How can I tell if a syllable is accented? I'm trying to

How does this work for uninflected languages like French?

>>8437436
French has poetry based on syllables not accents.

>>8437436
different meters for different languages. Italian poetry is easy as fuck to make sound incredible. English is a difficult language for poetry.

>>8437427
Practice. There are books and probably websites with poems that show the accents. Sometimes there can be more than one way to do it too.

>>8437427
sometimes you can force a word into more than one scan. it just depends on the meter you are using. just say the words out loud like a moron until you get it. you'll sound like rain man, but girls love poets. it's worth it.

>>8437445

different != difficult

>>8437427

You can tell a syllable is accented if it's accented. No really, I'm not just being a smartass, it's that you're thinking of it the wrong way. Don't look for a metric pattern and then try to cram all the syllables into that pattern; instead, just mark all the syllables they way they would normally be accented and see what patterns arise from that. Let you give you a simple example. Say you find two lines like this:

x / x / x / x / x /
/ x x / x / x / x /

Note that the first two syllables on the second line are inverted from the standard iambic pentameter. Does that mean that you should be pronouncing the word 'meter' as me-TER instead of ME-ter? No, it means the poet decided to use a trochaic word instead of an iambic one, likely for an aesthetic purpose. Then the fun part is finding out what that purpose is and if the poet included other examples of that pattern.