Entertainment / Literature / Ictus: (Latin, 'blow,' or 'stroke') An artificial stress or diacritical accent placed over the top of particular syllables in a line of poetry to indicate which syllables the poet wants the reader to stress if that stress is not clear from the normal pattern of pronunciation. Sometimes, later editors will count the syllables in a line and add an ictus to flesh out the required versification. For instance, if a Shakespearean play has the word banish???©d, the ictus over the final -e indicates that the word is probably pronounced as three syllables, with the heavy accent on the final syllable. Some poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins use ictuses (icti) to place an artificial stress on syllables that would not normally be stressed. J. A. Cuddon's Dictionary of Literary Terms (page 439) offers the following example from Hopkins' poem 'Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves': self ???n self steep???©d and p????shed--quite. Here, the preposition in, which would normally be unstressed, is artificially stressed by the poet, as is the -ed in steeped.
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