File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0302, message 226


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



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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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