Random thoughts

 I'd like to conceptualize adaptation studies under the category of reception, and have it include everything from translation to illustration, musical setting, and apocrypha.  It seems Hutcheon just perceives it in a conventional way, as novel to film, or film to video game, or things in that paradigm. Mostly larger narrative structures.  

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I was reading Carlos Piera's dissertation on Spanish metrics, from 1980 or so. It still stands up pretty well. I just had a random email in my box with a link to download the pdf.  It humbled me a bit because he begins with the distinction between prosodic rules and metrical rules, and I couldn't figure out what the difference is! 

Anyway, I was thinking of metrical patterns, and you could think of the metrical paradigm easily seen in a line like this---

"Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow" 

--as being rare.  In other words, a line of zero complexity is both rare and somewhat bad (of course, if is not bad here, because it is used on purpose, and almost as a kind of metrical joke!).  

So the next category would be the statistically average, or the rhythmic instantiations most frequently found. What is the "average" degree of metrical complexity? The corpus would have to be, say, a particular poet or a long work.  

The next category would be "optimal." This might overlap a bit with the "average," in the sense that the most skillful verse will also fall somewhere in the middle of the complexity range. 

Metrics itself cannot tell us what optimal means. We would have to first agree on what poets we thought of as optimal, according to our own ears, and then see what their averages are.  I might like a poet of more complexity, or less, than you do.  Also, you would want to see what happens from line to line, the movement of the verse, and what we might call the prosodic intelligence. Poets, to me, have a certain metrical "signature" that I can visualize with my eyes closed. It is the overlay of the sounds of words, the syntax, and the particular rhythms.  

So what is the exact relation between the "average" and the "optimal"?  That would be the question.