sleep til it's

[hypercaro]

today élan wanted to know what is the sonnet of critical writing? i said the five-paragraph essay. on another note entirely: the next two stanzas will trail along eventually, but thus spake the little engine that could--

Comments

1/5

[fuxd]

Since the dawn of time, man has used structured forms and technical conventions in the service of communication. Ever since Plato, the philosopher has employed dialectic so as to maximize logical clarity and thereby guarantee accuracy in the communal ascension toward truth. Poets have likewise utilized their various prescribed patterns of meter and rhyme in their evocative creations of sentimental expression. And need we mention the orators? Those speakers whose uses of the occult arts of rhetoric have forever guided the judgments of the disparate masses in matters of public praise and condemnation, in questions of law, in decisions of state. Yet the merits of these individual arts pale in comparison with that superior and originary structural form--of whose genius all the techniques of dialectic, verse, and rhetoric partake, and from which, as we shall see, they each ultimately derive: the five paragraph essay.

Re: 1/5

[hypercaro]

*like*

[pretentiousblue]

Hmmm... something's gone wring with the last line, which, so far as I can tell, scans:

__ u u | __ u u | __ u | __ __ | __ __ | __ __ | __ __ | __

Are you not eliding the -em in Helladem and treating the second two syllables in pennatis and omnino (which are long by nature) as short?

Otherwise it's pretty good. Latin poets don't like feminine caesuras (as in line 1), but that's appropriate, 'cause you're writing about Homer. Similarly with the Greek treatment of the hephthemimeral caesura in line 2. The other bit that's a bit sketchy is "ille plumei." The Romans were much more uncomfortable than the Greeks about word-initial consonant clusters making position, which almost never happens in extent Latin poetry. But once again, all this is distinctively Greek -- even Homeric -- and therefore perhaps justifiable.

Um...maybe that was too lengthy.

[pretentiousblue]

i wanted the last line to be

QUORT-us-er-AT sup-er-HELL-a-da-PENN-a-tis-OM-ni-no-TEN-TIS

in retrospect, obviously the "tis" in pennatis is long, foolish caroline, but the "em" in helladem does go away... fuck i need to work on this. okay thanks that was INCREDIBLY helpful; second stanza to follow soon.

[hypercaro]

that was me above, hopefully obviously

[pretentiousblue]

(And there IS a verb pennor, pennari, even though we see it primarily in its PPP:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pennatis&la=la#lexicon )