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"Eighteenth-century music theorists adopted incise from literary terminology when they began to indulge in detailed analogies between music and poetry. On the one hand, using incise to mean a segment, they described it as one level in a hierarchy of structural levels. More specifically, they described it as a clause, or subphrase, which ranked above one or more poetic feet at the minimal level (such as iambs or trochees), but below a verse, sentence, or phrase at the next higher level (or a period, a stanza, a paragraph, or a section, at yet higher levels). On the other hand, using incise to mean a caesura, the theorists described it as an incomplete cadence on a par with the comma. For they also perceived a hierarchy of cadences in music, from barely perceptible to complete and final, that was analogous to the progressive levels of punctuation in poetry, from the comma to the semicolon to the period." (William S. Newman, Beethoven on Beethoven, p. 164)