----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Well, I've been waiting for Dr Hamilton to give me chapter and verse on
this. He knows I operate by ear! I know quite well that there are
differences between all of these -- I can *hear them; and they are not all
historical, the thing varies from poet to poet, voice to voice, even poem to
poem within an individual's oeuvre. (I suppose you could even do it *within
a poem, if you had a valid reason for it.) As is borne out by your comment
about Shakespeare. But all we can say to other practitioners, surely, is
'Look, here are some models that other poets have used -- this is how they
work, and now it's up to you to do what you want with them'.
joanna
> WHICH version of iambic pentameter? Chaucer's? Lydgate's? Wyatt's?
> Surrey's? Donne's? Jonson's (plays or poetry)? ... Wallace Stevens? Not
> exactly the same thing.
>
> And Shakespeare's iambic pentameter ... Which one -- the early plays, the
> late plays, the Sonnets, Venus and Adonis? Anyone want to argue these are
> the same thing?
>
> <god give me patience! he sighed.>
>
> The bare term "iambic pentameter" is virtually sematically null.
>
> Add to WHICH, the (unspoken) definition of the "correct" version of the
> iambic pentameter line is taken from the rhymed iambic pentameter couplets
> of the major 18thC poets such as Pope and Dryden. And even they, in their
> practice and theory, were never as rigidly restrictive as their 20thC
> "acolytes".
>
> <At which point, a Mad Dormouse, with smoke steaming from his ears,
> crawls back into the teapot and began feeding his copy of Trager-Smith,
> page
> by page, into the fiery belly of the stove. Open fires not being
> practical
> inside well-bred teapots.>
>
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