In languages with quantitative poetic metres, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, and classical Persian, an anceps is a position in a metrical pattern which can be filled by either a long or a short syllable.
The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The unit is composed of syllables, and is usually two, three, or four syllables in length. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, dactyl, and anapest. The foot might be compared to a bar, or a beat divided into pulse groups, in musical notation.
Choliambic verse, also known as limping iambs or scazons or halting iambic, is a form of meter in poetry. It is found in both Greek and Latin poetry in the classical period. Choliambic verse is sometimes called scazon, or "lame iambic", because it brings the reader down on the wrong "foot" by reversing the stresses of the last few beats. It was originally pioneered by the Greek lyric poet Hipponax, who wrote "lame trochaics" as well as "lame iambics".
A catalectic line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot. One form of catalexis is headlessness, where the unstressed syllable is dropped from the beginning of the line.
Glyconic is a form of meter in classical Greek and Latin poetry. The glyconic line is the most basic and most commonly used form of Aeolic verse, and it is often combined with others.
The Iambic trimeter is a meter of poetry consisting of three iambic units per line.
Iambic tetrameter is a poetic meter in ancient Greek and Latin poetry; as the name of a rhythm, iambic tetrameter consists of four metra, each metron being of the form | x – u – |, consisting of a spondee and an iamb, or two iambs. There usually is a break in the centre of the line, thus the whole line is:
| x – u – | x – u – || x – u – || x – u – |
Archilochian or archilochean is a term used in the metrical analysis of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The name is derived from Archilochus, whose poetry first uses the rhythms.
This is a glossary of poetry.
In Greek and Latin metre, brevis in longo is a short syllable at the end of a line that is counted as long. The term is short for (syllaba) brevis in (elemento) longo, meaning "a short [syllable] in place of a long [element]." Although the phenomenon itself has been known since ancient times, the phrase is said to have been invented by the classical scholar Paul Maas.
Resolution is the metrical phenomenon in poetry of replacing a normally long syllable in the meter with two short syllables. It is often found in iambic and trochaic meters, and also in anapestic, dochmiac and sometimes in cretic, bacchiac, and ionic meters. In iambic and trochaic meters, either the first or the second half of the metrical foot can be resolved, or sometimes both.
In ancient Greek and Latin literature, the trochaic septenarius is a form of ancient poetic metre first used in 7th century BC Greek literature. It was one of the two most common metres of Roman comedy of the early 1st century BC and was also used for the marching songs sung by soldiers at Caesar's victory parade. After a period when it was little used, it is found again in the Pervigilium Veneris, and taken up again as a metre for Christian hymns. The same metre, with stress-rhythm replacing quantitative metre, has continued to be used, especially for hymns and anthems, right up to the present day.
The ionic is a four-syllable metrical unit (metron) of light-light-heavy-heavy that occurs in ancient Greek and Latin poetry. According to Hephaestion it was known as the Ionicos because it was used by the Ionians of Asia Minor; and it was also known as the Persicos and was associated with Persian poetry. Like the choriamb, in Greek quantitative verse the ionic never appears in passages meant to be spoken rather than sung. "Ionics" may refer inclusively to poetry composed of the various metrical units of the same total quantitative length that may be used in combination with ionics proper: ionics, choriambs, and anaclasis. Equivalent forms exist in English poetry and in classical Persian poetry.
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
A lekythion or lecythion, in classical Greek and Latin poetry, is a metric pattern (colon) defined by a sequence of seven alternating long and short syllables at the end of a verse (—u—x—u—). In classical grammatical terminology it can be described as a trochaic dimeter catalectic, i.e. a combination of two groups of two trochees each (—u—x), with the second of these groups lacking its final syllable; or as a trochaic hepthemimer, i.e. a trochaic sequence of seven half-feet. A lekythion can appear in several different metric contexts in different types of poetry, either alone as a verse or as the second of two cola following a caesura. A frequent type of occurrence in Greek drama is in lines of iambic trimeter, the most frequent metre used in spoken dialogue, i.e. lines of the type x—u—|x—u—|x—u—. These lines may have a metric caesura after the first five syllables, with the remaining line thus resulting in a lekythion group.
Prosody is the theory and practice of versification.
Roman comedy is mainly represented by two playwrights, Plautus and Terence. The works of other Latin playwrights such as Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius, and Caecilius Statius are now lost except for a few lines quoted in other authors. 20 plays of Plautus survive complete, and 6 of Terence.
Brevis brevians, also known as iambic shortening or correptio iambica, is a metrical feature of early Latin verse, especially Plautus and Terence, in which a pair of syllables which are theoretically short + long can be scanned as a pair of short syllables. The plural is breves breviantes.
Anaclasis is a feature of poetic metre, in which a long and a short syllable exchange places in a metrical pattern.
A metron, , plural metra, is a repeating section, 3 to 6 syllables long, of a poetic metre. The word is particularly used in reference to ancient Greek. According to a definition by Paul Maas, usually a metron consists of two long elements and up to two other elements which can be short, anceps or biceps.