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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.
Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example: AH0 TH IY1 N AH0 = a-THEE-na (Athena)
The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.
Quick Definition
The structured pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (or long and short in classical verse) that creates rhythmic foundation in poetry.
Explore this topic in depth (5)
How to Read Poetry Aloud
— Reading poetry aloud is not about sounding theatrical. It is a way of listening more closely to how sentences, lines, rhythms, sounds and silences work together.
How to Scan a Poem
— Scansion is the practice of listening closely to a poem’s rhythm and marking its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is not a way of forcing every line into a formula, but a method for hearing how regularity, variation and natural speech work together.
Ballad
— Ballads tell memorable stories in a compact, musical form. Rooted in oral tradition but endlessly reshaped on the printed page, they use rhythm, repetition and dramatic scenes to make narratives travel.
Lyric Poetry
— Lyric poetry is a broad poetic mode, not a fixed form or simply another name for song lyrics. Discover how lyrics shape experience through voice, sound, address and movement—and how reading and listening can reveal their workings.
Ode
— An ode is not one rigid pattern but a flexible lyric genre in which a speaker gives sustained, heightened attention to a person, object, place, idea or experience. It can praise, question, remember, mourn and think aloud.
Detailed Definition
Metre is the rhythmic backbone of much traditional poetry, organizing lines into repeating feet (e.g., iambic pentameter) to create musicality and expectation; as a constraint, it shapes diction, syntax, and phrasing to conform to prosodic rules, influencing everything from Shakespearean drama to sonnets, and remains central to poetic form even when deliberately subverted in free verse movements.
Example
Example in poetry:
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 uses iambic pentameter as meter; Emily Dickinson’s hymn stanzas alternate iambic tetrameter and trimeter; Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” uses free verse meter based on breath; Contemporary poet Tracy K. Smith uses irregular meter in “The United States Welcomes You”; Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” uses iambic tetrameter; Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” mixes nursery rhyme meter with free verse.
Metre examples: iambic pentameter in Shakespeare (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”); trochaic tetrameter in Poe’s “The Raven”; anapestic trimeter in Dr. Seuss; dactylic hexameter in Longfellow’s “Evangeline”; spondaic emphasis in Hopkins (“Carrion comfort”); free verse rejecting metre for organic rhythm.
Additional Notes
Meter: The structured pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse; includes iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic; essential for traditional prosody but often subverted in free verse.
Metre is rhythmic structure—iambs, trochees, etc. Students must master scansion. Metre shapes emotion and tradition; free verse reacts against it. It’s foundational to poetic craft across cultures.