A comprehensive and joyous celebration of metrical poetry - from Shakespeare to slam poetry - bringing together some of the best rhythmic lines in literature.

Two contemporary poets turns their attention to poetry as a living, rhythmic, often musical performance. Their wide-ranging selections encompass epic, folk songs, the Romantics, the Victorians, poets of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary hip hop. For many readers, the most familiar poetic metre is the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, but this only scratches the surface of the extraordinary diversity of rhythmic patterns that poets have employed over the ages. Measure for Measure has sections on Accentual Metre (Kipling, Bishop, Auden), Trochees (Blake, Dickinson, Dorothy Parker), Anapests (Byron, Frost, Langston Hughes); other sections cover iambs, ballads, and more exotic metres like amphibrachs, dipodics, hendecasyllabics and sapphics