Uh-oh. I think I'm in over my head here. I couldn't get myself to concentrate on all these abstractions and found
myself skimming faster than I can read. It doesn't bode well for the long-and-often-postponed treatise on prosody that I have sworn to finish this year. Maybe I'm too old for that kind of shit. Thanks, Alan, for posting that longish piece of mine; it still seems quite sensible. And thanks, Golias, for copying out "Ill Lit Blues" which is one of a handful of my poems that I continue to like and feel satisfied with. I will talk about it before long and scan a few lines---it is in dipodics, the double foot with one strong and one weak beat, which almost all (but not quite all) English heptameters and octameters fall into. As for the argument about whether Poe writes good metrical verse or not, the only arbiter here is an good ear, for which nothing and no amount of theory can substitute. (I seem to be implying here that I have a good ear, but I might as well be explicit: I may have few or no other virtues as a poet, but I have no doubt about my ear: it is good.) As I said earlier, it is not for nothing that Emerson called Poe "the jingle man." (Emerson's ear is not really great, but it's more than good enough to recognize how bad Poe's is. Enuf said.)
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