> "Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.

"Till this moment I" and "I never knew myself" would be trochaic and iambic, respectively, but they don't strictly scan when you overlay the 'I's. You can of course get them to by e.g. eliding 'moment', or adding a line break and taking '-ment' as a feminine ending, or just scanning according to the writer's idiosyncrasies.

And individual writers can be very idiosyncratic here. Shakespeare, for example, if I remember right, lets monosyllabic words occur in almost any position. Disyllabic words on the other hand can have any combination of stresses (iamb, trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic), but only if they're foot-aligned. And so on.

The field has probably evolved since I was last part of it, but I'll still recommend Kristin Hanson's work in this area: https://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf. (Actually the second time I've recommended Hanson on HN. The last time was, let's see, 6 years ago!)

+1! Hanson is one of the gold-standards on this. It is idiosyncratic, you're right - to the speaker / reader as much as the writer (is my contention with their work).

Personally, I do take 'ment' as a feminine ending there, or - more specifically - the T sound runs into the I sound when I read it, the way it would in the predominantly Italian stuff she's likely referencing.

I'm very much with Gordon Lish on Shakespeare's monosyllabic drift words - that he was educated in Latin, and integrating Germanic vocabulary into that structure relatively freely, and further analysis is almost impossibly complex. That said, there's a lot of moments in those where I'd kill to hear where the stress landed when first performed.

This specific area is really one of those "What if?" moments in literary criticism, I think - I believe it would be incredibly beneficial for the form if this was the dominant focus of critique, rather than thematic stuff. On the rare occasions I teach at universities, this is all completely new to students, which sucks - it's entirely possible to approach prose theory with the same rigour as music theory, and it seems (in the UK, at least) to be very quickly becoming a lost art!