Janet,
You mean the Borges poem? It's straight pentameter, and for
masochistic and sentimental reasons, I kept strictly to Fitzgerald's "Rubiyat", rhyming exactly and using no metrical
variations that he didn't use. Borges does the same thing in Spanish, though of course he can't begin to sound anything like Fitzgerald. I'm glad you mentioned the poem, becauee I think it is perhaps the finest "ars poetica" since Horace.
(I must say that I thought the Collins and Bly attempts, and some others, were pretty awful, and yes, that MacLeish poem does make me groan: almost everything he says about a poem strikes me as wrong or untrue. For example, a poem must mean AND be. Being is not worth much if it's meaningless.)
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