In poetry, cadence describes the fall in pitch of the
intonation of the
voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...
, and its modulated inflection with the rise and fall of its
sound
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.
In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the br ...
.
Etymology
From Middle French , and from Italian , and from Latin , with the meaning "to fall.""
Cadence in poetry
In poetry cadence describes the rhythmic pacing of language to a resolution and was a new idea in 1915 used to describe the subtle rise and fall in the natural flow and pause of ordinary speech where the strong and weak beats of speech fall into a natural order restoring the audible quality to poetry as a spoken art. Cadence verse is non-syllabic resembling
music
Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...
rather than older metrical poetry with a rhythmic curve containing one or more stressed accents and roughly corresponding to the necessity of breathing, the cadence being more rapid and marked than in prose.
Legacy
The idea that cadence should be substituted for
metre
The metre (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of ...
was at the heart of the
Imagist
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized literary modernism, modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism has bee ...
credo according to
T. E. Hulme
Thomas Ernest Hulme (; 16 September 1883 – 28 September 1917) was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism. He was an aesthetic philosopher and the Imagism ...
.
Unrhymed cadence in
Vers libre
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free v ...
is built upon 'organic rhythm,' or the rhythm of the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system.
Cadence in
free verse
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free ...
came to mean whatever the writer liked, some claiming verse and poetry had it, but prose did not, but for some it was synonymous with free verse, where each poet has to find the cadence within himself.
[Taupin, Rene, ''The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American Poetry'' (1986),(trans. William Pratt) Ams Studies in Modern Literature, ]
See also
*
Vers libre
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free v ...
*
Free verse
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free ...
*
Cadence (music)
In Classical music, Western musical theory, a cadence () is the end of a Phrase (music), phrase in which the melody or harmony creates a sense of full or partial resolution (music), resolution, especially in music of the 16th century onwards.Don ...
References
Further reading
* Allen Charles- ''Cadenced Free Verse''. College English Vol 9 Dept of English, University of Arizona 1948.
*Charles O. Hartman, ''Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody'', Northwestern University Press, 1980.
* Smith James Harry ''The Reading of Poetry'' Houghton Mifflin New York 1939
External links
Read 'Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard' a cadenced poem by Carl SandburgCharles Allen - Cadenced Free Verse essay
Poetic forms
Human voice
Pitch (music)
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