Hi Richard
Welcome, and how nice to see you here!
Thanks too for your fascinating mail. I had no idea (doh!) that the 18C
couplet was considered "nearest prose", though I guess when you think about
it, those who used it in those days, besides Pope - Dryden, Swift, Rochester
- were writing pretty robust verse. But it is interesting how what begins
as colloquial or invisible convention reveals its artifice as the tide draws
out. Wordsworth and Coleridge were radical for seeking "natural" speech in
poetry, though it looks anything but natural now. It rather makes a joke of
those barriers that are sometimes drawn up in the poetry world between the
"accessible" and the "obscure" - time will doom us all to obscurities!
I'm not very familiar with Saadi, so this is probably a dumb question: but I
have a bit of difficulty associating Sufi mystic poetry with the poetry of
Alexander Pope! Could you explain further those connections?
On 2/2/05 10:14 PM, "Richard Jeffrey Newman" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> On the one hand, you have concern with the essence of a text, with
> being true to its spirit, while on the other hand you have the necessity of
> paying attention to the time and place and form-and the relationship between
> and among them-in which a poet lived and wrote her or his poetry. And
> another way of talking about these two poles, and I suppose this is the way
> of putting it that really intrigues me, is as the distance between the
> hubris one must have in order to think one can free into anything other than
> itself the essence of any text-and Barks' Rumi, wonderful and compelling as
> he is, I should add, is absolutely Barks' creation, bearing little
> resemblance to the original-and the humility of submitting oneself to the
> context of the original.
Isn't that a sensitivity to style/rhetoric itself as a means of language?
Something like Catullus' pisstake on Cicero, which simply mimics his
oratorical style? I think it is an intriguing aspect of writing, maybe the
dna of it. But it's early and I'm putting this badly...
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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