ABSTRACT
An English-speaking poet who chooses to write in pure syllable-count metre is not, of course, attempting to abolish the phonetics and prosody of natural English speech. Pure sense stress metre is, in a way, the most natural metre in English. Similarly, stress-syllable metre, though artificial, is slightly more ‘natural’ in English than quantitative metre, and most exercises in quantitative metrics can be re-interpreted, especially in performance, as if they were in slightly unusual stress-syllable lines. There are languages, of which French is possibly one, but of which Japanese is a clearer and simpler example, in which stress differences and differences in the quantity of syllables are so slight, or so little observed, that they play no part in metrics. In such languages it is syllable count which defines the lines of verse. Japanese is a language of short open syllables.
