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The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. [2]
Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English poems like Beowulf, Middle English poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Old Norse works like the Poetic Edda, and in Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. [3] It was also used as an ornament to suggest connections between ideas in classical Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit poetry.
Some of the most recent analysis proposes that the traditional four-stress model of both Old English and Middle English alliterative verse is a "misapprehension" [9] and that a focus on other apparent rules clarifies the evolution of the form, with Layamon's Brut emerging as a key text in the development of alliterative verse. [9]
Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is Beowulf, but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition.
Cicero has frequent examples of alliteration in his poetry, but usually involving only two or three words in any one verse. [52] In the following lines, which describe the killing of Orion by the Scorpion as depicted in the stars, the primary alliteration of V V V is accompanied by minor alliteration of D, C, T, F and R:
Ljóðaháttr ("chant" or "ballad" metre) is a stanzaic verse form, organized into four-line stanzas. The first and third lines were standard lines of Germanic alliterative verse with four lifts and two or three alliterations, separated into two half-lines with cæsura; the second and fourth lines had three lifts and two alliterations, and no ...
As is typical of Old English verse, the metre of the poem is alliterative and consists of four-stress lines, divided between the second and third stresses by a caesura. Each caesura is indicated in the manuscript by a subtle increase in character spacing and with full stops, but modern print editions render them in a more obvious fashion. It is ...
Eduard Sievers developed a theory of the meter of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, which he published in his 1893 Altgermanische Metrik. [1] Widely used by scholars, it was in particular extended by Alan Joseph Bliss. [2] Sievers' system is a primarily method of categorization rather than a full theory of meter.