Essential Features and Origin
| In this article ¯ indicates a longum, ˘ indicates a breve, and × indicates an anceps. |
Sappho and Alcaeus' verses differ from most other Greek lyric poetry in their metrical construction:
- Verses consist of a fixed number of syllables (thus, for example, no resolution, contraction, or biceps elements).
- Consecutive anceps syllables may occur, especially at the beginning of the verse (where two initial anceps syllables are called the aeolic base). (This forms an exception to the principle, otherwise observed in Greek verse, that two successive unmarked elements are not permitted. Lines beginning with multiple anceps syllables are also exceptional in not being classifiable as having rising or falling rhythm.)
Antoine Meillet and later scholars, by comparison to Vedic meter, have seen in these principles and in other tendencies (the sequence ...¯˘˘¯˘¯..., the alternation of blunt and pendant verses) conserved traces of Proto-Indo-European poetic practices.
In Sappho and Alcaeus, the three basic metrical groups ¯˘˘¯˘¯, ¯˘˘¯ (choriamb) and ¯˘¯ (cretic) figure importantly, and groups are sometimes joined (in what is probably a Greek innovation) by a link anceps. Aeolic poems may be stichic (with all lines having the same metrical form), or composed in more elaborate stanzas or strophes.
Read more about this topic: Aeolic Verse, General Description
Famous quotes containing the words essential, features and/or origin:
“Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.”
—Ida M. Tarbell (1857–1944)
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)