Editing Poetry (section)

====Metrical patterns====
{{Main|Meter (poetry)}}
[[File:Lewis Carroll - Henry Holiday - Hunting of the Snark - Plate 6.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Lewis Carroll]]'s ''[[The Hunting of the Snark]]'' (1876) is mainly in [[anapestic tetrameter]].]]
Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearean [[iambic pentameter]] and the Homeric [[dactylic hexameter]] to the [[anapestic tetrameter]] used in many nursery rhymes. However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a [[caesura]] (or pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a [[Meter (poetry)|feminine ending]] to soften it or be replaced by a [[spondee]] to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly irregular.<ref>{{Harvnb|Fussell|1965|pp=36–71}}</ref> Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different languages, so that, for example, [[iambic tetrameter]] in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur, or occurs to a much lesser extent, in English.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |url=https://archive.org/details/notesonprosodyon0000nabo/page/46 |title=Notes on Prosody |publisher=Bollingen Foundation |year=1964 |isbn=978-0-691-01760-0 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/notesonprosodyon0000nabo/page/46 46–47]}}</ref>

[[File:Kiprensky Pushkin.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Alexander Pushkin]]]]
Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include:
* [[Iambic pentameter]] ([[John Milton]], ''[[Paradise Lost]]''; [[William Shakespeare]], ''[[Shakespeare's Sonnets|Sonnets]]'')<ref>{{Harvnb|Adams|1997|p=206}}</ref>
* [[Dactylic hexameter]] (Homer, ''[[Iliad]]''; [[Virgil]], ''[[Aeneid]]'')<ref>{{Harvnb|Adams|1997|p=63}}</ref>
* [[Iambic tetrameter]] ([[Andrew Marvell]], "[[To His Coy Mistress]]"; [[Alexander Pushkin]], ''[[Eugene Onegin]]''; [[Robert Frost]], ''[[Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening]]'')<ref name="tetra">{{Cite web |url=http://www.tetrameter.com |title=What is Tetrameter? |publisher=tetrameter.com |access-date=10 December 2011}}</ref>
* [[Trochaic octameter]] ([[Edgar Allan Poe]], "[[The Raven]]")<ref>{{Harvnb|Adams|1997|p=60}}</ref>
* [[Trochaic tetrameter]] ([[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]], ''[[The Song of Hiawatha]]''; the Finnish national epic, ''[[Kalevala|The Kalevala]]'', is also in trochaic tetrameter, the natural rhythm of Finnish and Estonian)
* {{lang|fr|[[Alexandrin]]}} ([[Jean Racine]], ''[[Phèdre]]'')<ref>{{Cite book |last1=James |first1=E. D. |url=https://archive.org/details/racinephdre00jame |title=Racine: Phèdre |last2=Jondorf |first2=G. |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1994 |isbn=978-0-521-39721-6 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/racinephdre00jame/page/32 32–34] |url-access=registration}}</ref>