I just ran across a wonderfully apt quote from 1908. T. E. Hulme, an early theorist of modernism, is arguing against just what I was trying to do in this poem:
“The effect of rhythm, like that of music, is to produce a kind of hypnotic state, during which suggestions of grief or ecstasy are easily and powerfully effective, just as when we are drunk all jokes seem funny. This is for the art of chanting, but the procedure of the new visual art is just the contrary. It depends for its effect not on a kind of half sleep produced, but on arresting the attention, so much so that the succession of visual images should exhaust one. Regular metre to this impressionist poetry is cramping, jangling, meaningless, and out of place.”
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