Writing in meter

[Anonymous No.20768777]

How did he do it? In fact, how does anyone do it? How do you go about writing a whole play or epic while simultaneously keeping your meter constant all throughout? Did he take months or years to write a single play? I'd like to be a playwright but things like blankverse and similar seem to be to tedious to deal with.

[Anonymous No.20768786]

>>20768777
>How do you go about writing a whole play or epic while simultaneously keeping your meter constant all throughout?
You're mistaking Shakespeare with Racine. Only Shakes's poems are fully in meter.

[Anonymous No.20769007]

>>20768777
>but things like blankverse and similar seem to be to tedious to deal with
Uh no? Blank verse is easy as shit to write. You just sound ignorant of poetry.

[Anonymous No.20769550]

>>20768777
I wrote a couple books for my shite epic in iambic pentameter. Writing in the meter is actually pretty easy (especially for iambic pentameter you can literally just count out syllables on your fingers) the hard part is actually making it, yknow, artistic
I found myself using way too man single syllable words like "and" "then" "when" etc and also found I was too limiting in that each line would contain one idea then the next line would be a different idea. It's hard for me to explain but if you read Shakespeare you'll find that the sentances flow across lines and if you read them without the breaks they read pretty seamlessly whereas my shite epic you felt like taking a breathe at the end of every line.
I don't really wanna link my poem cuz, ya, it's really bad and cringe but it was that experience writing it which gave me a really deep and intense appreciation of what Shakespeare or any of the epic poets were able to construct

[Anonymous No.20770868]

Shakespeare actually frequently "relaxed" the meter in his later plays, aside from outright switching to prose when suitable (for e.g. uneducated characters).
A big part of it is just habit, when you write such verses for a few years it must become a second nature (note that Shakespeare practically never used anything but iambic pentameter!). You immediately have a feeling for which word might fit where.
A single play must've taken him many months or even a few years to write, but not due to the verse.
There are much more difficult verse forms, take a look at Dante's terza rima. One of the most complicated examples that I know of was Marko Marulić, who wrote in twelve-syllable lines, where each line actually contained two rhyming words, one on the end and one in the middle of the verse, and transmitted the rhyming pair of syllables from each end to the following internal rhyme. To illustrate, a stanza:
>Zgrize ga mao čarv oružjem njegovim.
>Ubi ga ženska sarv, ki biše prostro dim
>da zajme svitom svim. Ki mnjaše da ni Bog
>silam njegovim tim jest protiviti mog.
čarv-sarv, njegovim-dim-svim-tim, Bog-mog (the final pair will continue being rhymed in the next two verses as well, as the first pair was also a continuation of the previous rhymes) - the "interlocking" pattern is reminiscent of terza rima
No wonder, he produced only one short epic and a handful of shorter poems with such a verse. Dante IIRC only did the Comedy with terza rima.
I remember seeing even more complicated forms used in some troubadour poems...
Now, a part of the problem is that rhymes are not a natural part of speech, they're difficult to come by and can be a strain on the sense of the text (which happens to Marulić). Shakespeare stuck to blank verse most of the time, the form that only cares about the stress and syllable count, which are much easier to control, and are a natural part of language. Accordingly, his rhymed sonnets I found much more difficult to comprehend and follow, and he must've sweated more upon them himself.