now that I get these things connected in one bunch, some strange connections occur; so this was at the tail end of all the talk about Patrick's snap.
Still, I think looking at one poet's oeuvre as a given state of things misses too much. We go back to Wyatt, say, & some of his seem so,um, 'ordinary' in speech 9while of course not being so, & Shakespeare can do it in the sonnets when he wants to.
So i tend to go with David on how it happens… (happened)…
it's a neat way to slot writers into categories to say everything they write is more or less the same, but it's not.
& within a poet's work many rhetorics might play….
from somewhere in the 20th century, Wordsworth might look like he wasn't doing that at all (but from somewhere else he might…).
in transit so to speak….
Douglas Barbour
I think I'm more or less with David, too. I'd never say everything any writer writes is "more or less the same," but do believe strongly that (1) every writer is in the long wrong (hmmm, I meant to type "run"; interesting mistake) distinctively more like himself than he is like any other writer, and that every few decades (maybe faster now that there are so many more poets) (2) a particularly original poet may be enough more distinctively like himself than like others (albeit may not more than 0.1%) to mark a genuine "color-jump," by which I mean jump from a color everyone would agree is yellow, say, to one everyone would agree is green. I still tend to think Wordsworth was one such, Williams another--and Cummings another in a much different way. Although, as I've said, I wish I had time to do a genuinely in-depth study of the matter--until I've multiplied my relevant knowledge by 5 or 6!
Now off to start a poem, "In the long wrong . . ."
--Bob
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