The course will cover theoretical approaches to rule-governed prosodic patterning in verse in the generative tradition. We will engage two groups of theoretical questions. (1) Metrical knowledge: how do metrical texts get their structure, and what is the nature of metrical representations and rules/constraints that govern them? (2) Variation: what is the nature of gradient metricality, how can it be discovered in a corpus, and how is it represented in grammar? The empirical focus will be on English, especially on working with large corpora of verse; time permitting, we will take a more cursory look at cross-linguistic typology.