No toes, no shoes, no soles here folks. In literary circles,
this term refers to the most basic unit of a poem's meter. A
foot is a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables.
There are all kinds of feet in poetry, and they all sound
different, so we'll give you a handy list. If you want to be the
nerdiest nerd in the nerd herd, you should memorize it: A
combination of feet makes up a line of meter. So, for example,
the most common meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter,
which contains five (that's where that "pent-" comes from)
iambs, all in a row. Finding your feet can be as tricky as
learning the Viennese Waltz, but that's the main task of
scansion, a fancy term for analyzing a poem's meter. Just
remember the list above, and read aloud, read read aloud.