Q&A for How to Scan a Poem

Usually words aren't required to be stressed, syllables are. It can depend on the way the poet wants to make the poem flow or on the type of poem or meter used.

Pretty much. Also, just out of a familiarity with English (and if you don't know how to pronounce a word, you can always look it up). For instance, you know that "poem" is PO-em and not po-EM. Sometimes in older stuff (like Shakespeare) stuff was pronounced a little differently (we pronounce "stressed" like "stress'd," they would've pronounced it like "stress-ed" unless they wrote it with the apostrophe), but generally it's pretty straightforward.

That's called common meter, which is the most, well, common meter for hymns and a lot of American poetry. Sometimes also called ballad meter, although the rhyme schemes for the two vary.

It's easiest if you copy and paste the poem into Word, or a similar program. Double spacing the poem and adding in the appropriate symbols is really easy to do with a word processing program.

Syl-la-ble.

You would have to recite the poem (or hear it recited) in order to detect a repeating pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Once you recognize the pattern, decide how many syllables are contained within each unit of the repeating pattern.

Perhaps you are referring to "iambic pentameter," in which each line consists of five "feet," and each "foot" consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. If you arrive at the fifth stressed syllable and there is still one word left in the line, either the poet miswrote the line, or you miscounted the syllables.