Introduction

This chapter is concerned with some of the basic meters of the Spanish tradition, as well as certain key aspects of Italian and Galician-Portuguese metrics. An important feature of the metrical systems studied here is that they make use of both the notion ‘stressed syllable’ and the more restrictive notion ‘maximum’. Failure to make the distinction between the set of stressed syllables and its subset of ‘maxima’ has often led metrists to cast their otherwise correct intuitions in terms of mere tendencies or preferences, or the equivalent. This in turn paves the way for doubtful conclusions: if, say, the Italian endecasillabo is conceived as having only a tendency towards an iambic distribution of stresses, then nothing prevents us from treating it as a syllabic meter, albeit one which properties of the language and universal rhythmic propensities conspire to overlay, somewhat haphazardly, with multiples of two. Why this rhythm should tolerate a maximum in the third position of the line, but not in the fifth, is of course a question that cannot even be posed unless the notion of maximum is available, in spite of the fact that this descriptive generalization has been obvious to scholars for centuries. Every one of the first ten syllables of an endecasillabo can bear stress, so the most one can conclude is that the third syllable is much more likely to be tonic than the fifth, or else that a fifth syllable stress is felt to be excessively evocative of a different meter.