>poetry grew out of use, hard
use, and misuse of the language and the rules. Poetry is metrical
language; lacking meter, language cannot be poetry. It may be powerful,
it may be art, it may be a lot of other things, too, but it cannot be poetry.
The whole point of poetry is the meter, and without it what you've got is
prose.
Sounds like the onward and upward school of thought. Was alliterative verse, or for that matter biblical verse organized as cumulative near-repetition, a failed experiment?
If you substituted "music" for "meter" in your above statement I'd come closer to agreeing (but see below). In the formula as you present it, there's never been poetry in Spanish, as Spanish poets don't write scanned verse, even in sonnets.
> What matters most is what is being said. I do NOT mean the abstractable
> prose statement of what the poem "means" which so many crave, but what is
> going on at that point in the poem
>Even accepting that you do not mean the prose statement of meaning, I
think it's wrong that what matters most in poetry is what is being said.
That's what matters most in prose. In prose one may fumble around for
quite a while before one gets one's profound insight across, but
fumbling around in poetry is just what makes poetry bad.
Lawrence can speak for himself, but my guess is this is a pretty thorough misunderstanding of what he's saying. It's difficult for me to understand how you missed "what is going on at that point in the poem," which includes the entire moment of discovery, in which music and meaning in the crudest sense are simultaneous.
Mark
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