Hi Annie,
hope you had a great holiday. I liked your post a lot. All sorts of nuggets
there. The idea of learning prosody by osmosis struck a chord with me. When
Louise and I were just married we read the Faerie Queene aloud to each
other. What a gorgeous noise. Years later, when I was chatting to Jennifer
Moxley I discovered she had done the same.
You mentioned the controversy that any attempt at scansion provokes. I'm
inclined to treat the scansion like writing a score. In music, there are all
sorts of conventions which allow one to write a reasonably crude
representation of the rhythms and it is understood that various liberties
are to be taken. (Of course, there are very literal notaters too, but I feel
this approach is less interesting.) I wonder if scanners in poetry were less
interested in producing THE scansion, would the results be more consensual
in a parallel way.
best
Randolph
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