Reflection #8, because I'm dumb and skipped 3 and am going to fail.

[mrpaulie]

While reading Donald Justice I realized today that I hate rhyming poetry. But then I thought about it and realized that rhyming poetry was fun when used right. But I couldn’t think of a single instance where rhyming poetry in modern language was simultaneously deep and good. I think I have come to a conclusion

Comments

[fantom07]

All I'm sayin' is that we've been reading some italian sonnets and some villanelles in our poetics that rhyme, are good, and rather deep. Perhaps you need to broaden your reading?

[sieve1979]

Feszik, are there rocks ahead?
If there are, we'll all be dead.
Stop rhyming now! I mean it!
Anybody want a peanut?

Still the greatest rhyming poem of all time. If your definition of poem extends to quotes from '80s movies.

What do you think of Auden and Yeates? I'm not an expert at poetry, or even functionally literate about poetry, but those old English dudes tend to have pretty good, deep and somewhat rhyming poetry.

[mrpaulie]

Thats part of what I'm saying. Auden and Yeates had a different english to run with. Right now it's a science. You have to have everything right. Think about Spanish where just about everything rhymes, and ges into a sentence in several different orders. In english we can't do that. The things that rhyme hardly ever match up, so one or the other of the rhyming words ends up being part of a metaphor, and that makes it feel forced, even if it's a really good metaphor. Yeates and Auden didn't have that problem. English was flexible. Shakespeare hardly ever worried about sentence structure because the rules used to be "Nouns do verbs. Adjectives describe nouns. Adverbs describe verbs. Everything else is color." Now it's "The noun, which comes in the first part of the sentence, preforms the verb, which is in the last part of the sentence. Adjectives go before the noun they are describing unless set up with an adequate qualifier. Adverbs come before a verb if they are in this box, after if they are in this box, and either or if they're from

[sieve1979]

Ok, I didn't know they were lumped in with the later-than-middle-but-not-quite-modern English grouping

[drmacd_snc]

hey, it was always a "science" that could be mapped by the grammarians. fortunately, poets are always breaking those rules, stretching and bending them. auden and yeats had our english, though it was english english and not american english, so that's the difference, but they were writing in the first half of the 1900s, not that very long ago, and they were pretty good about stretching the language, using sound and sense in lovely packages.