It’s one thing to be given a single word and be asked what kind of foot it exhibits (something you should prepare to do on the exam) and another to look at a whole stanza or a whole poem and do the same thing (this assessment of the poetic meter is the scansion). Emily Dickinson’s name contains two dactyls, as Emily Cope observed in her awesome poem “Emily Dickinson,” which is composed entirely of dactyls: Three-beat feet include the anapest, two unstressed followed by a stressed beat, the dactyl, a stressed followed by two unstressed beats. A two-beat foot in which both beats seem stressed is a spondee the opposite, a two-beat foot with no stresses, is called a pyrrhic (though some poetry critics deny this foot actually exists). A side note: most first names are troches, and all US Presidents have trochaic first names except Barack Obama’s: ). The opposite is the troche, a two-beat foot with the stress on the first beat. For example, you are probably familiar with the iamb, a two-beat foot with the stress on the second beat. ![]() ![]() A foot of poetry can have two or three beats to it, but is always defined by the place in the foot that receives the stress. Scansion involves breaking a line of poetry into feet. “Scansion” is the process by which we assess and assign a meter to a poem or section of a poem, and although it was first defined to assess what was going on in ancient Greek and Latin poetry (which were much more regular in their meters), it applies just as well to free verse, and will equip you with quite a precise way of talking about poetic meter.
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