"Acatalectic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two very remarkable things. In the first place, he broke entirely with alliteration and with any-length lines, composing his poem in a metre which is either a fifteen-syllabled iambic tetrameter catalectic, or else, as the reader pleases, a series of distichs in iambic dimeters, alternately acatalectic and catalectic. He does not rhyme, but his work, in the couplet form which shows it best, exhibits occasionally the alternation of masculine and feminine endings. This latter peculiarity was not to take hold in the language; but the quantified or mainly syllabic arrangement ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the "Raven." The former is trochaic—the latter is octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptametre catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrametre catalectic. Less pedantically, the feet employed throughout (trochees) consists of a long syllable followed by a short; the first ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe |
