This study finds that in scanning poetry, the commitment to the "foot" as a unit of measure satisfies a desire for a poem to display a "system." But that system is achieved only at the cost of distorting or obscuring the true stress configuration of verse lines. The foot also comes into play in setting up the notion of an ideal line, supposedly heard by the "mind's ear," and said to be in "tension" or "counterpoint" with the actual line.

Rethinking Meter discards this approach as removing us from our authentic experience of a poem's movement. Before presenting its own view of meter, the book takes up the issues of how the words of a poem are to be enunciated, the place of pauses, and the notion of the line as the essential formal feature marking off poetry from prose. Focusing on iambic pentameter, Rethinking Meter proceeds to offer a view of metrical patterns that discards the foot entirely.