Rhythm and Metre

Abstract

The starting point of the paper is the Greek understanding of poetry, which became the norm in antiquity and has maintained such a status well into post-antiquity. According to this understanding, poetizing is a measuring or a putting of words into a measure (Gr. metron), while poetry is an art of metrical speech binding and thus of versification. The rhythm in Greco-Roman poetry seems to have been captured in a measure that was a quantitative measure, the duration of syllables. But already in ancient metrics rhythm began to separate from meter, although it remained subordinate to it as a systemic structure. When in late antiquity the distinction between long and short syllables, on which the quantitative system of versification was based, became inaudible, the liberation from the meter began under the sign of rhythm. “Rhythm” in Middle Ages described the structure of poems in the vulgar languages of post-antique Europe and established itself in the Renaissance as the primary term for the syllable versification system. However, the imitation of the meter continued in European poetry, with demetrification and remetrification alternating. Therefore, modern versiology illustrates the development of European versification with the movement of sea waves, which is not equable as in nature: the meter is in decline, while the rhythm is steadily increasing. In the picture it paints, the final liberation of rhythm from the meter is represented by the free verse. Nonetheless, at the end the paper returns to the beginning with the warning that rhythmos originally did not refer to something audible, but to the mostly visible momentary form of something unstable. On this basis it finally tries to define what a poetic rhythm is.