[New-Poetry] Re: a dead ear for scansion

[David Bircumshaw]

> n a message dated 7/26/2008 3:55:03 PM Central Daylight Time, 
> david.bircumshaw at ntlworld.com writes:
>>
>> the thing about iambic pentameter: it's a matter of swagger. Rap doesn't
>> do it, although it's as public as the Elizabethan-Jacobean stage, it's
>> too pre-occupied with being ego,  the Players started off from that
>> point and rapidly went beyond it, they had to do dialogue, along with
>> the afflatus, and the swagger went cosmic.
>>
>> The studious stuff that comes later diminishes with each generation.
>
> Pope raps pretty well actually.  The underlying 4-beat rhythm would 
> survive the loudest of sub-woofers.  I say "4-beat" because Pope's 
> lines often have a weak syllable in the middle, even though his meter 
> is pentameter.
>
Yup, this is the thing, from the four to the five, if you want to make 
it big, so to to speak. There are lots of mini-lyrical options if you 
don't want to go that far, but it goes like this: Marley discovers the 
big line for in public, Shaksper works out how to play it like a ballad 
tune and more, and more, than anybody else did,  Jonson becomes the 
first critic, Donne refuges in rough, Marvell discovers the voice of the 
civil servant, after then its mainly downhill, the romantics find some 
tricks, like Keats expanding the quatrain of the sonnet, but always 
there's the ghost of Milton trying to be the last possible poet, just as 
Pound and Eliot tried , differently, to be.

-- 

David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk

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