Prosody

All poets use rhythm and all readers of poetry hear rhythm, whether or not they are conscious of doing so, but prosody, the description and analysis of poetic rhythms, can be as complicated as musical notation, and different languages require different sorts of prosody.

In the classical languages prosody was quantitative, based on vowel length or quantity. In Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) prosody was qualitative, based on patterns of stress or accent (with other complex rules concerning alliteration, p. 202). In Slavic languages, like Russian, words can be very long, because such synthetic languages build a lot of meaning into one word by adding prefixes and inflecting endings, but there is also a rule which allows only one stress per word, however long––so Russian poetry is usually analysed with a basis in accent but many variants. In Romance languages, like French, rules of stress are more flexible than Russian but more rigid than English and French poetry is usually analysed in syllabic prosody, according to the number of syllables in each line.

The Poetry Handbook. A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism. Second Edition. JOHN LENNARD. Oxford University Press