Verse Meter and Characteristics of Enjambementin Civil Lyrics by J.G. Whittier

The article investigates the problem of similarity and difference between iambic tetrameter and pentameter in terms of interrelation of features in enjambement. The database includes civil lyrics by a famous romantic poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, in which iambic tetrameter and pentameter are most typical meters. The use of correlation analysis (Cole coefficient) made it possible to obtain the data about interrelation of enjambement characteristics (enjambement type, force and type of syntactic tie between the divided words, their contact or distant localization) in the abovementioned verse meters as well as the data on the basis of a combined dataset. The fact, that the frequency of enjambement in iambic pentameter is significantly higher than in 8-syllable lines, emphasizes the role of enjambement as a stylistic expressive unit not connected with the limitation of poetic line length. Analysis of similarity of the obtained correlation matrices (Jaccard coeffitient) demonstrated that the system of relations between enjambement characteristics is a stable feature of the poet’s individual style. Differences between meters, tough significant in size, are quantitative and not essential: the same tendencies are realized but to different extend. In iambic tetrameter the system of relations between different features is realized most completely