ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Put simply, iambic pentameter is a metrical speech rhythm that is natural to the English language. Shakespeare used iambic pentameter because it closely resembles the rhythm of everyday speech, and he no doubt wanted to imitate everyday speech in his plays.

Detailed explanation-2: -Iambic pentameter is the name given to a line of verse that consists of five iambs (an iamb being one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed, such as “before"). It has been a fundamental building block of poetry in English, used in many poems by many poets from the English Renaissance to the present day.

Detailed explanation-3: -Iambic pentameter is a very common way that lines of poetry are structured. Each line has five sets of two beats, the first is unstressed and the second is stressed. E.g. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” where the bold beats are stressed, and the underlined beats are unstressed.

Detailed explanation-4: -Shakespeare’s sonnets are written predominantly in a meter called iambic pentameter, a rhyme scheme in which each sonnet line consists of ten syllables. The syllables are divided into five pairs called iambs or iambic feet. An iamb is a metrical unit made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.