Yes, I meant "free-floating" only with respect to word
order. Whereas one expects to find adjectives physically separated from
their nouns all the time in Latin poetry (and I assume in Greek, though I'm
ignorant in that area), the phenomenon is unusual in English and therefore
calls attention to itself more. It's the same principle as that of much
poetic form: e.g. meter is in some ways paradoxically more flexible than
free verse precisely because it sets up expectations that it can then
break. I didn't, of course, mean that Latin poets don't also make use of
the phenomenon brilliantly.
Dorothy
At 05:46 AM 1/11/2006, David L. Miller wrote:
>This is a good point. I may have missed the point from the start, but I
>assumed that Dorothy meant that the adjectives were "free-floating" with
>respect to word order rather than grammatical function. Don't Latin poets
>do a lot with their freedom to position words within the line, in
>comparison to which English tends to constrain word-order?
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