Description: Many of the great works of world literature are composed in metrical verse, that is, in lines which are measured and patterned. Meter in Poetry: A New Theory is the first book to present a single simple account of all known types of metrical verse, which is illustrated with detailed analyses of poems in many languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, classical Greek and Latin, Sanskrit, classical Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Latvian. This outstanding contribution to the study of meter is aimed both at students and scholars of literature and languages, as well as anyone interested in knowing how metrical verse is made.
Brief description: Nigel Fabb is Professor of Literary Linguistics in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. His recent publications include Sentence Structure Second Edition (2005) and Language and Literary Structure (Cambridge, 2002).
Review Quotes: '... extremely impressive ... the authors have laid out an interesting and fairly explicit proposal for how metrical poetry works and have demonstrated the power of this theory with a truly impressive array of facts. Anyone seriously interested in the linguistic analysis of meter really needs to read this book.' Journal of Linguistics