It has been my good fortune to pursue research on alliterative metre during a period when this subject attracted the attention of many Anglo-Saxonists and when questions of poetic form took on special importance for theoretical linguists. For valuable discussion of metrical problems by correspondence and at various conferences I owe thanks to Patricia Bethel, Mary Blockley, Thomas Cable, Robert Creed, Daniel Donoghue, Edwin Duncan, David Hoover, Constance Hieatt, Rand Hutcheson, Calvin Kendall, O. D. Macrae-Gibson, Bruce Mitchell, Haruko Momma, Eric Stanley and Jun Terasawa. A draft of the book was read by William Crossgrove, R. D. Fulk, Joseph Harris and two anonymous reviewers, for whose comments I am grateful. My approach to related linguistic problems began more than two decades ago in discussions with Roman Jakobson, Samuel J. Keyser and Paul Kiparsky. Since then I have also profited from conversation or correspondence with linguists Elan Dresher, Bruce Hayes, Richard Hogg, Pauline Jacobson, Roger Lass, David Lightfoot, C. B. McCully, Donka Minkova, Robert Noyer, Robert Stockwell, Seiichi Suzuki and Gilbert Youmans. Some of these researchers have published views differing from my own, but all have been courteous and helpful. They bear no responsibility, of course, for any errors I have made. To Jacqueline Haring Russom I owe special thanks for identifying computational procedures that greatly enhanced my control of the data. Allen Renear's Scholarly Technology Group found just the right software to implement these procedures and showed me how to use it most effectively.