Highlander,
Cunningham wrote for the world,not just for
university types with tin ears (Tim Steele,
his good friend, thinks Cunningham is the best
epigrammatist in English in the twentieth
century. Does Steele have a tin ear?)Cunningham
also admired Dickinson--whose meter
is basically hymn meter (and so quite regular).
Where any poet cannot convince us of his
bona fides with meter, we are justified in
wondering if that person knows what he is doing.
Changing the dashes to normal punctuation would
simply make it easier for her to communicate with
us, and I can't see how that would be a sin.
Cheers!
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