ABSTRACT
The study of rhythm in poetic and literary prosodies takes place within a frame of rhetoric rather than of grammar or linguistics. Whereas the study of spoken discourse belongs to pragmatics, linguistics and discourse analysis, poetic prosody belong to poetics, a subsection of rhetoric. The key distinguishing boundary between these macro-disciplines is the more highly conscious framing of art forms like poems, as opposed to the looser, sociologically informed framing of conversations, speech genres and other schemata. In the present chapter, the distinction between blank verse and free verse is explored, principally through Milton and Wordsworth. Then the distinctive nature of free verse is discussed, with extended discussion of the difference between the oral and written versions and traditions. Some of the devices that provide cohesion and coherence in free verse are presented, like listing and repetition.
