>even when (as with Milton, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare!)
>there was a large linguistic element.
I can just never conjure the casualness to overlook remarks like this,
which seem so desperately vacuous (despite FB's fastidiousness in other
respects), so entirely offhand and automatic; the big four are wheeled out
and hitched to some chokingly bathetic life-support gesture, "there was a
large linguistic element" - NO SHIT. More than, say, a ceramic element?
I grasp Fred's thesis, I think it fairly rote though not insupportable,
but ultimately belied in its principal significance by any glimpse at the
broader historic shifts in success with the metrical line: Fred, just how
many writers, would you say, were using metre with sufficient and durable
expertise in, say, 1750, or in, say, 1685? Not a great number. Just as
now. In fact, if you'll take a look at some of the newer writers in the
US particularly (since you're probably familiar with those in the UK?), I
think you'll be pleasantly surprised, provided of course that you don't
lack that very special capacity, or have not foresaken it for a set of
once-lurid trench-trimmings.
Prynne's current work is MORE metrically complex than BRASS.
Also, to add a dash of spice to proceedings, I'd like to hear a convincing
argument to the effect that the poems -I- have posted to this list are not
of a considered and fairly new-spirited metre. And what of Ira's pieces,
or are these simply not metrical, in your view?
yours in oriented cheer and good spirits, k
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