Anisometric verse, known also as heterometric stanza, is a type of
poetry
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...
where the
stanza
In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...
is made up of lines having unequal
metrical length. The number of syllables within the individual lines do not correspond, nor do the number of feet. In poetry, a foot is a group of syllables patterned according to their
weight
In science and engineering, the weight of an object is the force acting on the object due to gravity.
Some standard textbooks define weight as a Euclidean vector, vector quantity, the gravitational force acting on the object. Others define weigh ...
,
stress
Stress may refer to:
Science and medicine
* Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition
* Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, or
accent relative to each other.
Traditionally, poetry uses isometric stanza, each line having the same number of syllables and the same number of feet. Before the 20th century, anisometric verse was rarely seen. Two exceptions are William Wordsworth's ''Ode: Intimations of Immortality'', and Afanasy Fet's ''Flights Beyond Fancy or Fantasy''.
The term ''anisometry'' is used often by Professor Emily Klenin in her published analysis of Fet's works: ''The Poetics of Afanasy Fet''.
Example
For example, the following verse would be anisometric:
See also
*
Alliterative verse
In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of ...
*
Foot (prosody)
The foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse in most Indo-European traditions of poetry, including English accentual-syllabic verse and the quantitative meter of classical ancient Greek and Latin poetry. The ...
*
Literary consonance
Consonance is a stylistic literary device identified by the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighboring words whose vowel sounds are different (e.g. coming home, hot foot). Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to the vo ...
Poetic rhythm
{{poetry-stub