Dear Fellow Spenserians,
Enjoy your awful sobriety.
Harry
>
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>From: caddison <[log in to unmask]>
>To: "versification" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: trochaic pentameter
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>
>At the end of Peter Groves's excellent account
>of the birth of English iambic pentameter, he returns to
>the issue of trochaic penatmeter thus:
>
>>I suppose the question is: did t.p. fail to develop metrical variation
>>because it wasn't taken up and used for the kinds of historical reason I
>>suggested, or is trochaic metre somehow incapable of it? I'm not sure.
>>
>I am very interested in these two issues--historical reasons
>for the usage of particular verse forms and what actually 'can'
>be done with these verse forms. I suppose that everyone
>involved with prosody has to be concerned with them. Finding
>and defending the degree to which one believes that one of
>them prevails over the other is like a prosodic theodicy--a
>personal thing for each individual perhaps, or something that one
>wants to preach from the mountaintops.
>
>Take stanza forms, for example. The Spenserian hasn't been,
>my knowledge, much used for comic purposes--and it's
>easy to find reasons for this after the event, as it were. (My
>great-great-grandfather, John Moultry, wrote Spenserians
>that are so solemn and awful that they are almost funny,
>but that's probably a different matter.) This is in contrast
>to ottava rima and rhyme-royal, which share characteristics
>with the Spenserian. But I don't believe that we can conclude
>that this form can't be used for comedy--even without
>some virtuoso poet proving us wrong by actually writing
>a batch of (intentionally) hilarious Spenserians. I suppose
>I believe that stanza forms encourage certain tendencies rather
>than enforce them. But this is still unproveable, since history
>is omnipresent and, in the views of some at least, omnipotent,
>too.
>
>Catherine Addison
>University of Zululand
>South Africa
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