimes with unusual results; I thought a mention of these variations was worthwhile (Latin poetry did not end with Virgil).

I also added some links to sound files I saw on-line. chjones_60656