Reddit reviews The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
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The single best piece of advice I can give to anyone wanting to really get to grips with metre (and poetry in general really) is to read Stephen Fry's book The Ode Less Travelled. His chapter on "the great Iamb (and other binary feet)" will make all this clear. First he introduces the iamb with reference to Popeye - "I yam what I yam" :-) and then shortly afterwards leads into two pages of lines of "perfect" iambic pentameter, insisting that the reader "not read a single line more until they have a pencil in hand" with which to mark up where the stresses fall in each of them... do that exercise, and I guarantee your brain will be wired to spot the stresses:
and one and two and three and four and five
he bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise
Only by sounding out a whole bunch of lines in iambic pentameter will you get past this mental block - but stick with it, and you'll soon wonder what the fuss was about!