Hexameter is a type of poetic line made up of six feet. A "foot" is a unit that includes syllables and accents in poetry. In Greek and Latin, a foot refers to patterns of syllables, not accents. Hexameter was the main meter used in epic poems from ancient Greece and Rome, such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. It also appeared in other works, like Horace’s satires, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Hymns of Orpheus. According to Greek mythology, the poet Phemonoe, who was the daughter of Apollo and the first Pythia of Delphi, is said to have created hexameter.

Classical hexameter

In classical hexameter, the six feet follow these guidelines:

• A foot can consist of two long syllables (— —), called a spondee, or one long syllable and two short syllables (— ∪∪), called a dactyl.
• The first four feet can include either a spondee or a dactyl.
• The fifth foot is usually a dactyl, and the sixth foot must be a spondee or a trochee (which together form an adonic). Exceptions may occur if a long name (especially a Greek name) ends a verse.

A short syllable (∪) is a syllable with a short vowel and no ending consonant. A long syllable (—) is a syllable with a long vowel, one or more ending consonants, or both. Spaces between words are not counted when dividing syllables. For example, "cat" is a long syllable (—) when said alone, but in the phrase "cat attack," it is divided into three syllables: "ca," "ta," and "tack," which are short (∪), short (∪), and long (—).

Changes in the pattern of feet from line to line, along with the use of caesura (a pause within a line), help avoid a repetitive, sing-song rhythm.

Application

Although the rules for classical hexameter seem simple, it is difficult to use this meter in English. English is a stress-timed language, meaning it shortens vowels and consonants between stressed syllables. Hexameter, however, depends on regular timing of sound patterns. Languages that are not stress-timed, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, and Hungarian, are better suited for hexameter.

Classical hexameter has not been widely used in English, where the standard meter is iambic pentameter. However, English poets have sometimes written in iambic hexameter. Many examples from the 16th century and a few from the 17th century exist. One famous example is Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), written in couplets of iambic hexameter. A line from Drayton shows the six feet in each line:

In the 17th century, iambic hexameter—also called alexandrine—was sometimes used in heroic couplets and in lyrical stanzas and Pindaric odes by poets like Cowley and Dryden.

In the 19th century, some poets tried to adapt dactylic hexameter to English, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Arthur Hugh Clough. These attempts were not very successful. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote many poems using six-foot iambic and sprung rhythm lines. In the 20th century, William Butler Yeats used a loose, ballad-like six-foot line with a strong pause in the middle. The iambic six-foot line has also been used occasionally, and some translators and poets have used an accentual six-foot line.

In the late 18th century, Kristijonas Donelaitis adapted hexameter to the Lithuanian language. His poem Metai (The Seasons) is considered the most successful hexameter work in Lithuanian.

For examples of dactylic hexameter poetry in Hungarian, see the section "Dactylic hexameter#In Hungarian."

Albert Meyer (1893–1962) used a natural form of hexameter in his translation of some verses from Homer’s Odyssey into the Swiss dialect of Bern.