2026

The study of meter in the 20th century has generally been marked by the foregrounding of some types of verse that proved amenable to a particular theoretical approach (e.g. English iambic pentameter in generative metrics, Russian iambic tetrameter in statistical work on verse, Greek hexameter in diachronic reconstruction), to the detriment of others.

Over the past several years the Linguistics and Poetics research group at the University of Oslo has sought to circumvent this kind of bias by exploring various manifestations and uses of poetic language in ancient (Greek) and Medieval (Latin, Germanic) cultural milieus. We have dwelt on the diversity of attested literary cultures (sometimes proliferating within a single national “tradition”) and prioritized an empiricist ethos over the goal of finessing any particular methodology.

The international symposium “Comparative metrics sub specie philologiae” aims to expand our vision of comparative metrics by interrogating and juxtaposing novel, tailor-made, and empirically-driven approaches to cross-culturally diverse uses of poetic meter.