La place de l’e post-tonique muet dans l’octosyllabe de quelques poètes

This paper analyzes and compares octosyllabic verses by sixteen Belgian and French poets, ranging from Baudelaire and Hugo to Éluard and Perros, with a special emphasis on post-stress e's at the various places this vowel can occupy. Even and odd syllables are confronted to determine whether some poets strive for, or avoid, an iambic scansion of their octosyllables. The study shows that six poets diverge significantly from the rest of the corpus, three of them through an especially high number of e's in even syllables, the others through a deficit at that same place and an overabundance at the 5th syllable. These observations allow us to distinguish between those poets who were able to perceive and design the octosyllable as a unit from those who, in order to compose it, needed to give it a binary rhythm or to allow for a median pause