An early 10th-century Arabic critic defined poetry formally as "metrical, rhymed, meaningful speech". There are numerous studies of classical Arabic poetry, both pre-modern and modern, that deal with the themes and motifs of poems. Many of these pay...
more
An early 10th-century Arabic critic defined poetry formally as "metrical, rhymed, meaningful speech". There are numerous studies of classical Arabic poetry, both pre-modern and modern, that deal with the themes and motifs of poems. Many of these pay scant attention to the formal aspects that distinguish Arabic poetry from prose: metre, rhyme, and other sound patterns. Likewise, there are many treatises and monographs on these formal aspects, but often they are more concerned with theory than with actual poetic practice, and they are rarely interested in the relationships between sounds and mea
Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Table of Contents; Preface; Abbreviations and Symbols; Transliteration; Some Terms; Body; I. INTRODUCTION; 1. Sounds and Senses; 2. Poetry; 3. The Sound of Classical Arabic Verse: the Known and the Unknown; II. METRE; 1. Arabic Metre; 2. The Suitability of Arabic Prosody; 3. Length or Weight; 4. Asymmetry as an Essential Part of Arabic Poetry; 5. Choosing a Metre; 6. The Irrelevance of the Foot; 7. The Relevance of the Hemistich and the Caesura; 8. Some Metrical Statistics; 9. From Theory to Rare Practice: Three Metres; 10. Long and Short Measure
11. Extremely Short Measure12. The Beat of the Clapper: An Oddity of Classical Arabic Versification .; 13. Further Metrical Experiments; 14. Degrees of Regularity and Irregularity; 15. Truly Unmetrical Verse; 16. Musical Rhythm and Poetical Metre; 17. Using a Metre; III. RHYME; 1. To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme; 2. Rhyme in Arabic Verse; 3. Rhyme and Metre; 4. Choosing a Rhyme; 5. Monorhyme and Monotony; 6. Enjambment; 7. Anticipating the Rhyme-Word ; 8. Choosing a Rhyme, continued: Feminine Rhyme; 9. Jarring Sounds, 1: The Ugly Rhyme-Letter /kh/ and its Ugly Sisters
10. Jarring Sounds, 2: The Ugliest Arabic Words and Tongue-Twisters11. Rhyming Irregularities; 12. Ultra-Monorhyme; 13. No Rhyme; 14. Rhyme Rich and Richer; IV. SOUND PATTERNS; 1. Onomatopoeia; 2. Sound Effects for their Own Sake; 3. Alliteration, Lipogram, and Related Forms; 4. Parallelisms and Repetitions; 5. Paronomasia and Double Entendre; V. SOUND AND SENSE; 1. Smoothness and Appropriate Roughness; 2. What is Wrong with al-A4shā's Ayniyyah?; APPENDIX A; Metre and Rhyme in Classical Arabic Poetry: A Practical Survey; APPENDIX B; The Sounds of Arabic; BIBLIOGRAPHY
