ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a commercial recording of poetry is compared with a radio news broadcast to establish which prosodic features these two genres have in common and which are peculiar to poetry reading; the former are ascribed to a general "performance style," and the latter to poetic intonation proper. Compared with studies of meter and rhythm, studies of the intonation of recited verse are fairly uncommon. A more productive strand of work has attempted to identify the intonational features that are specific to verse recitation as well as the features of poetic texts that give rise to their use. The chapter examines the notion of poetic intonation as a special variety of prosody. The problem with the formula is that, although these may all be characteristics of poetic intonation, some of them are also associated with other varieties of nonspontaneous speech. This is true of slow speech rate, for example.
