At the core of this study is the assumption that the sound of discourse transfers the text from its silent fictional existence to an independent entity that refers, through its linguistic dialect, to a social context outside the text. This assumption makes it possible to move beyond defining prosodic forms merely according to the number of syllables or feet in a line toward an investigation of larger units and meta-constructions of prosodic elements where form and ideological content are inseparable. Following Mikhail Bakhtin, the article defines the phenomenon of metrical hybridization as the simultaneous existence of several voices represented by a mixture of multiple prosodic structures, each referring to a different set of poetic and ideological conventions. Considering examples from Emily Dickinson and Guillaume Apollinaire, I develop a method of analyzing the dialogical relations between the social voices in the hybrid construction.
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