So, I ask, off with severity, spare my jests and jollities: Martial’s choice of meter as a primer of humorous affect in his dactylic, hendecasyllabic and choliambic poetry
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2025-08-18
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en
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How does Martial exploit metrical features such as caesura placement, enjambment, foot substitution, and line-final closure to control not just meaning, but when and how humorous effects occur? Or, more broadly speaking, how does Martial’s metrical proficiency yield affective prosody? The scope of this study is to understand how the metrical tricks up the poet’s sleeve are employed to prime expectation and to subvert it. Three different Latin meters will be discussed, the dactylic hexameter (and conversely elegiac couplet), the hendecasyllable and the choliamb, where particular attention will be given to their respective prosodic and stylistic qualities, before examples of this meter from Martial’s corpus will be thoroughly analyzed both rhythmically and metrically. After this analysis, the synkrisis of Martial’s meters, and how the caesura acts as a rhetorical, or in this case humorous, anchor, will be put up for discussion: the closing preposition being, the caesura may act as a primer of humor, governed by the prosodical idiosyncrasies of specific meters.
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Faculteit der Letteren