Poetic Feet

Accentual-Syllabic verse--again, that's most traditional poetry in English--consists of feet. Each poetic foot has a distinctive combination of stresses and number of syllables. Iambic meter, for instance, consists mainly of two-syllable feet with the stress on the second of those two syllables. This section defines the poetic feet, and then it gives you a handy poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to help you remember them.