Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Q
Nick,
Poe's most famous poem is called The Raven, in which the N is mourning a lost love; it features a raven that taps at his window and a refrain in which the raven says "Nevermore". Prometheus stole fire from Olympus and gave it to humans, and his punishment was to have his liver pecked out and eaten by an eagle every day, whereupon it would grow back in time for this to be repeated the next day.
Useful to know that you find the "slid in beneath" construction awkward. It does seem natural to me: it slides into the space/flesh beneath the fingernail. Can you say more about what bothers you about the Poe sentence? Is it a rhymical issue? The poem does become increasingly iambic as it progresses, but this sentence is flat prose. I'd wanted the opening to sound more like reportage, but it might be possible to smooth it out.
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I don't have the grammar lexicon on hand, but I wonder if you might have subject problem on the word 'it's'.
Quote:
Livermore, scholars say, was a poem Poe discarded, a remaking
of the Prometheus myth, in which it’s a raven that pecks out
the god of fire’s liver
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I'm parsing your poem fairly quickly, and in this sentence by the time I get to
it's I'm not clear on which subject it's referring to. Whether we're talking Livermore, the Prometheus myth, or something else. It was just too busy of a passage for me to read cleanly without straining.
When I read it more slowly I can parse it, but by the time I get to that point the poem's already lost it's flow.