It remained for the Russian linguistic-statistical school to systematize it; in their 1968 study of Russian verse, A.N. Kolmogorov and A.V. Proxorov used a system which made both stress and ictus explicit simultaneously.
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This basic approach has subsequently been used to scan English verse by Marina Tarlinskaja, Derek Attridge, and Peter L. Groves, though their systems differ in detail and purpose.
It is a technique employed often in the concluding lines of hymn texts, and has been employed in poetry to change tone or announce a conclusion, including its use in Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young." Robert Wallace argues in his Meter in English that the term acephalous line seems "pejorative", as if criticising the poet's violation of scansion, but this view is not widely held among critics.