ABSTRACT
We all live with rhythms. In fact, we live in and through rhythms –rhythms of walking, talking, breathing, swimming, writing. When our muscles are engaged in any continuous activity, they prefer to tense and relax rhythmically, in time to a regular beat. The songs we sing and the music we listen or dance to can move our bodies and linger in our minds because they use rhythms that arise from these elementary pulses. Rhythms in poetry work similarly, from the nursery rhymes we chanted as young children to the subtle language we hear in performances of Shakespeare. In this opening chapter, you will see (and more importantly hear and feel) how these basic rhythms, at the heart of all metrical poetry, do their work.
