Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 14:57:31 -0800 (PST) From: Jason Stuart <jts0803odon-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Topic --0-1945151004-1045781851=:89598 >One of the things I find very vexing is prosody and more or less came to the conclusion that most of the rules of English prosody at the time when it was built around a stress-timed feet and not alliteration, were just conventions. Conventions do come about for a reason. English prosody has always had stressed feet; the break with a highly alliterative poetry came around the same time that vowels were shifting in English, and so the major change is from long/short vowel stresses (quantitative meter) to syllabic stress (accentual-syllabic or accentual meter). Conventions also have a lot to do with social context and rhetorical needs: note Milton's approach to the epic and his association or rhyme with vulgarity, and how the opinion about rhyme, vulgarity, and epic changed for the late neo-classicists; and how that style changed into the Romantic period. >Eventually I tried to inject my poems with some sort of flow My advice, before I even look at the poems, is to rid your vocabulary of the word "flow" and never look back. Use a different, more precise terminology, or you'll just beat yourself up over nothing. >I read Pound...old travelling case. Was that the poem? Good luck-- JS --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more --0-1945151004-1045781851=:89598
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>One of the things I find very vexing is prosody and more or less came to the conclusion that most of the rules of English prosody at the time when it was built around a stress-timed feet and not alliteration, were just conventions.
Conventions do come about for a reason. English prosody has always had stressed feet; the break with a highly alliterative poetry came around the same time that vowels were shifting in English, and so the major change is from long/short vowel stresses (quantitative meter) to syllabic stress (accentual-syllabic or accentual meter).
Conventions also have a lot to do with social context and rhetorical needs: note Milton's approach to the epic and his association or rhyme with vulgarity, and how the opinion about rhyme, vulgarity, and epic changed for the late neo-classicists; and how that style changed into the Romantic period.
>Eventually I tried to inject my poems with some sort of flow
My advice, before I even look at the poems, is to rid your vocabulary of the word "flow" and never look back. Use a different, more precise terminology, or you'll just beat yourself up over nothing.
>I read Pound...old travelling case.
Was that the poem?
Good luck--
JS
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