Language and Meter in Early English, Dutch, German, and Russian Iambic Verse

This article offers a comparative study of how iambic verse was realized during the early modern era. The focus is on the “rhythmic freedom” of verse as well as on the linguistic and historical determinants of that freedom. Special attention is devoted to omissions of metrical stress and the development of differences in the rhythmic profile of the English, Dutch, German, and Russian iamb. The study investigates the link between the average number of syllables in the rhythmic words of each language and the degree of strictness in the realization of metrical structure. The results we have obtained give grounds for considering that the length of words is not—as scholars have previously thought—the decisive factor in allowing verse to free itself from its metrical bounds. A comparative analysis of identical types of versification in different languages allows us to view this issue quite differently. It frequently turns out that not the linguistic but the historical conditions of creating of the new versification have the decisive influence on the nature of the interaction between meter and language.