Given my thesis topic, I've been thinking a lot lately about how to conceptualize the unit of the "line" in poetry, and how it might translate into other media. So much, if not all, of our understanding of meter and prosody was born from poetry laid out on the printed page; we're taught to read each word aloud, find the syllable divisions, mark each stress with a pen. This process is designed to map sound onto the written word. For the "poems" that I'm exploring from the seventeenth-century, though, prosody came before the text it describes -- it was a system into which language was poured. In the case of Juan Caramuel's Maria Stella (below), syllable and stress divisions were built as a kind of machine, and whatever language was automatically generated from it seemed almost inconsequential. The same thing happens in so many digital poems, where the sound and visual appearance of words take on a dimension that in many ways seems prior to whatever text pops out. How can we generalize the rules and theories of meter (broadly construed) so as to be useful for the study of poetry in all media?

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