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Fixed verse is a structured type of poetry with a fixed meter and rhyme. It was popular in early English poetry and had strict guidelines for line length and rhyming conventions. Shakespearean poetry used iambic pentameter. Free verse replaced fixed verse as poets focused more on emotional intent than technical mastery. Fixed verse is still studied but not commonly produced in contemporary literature.
Fixed verse is a type of poetry that has predominated for many centuries within the writing communities of the English language and other contemporary cultures; the essential aspect of this broad category of writing is that it has a fixed metre, or number of syllables in each line, together with the required rhyme. Fixed poetry is also often called structured poetry because writers are expected to adhere to strict guidelines regarding the line length of the poem, as well as rhyming conventions.
In early examples of English poetry, fixed verse was nearly universal. Societies of the time built elaborate structures for fixed verse, including many different types of meters and technical conventions for poetry. Some of the more popular forms included iambic and trochaic, where each line was composed of fixed patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables, called feet, and a fixed line length.
The result of the conventional fixed verse was a poem that read in a specific cadence and was largely predictable. Pairs of lines, or even additional sets of lines, in different lines rhyme with each other to further enhance the effect of the fixed line. One prime example of this is the fixed traditional Shakespearean poetry and drama which still dominate some areas of secondary and university English literary education.
In the example of Shakespearean or general Elizabethan fixed poetry, the meter is most often iambic pentameter. This means that each line consists of ten syllables in a specific pattern of an initial unstressed syllable, followed by a stressed syllable. In other words, iambic pentameter is five twos. This pattern produces a recognizable cadence and inflection that most English-speaking speakers are familiar with.
As poetry evolved, fixed verse was eventually replaced with an almost opposite framework called free verse. Poets began to abandon the fixed meters of previous eras, associating the effects of poetry more with emotional intent than with technical mastery. In general, the poem began to take on many more informal conventions, from the omission of capital letters to the arbitrary use of partial lines wrapped in white space on the page.
While fixed verse is still widely studied, it is not much of a contemporary literature. Free verse and other more modern forms of poetry are also less commonly produced than newer forms of communication such as visual media or book-length manuscripts. It is helpful for the modern student to understand the use of fixed verse in poetry over the centuries and how it has contributed to a number of world cultures and literary canons.
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