Three types of scansion exist in English - graphic, musical, and acoustic - but graphic is most common. Various combinations of long and short syllables made up a foot of quantitative verse, whereas various combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables make up a foot of accentual-syllabic poetry in English. Modern scansion was adapted from classical quantitative scansion, in which critics analyzed meter on the basis of the amount of time required to pronounce each syllable of a poetic line. Most critics also consider the identification of a work’s stanzaic structure to be part of the work of scansion. Scanning verse typically involves the following steps: (1) determining whether each syllable in a given line is stressed or unstressed, using natural speech patterns (2) dividing each line into feet, which requires determining both the predominant type of foot and the number of feet per line (3) indicating any major pause ( caesura) in each line and (4) determining the poem’s rhyme scheme, if any such scheme exists. Meter is typically described in one of the following three ways: by the dominant type of foot(a poetic line’s rhythmic unit, containing two or more syllables), the number of feet per line, or both.Ĭritics “scan” lines to determine a poem’s predominant metrical pattern and to discover deviations from that pattern. Scansion: The analysis, typically using visual symbols, of poetic meter, the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables found in verse. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms - Ross Murfin 2018 Scansion
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