Robert Frost: Rhythmical Structure of His Iambic Tetrameter

Abstract This essay researches how Robert Frost's poems “are made.” It offers new methodologies of analyzing stressing, the main constituent of poetic rhythm. Frost's iambic tetrameter is the material of analysis. The formula of entropy is used to measure the rhythmical diversity of texts. The essay also follows the distribution of word boundaries and syntactic breaks in poetic texts. Word boundaries and syntactic breaks are two more constituents of poetic rhythm. The conclusions are: (1) Frost's late poems are rhythmically more diverse than his early poems, and (2) the rhythmical structure of lines also depends on the narrative and thematic features of the poems. Similar features had been discovered in Russian poetry. Further research might show if these are poetic universals.