Accent (poetry)


In English poetry, accent refers to the stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word, or a monosyllabic word that receives stress because it belongs to an "open class" of words or because of "contrastive" or "rhetorical" stress. In basic analysis of a poem by scansion, accents can be represented by a short vertical line preceding the syllable, while the divisions between feet are shown by a slash.
There is generally one accent in each foot, for example: