Rhythm in poetry and in prose

Abstract

The paper describes an attempt to compare the rhythm of poetry with the rhythm of prose. Two poets read a number of their own poems in two modes, “poetry mode” and “prose mode.” The recordings were analyzed acoustically; segmental durations were measured from broadband spectrograms, while the duration of longer utterances and pauses was measured from oscillograms produced on a Honeywell model 1858 Visicorder. It was expected that the rhythm of read poetry would be more regular than that of materials read as prose. This was expected to be reflected in durational variability. Specifically, it was anticipated that the duration of metric feet contained in texts read as poetry would be less variable than the duration of the same verbal material read as prose. This expectation was not met: for both speakers, the variability of the durations of metric feet in texts read as poetry was greater than the variability found in texts read as prose. The difference was nonsignificant in the materials produced by one of the speakers; in the materials read by the other speaker, the durations of metric feet read in the poetic mode were significantly more variable than the durations of the same verbal material read as prose.