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Unread 09-03-2008, 10:32 PM
Mike Slippkauskas Mike Slippkauskas is offline
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Janice,

But I don't trust many (mainly free verse) poets to have "the sense to read without jingling" (Ezra Pound of all people, praising Thomas Hardy). It's actually difficult to write metered verse in an unvarying cadence. If we end our sentences in different places in the line, if we have varying degrees of stoppage in our syntax, use words of different length, sentences of different length, etc., etc., the work of rhythmic variation is largely done for us. Whether the resultant rhythmic variations will be apt, expressive, what have you, is another issue. But statements like Voigt's often perplex me (and I hear them even in these environs).
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