It was an oops we should have given it to you for The Secret History award. This is just my opinion but I stand by it.

It doesn't matter. There's no such thing as 'messing up' one's reading. Just read on and take in what Milton has to say. You don't have a good ear. but so what? in fact, maybe you've simply no sense of rhythm but again, so what? There's no entrance exam on pentameters you must pass before you're allowed to read a poem. Trying to hear what you can't will only lessen whatever reward you might get from it.

Excellent advice so far, the only thing I would add is that the de/dum rhythm isn't always consistent within a line.

Lines can be 9/11 syllables and some feet may not conform to iambic metre - they might be trochaic for instance. There are certain feet that have to be iambic for the metre to work. I think they are 2/3/5 but my memory fails me slightly.

This might cause you a bit of difficulty when you are exaggerating the rhythm.

Another point is that different accents can add or subtract syllables from a word. In Milton's time some of the words will have been pronounced differently and this can cause difficulty for a modern reader.

Read it like prose, not poetry - follow the punctuation not the da-dum, da-dum

Try Ozymandius, by Shelly or the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay

This video was actually a great help. Thank you! I feel like I allllmost get it

Iambic pentameter is not originally English.

Genius.

This Tom Scott video really helped me understand the 'beat' of iambic pentameter.

I see it particularly in the poems of A.E.Houseman - from When I was One and Twenty, lines like:

"no Use to Talk to Me" - capitalisation my own.

Also, try A Shropshire Lad 1 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44410/a-shropshire-lad-1-from-clee-to-heaven-the-beacon-burns

I was reading Lost Paradise to my wife out loud and she was saying it made sense but while I was reading it I felt like I was messing up. Milton hated rhyming so his version is no rhyme and apparently lines can flow into the next line and the next line and the next so I wasn’t sure if I was reading it aloud properly

Thank you! Im gonna head to PTP and throw that on my Plex server TODAY!

In all seriousness though, the “de-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum” is supposed to act like the background pulse while the more dramatic emphases and variations cause the musical flow that makes writers like Milton and Shakespeare masters of iambic pentameter. The best way to improve your appreciation is to read them aloud or to find a high quality audiobook to listen to while you’re reading. Older texts can take a little more effort to get into but are really rewarding as well, so best of luck in your reading and enjoy!

are you reading it out loud by any chance? my experience w/ iambic is only shakespeare and afaik the dramatic effect of iambic doesn't come through until an actor/reader delivers it appropriately. when i was taught shakespeare, the goal wasn't to read it to yourself but to feel how it sounds when it's spoken aloud, and the dramatic (or comical) effect it creates when the rhythm (or lack of, as he often omitted on purpose) punctuates a moment

The trick for this is simple once you see / it’s all about conforming to the flow / of normal English speech, which has a pulse / of stressed and unstressed syllables which can, / by careful choice of words and phrases be / contained within this metric scheme for long / and drawn out passages that ebb and flow, / with sentences that never seem to end.

Shakespeare used iambic pentameter quite a bit (from memory I believe mainly if not exclusively for characters of noble standing but I could be mistaken here). Just in case you want some reference material to help.

Think heartbeat if that helps.

The rhythm doesn’t have to be apparent when reading, it’s more subconscious. If you want a very clear representation of how it works, watch Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost. There’s a scene where he taps out the iambic pentameter, then speaks over the tapping while exaggerating the da-dum rhythm, then continues to speak the text normally. It really showcases how it works, in my opinion.

Ozymandias by Shelley

The rhythm’s there, not always in your face. Some subtlety can make it hard to spot—unless you’re used to clapping every line. That’s what I make my freshmen do in class. No matter what I try, some still get stuck. On YouTube, there’s a video that helps: “I am a Pirate With a Wooden Leg.”

You are right. I am a truck driver so I listen to audiobooks to pass time. But every now and then something comes up on the road and i then i press rewind couple times to listen that portion again. Thats why i only listen fantasy/scifi books now and i plan to actually read the philosophical texts from now on

It's a great book. I don't think of Norris as anti-capitalist as much as a proponent of naturalism. McTeague is a great example of that

Thanks for finding the complete article.

The "date" in the url 1994_04_3 made me think that the date in my citation was off. But the image in the PDF itself is May 5.

Sublime is the perfect word!

We read it in high school! I sometimes think of it when I’m being cheap about something… don’t be like Trina!

But I always thought it’s weird that of his books, McTeague is the only one that blames the individual more than it does capitalism – he mainly critiqued capitalism but somehow that’s not the famous book. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy but…

> decided behind closed doors by unknown and unaccountable figures

I'm sorry. Who is this shadowy cabal deciding inclusive language? Do they decide all the modern no-no words or are there sub-committees for different minority groups?

>and handed down with no debate or dissent permitted,

They have enforcers!? Wow. They must be pretty powerful. I can imagine it now, "Hey, Tony, we don't use the g-word anymore. Yeah, last Tuesday. You mean yous didn't get the new list? Sorry, no excuses. I have to bust ya kneecaps. Oh, I guess I gotta call you a Nazi or racist or something too. Yeah, thanks for being so understanding, Tony."

Now, I wrote a lot of words so maybe you missed the important point that he missed and one of the main issues I have with accepting his argument. So let me spell it out:

The way we describe people absolutely colors how we engage with them. Advocates for inclusive or person-first language often do so with the intention of humanizing individuals within a group.

How much they succeed and whether or not they're ignoring the people with the most skin in the game, so to speak, is up for debate, especially as more people from within these minority and marginalized groups are able to be heard. It can be hard when there are advocates outside a group trying to be mindful or helpful so they use terms that conflict with the preferred terms of people within that group, doubly so if advocates within the group aren't even completely decided. And that's not even getting into the in-group people who are not as engaged and may not accept any of the most popular terms.

For example, I used latinx in a setting with some younger people from Cuba and the Dominican Republic a few years ago, mostly because I heard it and thought maybe it was slightly more inclusive. They were upset at most and indifferent at best, but all very vocal about it. So I asked their opinions, listened, then asked, "What would you, right now, as a group prefer?" They debated latino, but then came to a consensus of either that or latin@, an alternative a few had seen that combines the -a and -o pronounced like latinay, for its inclusivity to the girls. So that's what I went with. When I was with other groups, if they had a problem when said it, I'd usually laugh a bit and apologize, explain my experience with the first group then ask the new group their preference.

We seem to have this aversion to being wrong. I don't know if I can blame people for where it comes from. I know I'm not immune to it. Part of it's natural: it hurts to be wrong. It hurts to have someone disagree with us. Research shows that our worldview is fundamentally tied to our ego. So when our opinions or beliefs are challenged, our body feels threatened. But part of this aversion is learned too. We get so full of ourselves. Look at the people I listen to, how intelligent I am, how many people I know, the success I have in work and home, the breadth and depth of my knowledge as proven by my peers, teachers, and institutions! Surely there is no fault in my logic, foundation, or reasoning! Maybe that's just as much the ego talking.

Perhaps I'm rambling. Point being that we hear a lot about scientific or mathematical reasoning. These are fields wherein answers are often clear cut. Barring rare or unusual cases that don't affect nor appear in most peoples' daily lives, 2+2=4; ice freezes; fire burns.

When it comes to people, our societies, our cultures, our languages and so on, things are not so clear cut. The language today is not the language we grew up with. There is no higher authority that can dictate nor forcefully direct the change of such. Rationality can only predict so much because not every person is rational nor are they rational in the same ways as, even with the same information, two people may come to opposite conclusions. In that way, we may write or say something and someone will disagree. It may be one person. It may be an entire group. We may be able to defend what we said and how we said it wholly and flawlessly. We may realize that what we said or how we said it was, in fact, poorly delivered. The best we can do is understand and learn. It's no good engaging with people who have good intentions if we don't even try to understand and faithfully represent why they do what they do.

If you've stuck with me this long, thanks. You didn't have to, especially after my snark at the beginning. I've been writing this comment longer than I wanted, same as my original comment honestly, partially because it's gotten more introspective than I was intending. I'm tired. Tired of a lot of things. I'm tired of endless niggling that assumes such and such is a monolith, taking advantage of our gullible brains' inability to distinguish a few examples from a genuine trend. I'm tired of endless pontificators huffing their own farts in intellectually masturbatory editorials. I'm tired of the people that continue to publish that rubbish as it's often inflammatory "hot takes" designed to attract clicks.

Anyways, here's Douglas Adams being far more concise than I'll ever care to be on the general subject:

>Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

To add to the other commenter's point about inclusive language itself being cheap, here's an MLK quote:

>It didn’t cost the nation anything to integrate hotels and motels. It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty, to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality

Change is easy when it doesn't require fundamentally restructuring our institutions or reconfiguring the way we distribute our wealth. We can't even get people to accept the cheap change, let alone the real change.

https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyorktimes.pdf