Sound patterns in poetry

Harvard FAS

This course examines the phonological structure of verse across three thousand years of the world's poetic traditions. We approach poetry as linguists, pattern-finding and puzzle-solving in the realms of meter, rhyme, alliteration, musical text-setting, phonaesthesia, and language games. We seek not only to describe such patterns, but also to explain them, grounding poets' metrical behavior in phonological theory and cognitive science. Modern metrics is informed by phonological theory, but…