Reconsidering Reuven Tsur's Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance-An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics

When reviewing Tsur's book for this journal in 2001, I praised it as the most thorough study we now have of performance techniques in reciting verse, but strongly criticized two of his key concepts. I argued that (1) the perception-oriented theory of meter cannot identify unmetrical lines and (2) the limited capacity of short-term memory fails to provide a general explanation why (as Tsur claims) the longest verse line we can perceive as a rhythmical unit without an obligatory break is decasyllabic. Subsequent research has, however, convinced me that I was wrong on both accounts, particularly as to the constraints of short-term memory on verse-length. This paper gives the evidence for that change of view.