Syllabics: 2

Poetic theory discusses different approaches to poetry. Two of the most common are accentual and syllabic. (There is also a third approach, durational, which I find now and then mentioned; but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to stick to just accentual and syllabic approaches.) The idea here is that some languages organize poetry according to accent, or emphasis, and some languages organize poetry according to syllables.

English is considered to be an accentual and syllabic poetic culture. The most common example of this is “iambic pentameter”. What is counted in pentameter are five accents, or emphases, in a line. Most such lines will contain 10 syllables because an iamb consists of both an accented and unaccented syllables. But there are exceptions; such as the feminine ending where there will be five accents but an extra syllable which is unaccented. There are also other mitigating usages which can alter the syllable count from the standard 10. But the five accents is primary; hence an accentual approach dominates English language verse.

Japanese and French are examples of syllabic approaches to poetry. In Japanese and French only the syllables are counted in defining a poetic form. This is because both of these languages are far less accented, or alternately stressed, than English (or other Germanic languages).

I have a somewhat different approach. In my view all poetry is primarily syllabic. And poetry is the shaping and crafting of words through the medium of syllables. In the way that baking is primarily the craft of shaping flour, poetry is the craft of shaping syllables. In the way that pottery is the craft of shaping clay into specific forms, poetry is the craft of shaping syllables into specific forms.

In other words, I view syllables as the basic medium of poetry, just as flour is the basic medium of baking, just as clay is the basic medium of pottery, just as wood is the basic medium of carpentry. Various tools are used to shape syllables and the use of these tools is what I mean by syllabics. Among these tools are: counting, accent, duration, rhyme, rhythm, meter, grammatical phrasing, etc. Different languages tend to emphasize some of these tools and to ignore others. English tends to use accent, counting, and rhyme. Japanese poetry tends to use counting and grammatical phrasing (I am referring to the use of cutting words). Chinese tends to use counting and rhyme. But all these different approaches have syllables as their basic medium.