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Mar. 31, 2005 Between the ages of 15 and 40, I must have written 1000 poems, which ranged in length from 14 to 8000 lines. Thanks to the vicissitudes of my fortunes, I no longer have any of these poems, but I do not regret the loss very much, though many I thought were beautiful. After all, poetry is largely fantasy, and when, at that latter age, I came face to face with the sober, grim realities of life, the poetic spirit in me merely evaporated. In recent years, I haven't written a single poem and don't intend to write any. Nor do I read poetry anymore. In the days when I was a poet however, I admired and emulated certain favorite poets that I had read. In particular, I loved Homer, Shakespeare, Vergil and Milton. But there were Pindar, Lucretius, Scott and Tennyson as well. And I even read some of the poets of the second rank, like Coleridge, Poe, Baudelaire and Longfellow. All of the poets that I admired wrote poems in meter. In poetry of this kind, a single line of a poem is called a 'verse'. What most people call a 'verse' should really be called a 'stanza'. Each verse is divided into two, three, four, five or six feet, and so it is called dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter or hexameter. Each foot consists of one, two or three syllables, not necessarily of the same word, with a noticeable stress on one or another of the syllables. For example, an 'iamb' is a foot of two syllables with the accent on the second. Shakespeare and Milton, often considered the two best poets in the English language, wrote all their poetry in iambic pentameter. Here is the opening of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: /Now, fáir/ Hippó/lytá/ our núp/tial hóur/ /Draws ón/ apáce;/ four háp/py dáys/ bring ín/ /Anó/ther móon;/ but, Ó,/ methínks/ how sóon/... Dividing the verses and showing the accents, as I have done above, is called 'scansion'. An example of iambic tetrameter would be Coleridge's Kubla Khan, which opens as follows: /In Xá/nadú/ did Kú/bla Khán/ /A státe/ly pléa/sure dóme/ decrée,/ /Where Álph,/ the sá/cred rí/ver rán/... An anapest is a foot of three syllables, with the accent on the third. An example of anapestic pentameter, which I just made up myself, being unable to find another example off hand, would be: /On the gówn/ of the béau/tiful Quéen/ I saw éight/ fleurs-de-lís./ /They were góld/ on brocáde/ of blue sá/tin of sílk/ from the Éast./ /And her skín/ was as sán/dal wood cárved/ by the hánd/ of a gód./ There are many other rhythmic schemes, especially in Greek, Latin and Arabic, where vowels have both accent and length. For English-speaking people, like myself, it's difficult to appreciate poetry in those languages as well as native speakers must. As for rhyme, it may or may not be present in the greatest poems. Iambic pentameter, without rhyme, is called blank verse, and this was the favorite of both Shakespeare and Milton, though Shakespeare uses rhyme in his sonnets. Scott, Coleridge, Poe and other poets use rhyme consistently. Then came the day of Walt Whitman. He began a movement to dispense with meter altogether, advocating a sort of natural rhythm, so his poetry is not subject to scansion at all. Here is an excerpt from Leaves of Grass: The noiseless myriads, The infinite oceans where the rivers empty, The separate countless free identities, like eyesight, The true realities, eidolons. One can still sense a definite rhythm, but such poetry has neither meter or rhyme. Since Whitman's time, though, poetry has gradually declined into being sheer acrobatic typing. Not only have rhythm and rhyme gone out the window entirely, but capitalization is now discretionary too. Complete sentences are the exception rather than the rule; good grammar and bad grammar are one and the same. Intelligiblity means nothing. Good taste is passé. All a poet has to do today is arrange any old nonsense into lines of equal or unequal length, with standard words, coined words, slang and gobbledegook all mixed in together, with no apparent reason even to be uttered or written. Thus we might find: Last week i saw a big black car going very fast along The boulevard in front of My house there were some people nouveau riche, mucho dinero people on the inside talking to each other you kinda know about stuff i never Dreamed was possible for folks to talk about and I said godddddddddddddd! what is this all about?????? ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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