> 'if poetry is primarily a written art, then form probably does matter in
>some academic (i.e. formalist) sense ...
This seems to me wrong in several ways. First, poetry is fundamentally an
oral art; it's only a written art in degenerate poetic eras like ours.
(What power can a *written* mantra have? It's only marks on paper. Or when
you feel the need to pray, do you rummage around for a pencil and paper?)
Second, it's exactly the oral nature of poetry that genrates poetic form and
makes it important, and exactly poetry's degeneration from song into text
that has destroyed. The implications of this view is that the proper term
for poetic form is "music."
"Style," said Yeats, "and its opposite can alternate, but form must be full,
sphere-like, single."
Tangentially, here's a metaphysical poetic question: What is Shakespeare's
Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day ...")? That is, what is
it in the most concrete sense? Most people would say, "it's a poem," and if
they were asked to produce it, would point to a page in a collected works of
Shakespeare. But is that what Sonnet 18 *is* -- black marks on a sheet of
paper? To clarify, consider a similar question: what is Bach's Concerto
for Solo Cello #6? If someone asked you to produce it, would you point to
its printed score?
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