The article surveys the four known Russian examples of Galliambic verse – a syllabo-tonic counterpart of the Latin metre associated with the cult of Cybele, as in Catullus’ Attis: works by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Maximilian Voloshin, Nikolai Gumilev, and Georgij Adamovich – analyzing how metre, rhythm, and meaning interact in the rarest of Silver Age verse forms.

This article describes the Russian sonnet as a verse structure. Highlighting the many deviations and innovations poets introduced – from adapting Petrarchan and Shakespearean models to radical experiments – the study shows how the sonnet’s diversity has made it one of the most resilient forms in Russian poetry. Foreword by Michael Wachtel

meter and rhythmThis article extends Roman Jakobson’s framework of “broad metrics” to sung poetry. Building on his dichotomies of verse design/instance (poetic meter and rhythm) and delivery design/instance (recitation rules and performance), it proposes an additional dyad: musical design/instance (musical meter and rhythm), which often diverge from verse patterns. The study also incorporates Mihhail Lotman’s concept of secondary meter to account for dual metricity in verse. Analysis of sung texts with dual-metered verse structures – such as but not limited to hyperpaeonic syllabotonic meters – shows how verse and music coalesce to shape delivery rhythms that may oscillate between multiple meters. Whenever this occurs, the choice of a particular rhythmic variant is conditioned by the delivery design (performance strategy). The model is substantiated by case studies of three Soviet-era songs.

The article deals with the origin of “rhythmical figures” serving as “rhythmical italics” to enhance meaning in English poetry from Chaucer to Frost (14th–20th centuries). In Surrey’s translation of The Aeneid (the first decades of the 16th century) the rhythmical figures already resemble their use in the later 16th-century poetry by Sidney and Spenser who were aware of the role of rhythmical deviations from the meter and used them to emphasize meaning, i.e., as rhythmical italics. Shakespeare inherited this device and widened its scope. Eighteenth-century Classicists (Pope, Thomson) confirmed the link between the “deviations” from the meter and semantics, while 19th-century Romantics (Shelley, Byron) in spite of their critique of Classicism used the same rhythmical figures on syllabic positions WS(W), the same grammatical patterns (“verb plus object”) and the same lexicon (the verbs “tremble, shake”) as Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare and Pope, turning them into formulas.

Antonina Martynenko’s dissertation: “Traditions and Innovations in Russian Poetry of the Second Half of the 1830s: A Quantitative Study”. Readers reports

Frontiers in Comparative Metrics V. In memory of Reuven Tsur and Barry Scherr. Call for Papers

The purpose of this article is to examine aspects of the poetic of the syllable ri in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The textual unit ri, prevalent as a pure syllable, but in some cases modified by a preceding consonant or consonants or by a following vowel or consonant, appears approximately 2000 times in the texture of the entire work. However, this study will focus on cases where the occurrences of ri possess rhythmic and/or semantic relevance. First, a brief exploration of De vulgari eloquentia, Dante’s own treatise on language and poetry, will determine whether the poet theorises rhythm and sound semantics in this work, and whether he considers smaller textual units than the word. Next, examples will be presented of poetic research that examines the reiteration of seemingly asemantic linguistic elements related to a specific theme, name, or textual position, while considering how such repetitions, alongside rhythm, contribute to textual semantics. The examples of the poetic of ri will primarily be drawn from the frames of the three canticles of the Divine Comedy, as it is within these frames that the modelling codes of the entire work are provided.

Editor's Note. Part I of Russian Binary Meters, the English translation of Kiril Taranovsky’s classic study Ruski dvodelni ritmovi (Taranovsky 1953), appeared in volume 7.2 (2020) of Studia Metrica et Poetica. Part I bears the title “Theoretical Bases for the Study of Russian Binary Meters”, and consists of the first four of the book’s nineteen chapters. Part II of Russian Binary Meters is entitled “Historical Development of the Rhythmic Drive of Russian Binary Meters”. Its first four chapters (numbered 5 to 8), devoted to trochaic tetrameter (four-foot trochee) and iambic tetrameter, trimeter and hexameter (four-, three- and six-foot iamb), were published in volumes 8.2 (2021) and 10.1 (2023). The next series of chapters (9 to 13) focuses on various types of iambic pentameter (five-foot iamb). Here we publish the introductory chapter of this series. The reader should bear in mind that the numbering of sections and footnotes is continuous with the earlier installments, beginning here with Chapter 9 and footnote 175.

Plotting Poetry 7: Metres of Humour. Conference report

This study is about enjambments, rejets and contre-rejets in French metrical poetry. No study explains why these constructions are seen as characteristic of poetry. Moreover, the common approach in terms of (mis)alignment between metrical and prosodic or syntactic structure leaves a number of unanswered questions. Why meter is studied only in its relationships with prosody or syntax, leaving many other aspects of discourse unexamined? When the meaning in a line straddles the line break to continue into the next line, which line is concerned by the enjambment? the first, the second, or both? Does enjambment constitute a homogeneous category? Observations of these constructions were carried out on an exploratory corpus based on Boileau’s and Chénier’s works. The unanswered questions above can be explained by the fact that metrical, and, above all, syntactic structures are seen as finished products. Conversely, a temporal and dynamic approach to discourse can shed some light on these issues. The first part of this study will examine the morpho-syntactic structure before and after a pause in speech, before and after the line break in versified poetry, and justify the idea that the phenomena referred to by the terms enjambement, rejet and contrerejet can be found in any discourse, including conversation. The pause at the line break is seen as a signal to process what precedes the pause without knowing what follows it. The second part will rely on linear or dynamic grammars that have established that, in any discourse, whether spoken or written, morpho-syntactic units are processed as they unfold over time. This temporal and dynamic perspective, applied to versified poetry, involves the reader in a prospective phase of predictions and a retrospective phase of satisfaction or frustration followed by continuous readjustments, which are an integral part of interpretation. Enjambment, rejet and contre-rejet represent an ideal observatory of this dynamic, since they highlight this two-stage process. This approach allows us to distinguish the first type of enjambment. When dealing with two lines, type-1 enjambment is only perceived at the start of line 2, through the addition of an unexpected grammatical constituent. Unlike type-1, type-2 enjambment is predictable from the end of line 1, and is generally confirmed by the beginning of line 2, bringing the rejet into focus. As for contre-rejets, some present events in discourse earlier than expected. Interestingly, the step-by-step process allowing predictions is supported by recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies. I suggest in the last part an analysis of a particular rejet that illustrates these dynamics at work.