> On the other hand, I don't think
> education in meter ever hurt or limited anyone's ear
No, I don't suppose it did. But that's not the issue. The issue is
what one is able to mean by "educated" or "uneducated", "skilled" or
"unskilled". I don't want to suggest that no meaningful distinction
can or should be made; still less that "education" is worthless, or
even damaging to some innate rhythmic sense. What I do want to suggest
is that the normative presumptions of formalism authorize a particular
way of making that distinction, by assigning a fixed value to those
terms in which it is couched.
> ...before jumping to any further blind
> conclusions on the irrelevance of the metrical code to the free-verse
> lineage.
Pretty much everything I am objecting to is summed up in the
expression "*the* metrical code".
Dominic
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