“The Trout Breaks the Ice” by Mikhail Kuzmin: Verse and Grammar

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.

Rhythm Reproduction in English Translation of Chinese Poetry: A Contrastive Analysis of Li Bai's “GUAN SHAN YUE”（关山月）and its English Version

This paper contrasts the rhythm of Li Bai's “GUAN SHAN YUE”（关山月）and that of Fletcher's English version “The MOON OVER The PASS” and finds out the functional equivalence between the Ping (平) and Ze (仄) (level and oblique tones) of Chinese poetry and the lightly stressed and heavily stressed syllables of English poetry, the number of Yan (言) (the number of characters) and the number of feet, and the rhymes. To promote the realization of musical beauty, formal beauty and emotional expression in the translation of Chinese poetry and reproduce the rhythm of ancient Chinese poetry, five-character and seven-character poem with regular line can be translated into iambic pentameter; pre-Tang poem and Song Ci with irregular line can be translated according to the analogy of character and syllable, and the feet of the translated poem can mainly be iambs; the rhyme of the translated poem can be couplet rhyme, cross rhyme or alternate rhyme. Based on this strategy, the author translates her self-created poem “MAN JIANG HONG ZHAN YI”（满江红·战疫）into English to prove the feasibility of the rhythm reproduction strategy of the English translation of ancient Chinese poetry.

How Not to Introduce Blues Prosody:

This article delivers a two-pronged intervention into blues prosody. First, it argues that scholars have repeatedly misidentified the metrical organization of blues poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. The dominant approach to these poems has sought to explain their rhythms with models of alternating stress, including both classical foot prosody and the beat prosody of Derek Attridge. The article shows that the systematic organization of blues structures originates in West African call-and-response patterning (not alternating stress), and is better explained by models of syntax and musical phrasing. Second, it argues that these misclassifications — far from being esoteric matters of taxonomy — lie at the heart of African American aesthetics and identity politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas literary blues verse has long been oversimplified with conventional metrics like “free verse,” “accentual verse,” and “iambic pentameter,” the article suggests that its rhythms arise instead from a rich and complex vernacular style that cannot be explained by the constraints of Anglo-American versification.

Evolution of Verse Form, Plots and Characters in English Plays (mid-16th to mid-19th centuries)

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate how the rhythmical evolution of English dramatic iambic pentameter parallelled the changes of aesthetic tastes and social values of English society from the mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth century. During 250 years the evolution of such features as the abundance or absence of enjambments, the use of constrained or loose iambs, and some others corresponds to the changes in the architecture of the theaters, the social structure of the audience, the manners of declamation, the complexity of poetic language, and the types of characters and plots the playwrights used.

Beautified Q1 Hamlet

Q1 Hamlet (1603) routinely sets prose speeches so that they appear to be blank verse. This article argues that such was an attempt to confer prestige upon the text, particularly in the wake of the saturation of Shakespeare books on the literary marketplace around 1600 – a phenomenon that saw his prose works achieve less favour than those in pentameter. The publishers of Q1 Merry Wives (1602) and Q1 Hamlet may have hedged their bets on these Shakespeare texts by amplifying their verse, long the gold standard of the Shakespearean brand. Like The True Tragedie of Richard III (published 1594) and The Famous Victories of Henry V (entered 1594), which presented their opening pages to readers as iambic pentameter, Q1 Hamlet seems to have beautified its dialogue for readers in the early modern book marketplace.

What, if anything, is a caesura? The ontology of the ‘pause’ in English heroic verse

The term ‘caesura’ (or ‘pause’) has featured in discussion of English iambic pentameter for four centuries, and yet it still lacks what the Latin hexameter or the French alexandrine have: a definition of the term that might be usefully applied in stylistic description. Despite the temptation to dismiss it as a prosodic chimera or a mere epiphenomenon of syntax, this article will investigate a rough consensus that emerged amongst 18th-century theorists and practitioners about the bisecting caesura as both a normative element of versification and an aesthetic instrument, and attempt to formalize that consensus into a taxonomy based on linguistic features that will allow the caesura to function as a feature of stylistic description and analysis, not just for the heroic couplet but for the pentameter more generally, in terms of three independent and objectively definable properties that I term ‘balance’, ‘juncture’ and ‘integration’.