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In seiner bahnbrechenden Studie über The Prosodies of Free Verse von 1971 unterschied Donald Wesling fünf verschiedene prosodische Typen in der Geschichte der free verse prosody:

  1. Whitmanic, referring to Whitman's adaptation of "the biblical verset and syntax" in "end-stopped lines .., .with boundaries so often equivalent to those of larger units of grammar," which Wesling sees as "constitut[ing] the precomposition or matrix of free verse in English" (166-67); 
  2. "line-sentences," as developed by Pound in Cathay on the basis of Ernest Fenollosa's theories of the sentence derived from study of Chinese; 
  3. dismemberment of the line, whereby the line becomes "ground to the figures of its smaller units" (181), and, as a sub-category, spatial dismemberment of the line by indentation, as by Williams in his triadic line verse; 
  4. systematic enjambment, whereby "[t]he lines.., .are figures on the ground of the larger unit, the stanza" (181); 
  5. dismemberment together with enjambment of the line, such that "the middle units on the rank scale engage in a protean series of identity shifts as between figure and ground." (181)

In Anlehnung an diese von Wesling in späteren Arbeiten erweiterten Typologie unterscheiden wir 18 rhythmische Muster anhand der folgenden drei Mustertypen:

Schema für Muster

Schema für Muster