Formal Approaches to Poetry

Book excerpt: This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. It includes papers from leading experts in the field, including Nigel Fabb, Kristin Hanson, Paul Kiparsky, Marina Tarlinskaja, Barry Scherr, among others. The book focuses on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. It contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory, the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach, and a semantic-pragmatic approach. The book will be of interest to both linguists and students of poetry.