Talk:Latin rhythmic hexameter

Excessive examples?

@Rsjaffe: This new article has been flagged up as containing "indiscriminate, excessive, or irrelevant" examples. May I answer? This article has been written to illustrate the development over the centuries of a particular kind of metre. This topic is not dealt with elsewhere on Wikipedia (the articles Dactylic hexameter and Prosody (Latin) do not mention it, and even standard textbooks such as D. S. Raven's Latin Metre stop short of medieval Latin). It is also not easy to find anything written about it in English, since almost all the useful articles on the subject are in German, Latin, French or Spanish.

I have illustrated it with 11 examples, which does not seem excessive for such a wide-ranging topic. All these examples are judged important and relevant to the topic by scholars who have written on the development of this metre. The average length of the examples is 10 lines. Should they perhaps be shortened? But subtle differences of style between one author and another and such features as alliteration and assonance cannot show up from just one or two lines. In the epitaph of Oppilanus, for example, it is only in lines 9 and 11 that the double leonine rhyme is used which startlingly anticipates by 5 centuries the famous 12th-century poem De contemptu mundi by Bernard of Cluny. In its early forms, the metre is a bit irregular and hard to grasp so it is helpful to have several lines to be able to understand it.

Apart from Urbanilla's epitaph, which has caught people's imagination and is mentioned in various blogs, most of the examples have no translation in English anywhere on the internet and some have no translation at all, so I thought it useful to add them.

Should more text be added? But I think the balance is right. Much of what has been written by scholars on these poems concerns their content or historical context, which is not relevant here; or else, like Hanssen, goes into a great deal of technical detail about elision, caesuras, and so on, of which it seems appropriate to include only the most important points.

As for advice to study how to write a Wikipedia article, I have already published over 50 articles on Wikipedia, several of which have achieved grade B, so I have a rough idea already of what is required.

So unless other readers add their voices to the discussion and suggest some changes I am happy to let the article stay as it is for the time being without trimming any of the examples or adding more text. Kanjuzi (talk) 07:53, 16 July 2022 (UTC)