Link passed on by Nelson Minar to a MetaFilter posting yesterday on “Approaches to Metered Verse”:
At The Paris Review, Anthony Madrid works through “A Homework Assignment from W. H. Auden” that others have also tried. At Herbert Tucker’s For Better For Verse, two introductory exercises are worked out on the instructions page, and another explains itself; for the rest, click above, on, and right of each line to try to solve. Several linguistic introductions are available online too, e.g. Mark Liberman, “An Internet Pilgrim’s Guide to Accentual-Syllabic Verse” (etc., etc.); Arnold Zwicky, “Word Accent, Phrase Accent, and Meter” [PDF]; and Bruce Hayes & Russell Schuh, Linguistics 251: Metrics (+ earlier version). Incidentally, Auden’s original [PDF] “hardest course in the humanities” [PDF] required memorization of poetry–a practice historically linked with meter.
Posted here because it includes my 1982 paper from Innovations in Linguistics Education — one of my many publications in deeply obscure places, but now stored on a Stanford site and easily available from this blog (in the list of Pages under: Publications (in .pdf files)).
On MetaFilter, from Wikipedia:
MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a general-interest community weblog, founded in 1999 and based in the United States, featuring links to content that users have discovered on the web. Since 2003, it has included the popular question-and-answer subsite Ask MetaFilter. The site has six paid staff members, including the owner, and, as of early 2011, about 12,000 active members.
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