Thread: Anachronism
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Unread 08-08-2024, 09:12 AM
Christine P'legion Christine P'legion is offline
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Location: Ontario (Canada)
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Hi N.M.,

I won't ding you for wanting to write in an anachronistic idiom; there is a time and place for poetic pastiche/mimicry and I've seen it used to very powerful effect. One of my all-time favourite novels is A. S. Byatt's Possession, which won the Booker prize in the mid-90s and is absolutely full of this sort of thing, albeit imitating a more modern period than you are here.

To really pull it off, however, will probably require you to (a) choose a distinct time period -- people have noted that your expressions seem to be ranging between the centuries a bit -- and then (b) really deeply immerse yourself in the language and literature of that period. So if you want to write in Elizabethan/Shakespearean English, for example, that means reading not just Shakespeare for drama but also Marlowe, Dekker, Kyd, Middleton, Fletcher, Jonson, etc.; for prose, probably a lot of the English reformers, the Book of Common Prayer, and the King James Bible; for poetry (besides Shakespeare), Spencer, Sidney, Jonson, and Campion.

In the meantime, as you're doing this deep reading, I echo Matt's earlier suggestion that writing poetry in your own contemporary idiom will also be helpful in terms of increasing your general poetic skill; the tools you will gain this way will, of course, be available to you regardless of which era or style you write in.
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