User:Bruce M. Tindall/My sandbox

Title: Metre (poetry)

The metre (American English: meter) of a poem is the basic, recurring pattern of some countable attribute of the lines of the poem. Some systems of metre count syllables (e.g., in French); some count patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables (e.g., in English and German); some count patterns of long and short syllables (e.g., in Latin); some count alliterating words (e.g., in Old English); and some, in languages like Chinese in which words have formalized tones, count patterns of tone.

Not all poetry is metrical. Meter is only one aspect of prosody, which Charles O. Hartman defines as "the poet's method of controlling the reader's temporal experience of the poem"