This book will create greater public awareness of some recent exciting findings in the formal study of poetry. The last influential volume on the subject, Rhythm and Meter, edited by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, appeared fifteen years ago. Since that time, a number of important theoretical developments have taken place, which have led to new approaches to the analysis of meter. This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. In terms of empirical coverage, the papers focus on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish,...

Readers of poetry make aesthetic judgements about verse. It is quite common to hear intuitive statements about poets' rhythms. It is said, for example, that Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet and 1987 Nobel Prize laureate, "sounds English" when he writes in Russian.

Yet, it is far from clear what this statement means from a linguistic point of view. What is English about Brodsky's Russian poetry? And in what way are his "English" rhythms different from the verse of his Russian predecessors?

The book provides an analysis of Brodsky's experiment bringing evidence from an...