ABSTRACT
Most of the greatest and most ambitious English poetry is written in a five stress line of, at its most regular, ten syllables, which can be divided into five feet in which the syllable of minor stress precedes the syllable of greater stress. The most common name for this line is the iambic pentameter. The two-syllable foot nevertheless remains the norm and the trisyllabic substitutions are to relax it into a conversational tone.
