Indo-European Poetry and Myth

A real advance was made by Antoine Meillet, who based his conclusions mainly on a careful comparison of Vedic with Greek metres. ...

determinate number of syllables.^65 The boundaries of the verse do not cut into a word or accentual unit; very often the end of ...

(ii)An eleven-syllable line with a caesura after four or five syllables and the cadence ∪−− ||, used in four-line stanzas (tris ...

components of stanzas of two, three, or four lines. We do not find, as in the Veda, stanzas composed of three or four lines of t ...

I have limited myself here to the most salient points of comparison.^70 The sum of correspondences, not only in the structure of ...

prefixed by a four-syllable element (−∪∪− | or ×−∪− |) or followed by a pentasyllabic one (| ×−∪−−). I have given reasons for th ...

××××|×∪––×|×××××′×|| –– a seven-syllable colon, usually with caesura after the fourth syllable, in syzygy with a six-syllable co ...

Arveriatis’. This certainly seems to show poetic diction and word order, and it can be arranged into three verses of seven or ei ...

In early British poetry the picture is not quite so sharp, but it fits sweetly enough into the same frame. It has long been a ma ...

The caesura after the fourth syllable suggests analogy with the Vedic, Avestan, Greek, and Irish long lines formed with a four-s ...

this may derive from a longer, twelve-syllable verse broken down into hemi- stichs. Thirdly, there are strophes in which the oct ...

whether the Hittite versions are themselves metrical. If they are, the versifica- tion seems to be based on a general balance be ...

Together with the extremely scanty Hittite and Luwian evidence, this sug- gests that proto-Anatolian poets may have practised co ...

an important part of Indo-European verbal art and often expressed itself in figures characterized by assonance of one sort or an ...

In later Sanskrit both padam and pa ̄dah ̇ ‘foot’ are used to mean ‘verse’. The usage seems to go back to Indo-Iranian times, as ...

Poetic prose At the outset of the chapter I gave a broad definition of poetry that (for the purposes of the present inquiry) ide ...

verse passages are the more fixed or traditional elements, capable of being sung or recited on their own, but needing to be put ...

OCCASIONS AND GENRES Hymns and praise poetry The Homeric singer existed to tell forth ‘the doings of men and gods’ (Od. 338). H ...

especially the most recent, if they have not been sung of before; or if not his own, then those of his forefathers, for his ance ...

even when they went to war, and that they recited encomia of them before the assembled company. One who was late for a feast and ...