[Brian Allgar]

Broken Limerick

Jayne,
I (another Brit)
Entirely agree
With
You.

[Mark McDonnell]

Jayne, apologies. Aaron and I had just finished one of our pointless arguments that we like to have to pass the long evenings and my blood was still up. In my defence, I swear I'd have leaped on anyone.

Aaron,

Mark, what I wanted to reply snarkily to was the "do you really think you're better than the tradition" bit. Well, yes I do! Now I'm probably wrong about that, but someone won't be, and they'll be the one to carry the tradition forward.

That reminded me of the exchange between Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot. Woolf said to Eliot, 'We're not as good as Keats.' and Eliot replied: 'Oh yes, we are. We're trying something harder'.

As Ollie says to Stan, "Twas ever thus".

[Ann Drysdale]

Just a thought...

Every established form had a beginning, a lightbulb moment in somebody’s head – somebody who’ll have been accused of sinning when lovers of the former "form" saw red and claimed that they had broken something special by making variations on their song, so that refinements they had seen as crucial suddenly disappeared or turned up wrong.

Poor Thomas Wyatt got a lot of knocking - accused of being actively obscene (though his newfangled sonnets weren’t so shocking as his prenuptial dalliance with the queen.)
Time kissed it better, Tom, and now your sonnet is well accepted as a sonnet. Innit.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrM2fxnkxjA
.

[Jayne Osborn]

Originally Posted by Brian Allgar

Broken Limerick

Jayne,
I (another Brit)
Entirely agree
With
You.

Haha. Thanks for bringing more levity to the discussion, Brian. You're not the only one who agrees with me, though clearly Cathy doesn't!

Cathy,
I carefully added "in my opinion'' when I said this is not a sonnet; it's a bit dogmatic to say this is definitely a sonnet, when many people regard it as only having similarities to a sonnet, making it a 14-line poem, therefore, rather than any particular form.

(And it's by Michael Spence, btw, not Aaron.)

Jayne
(Popped back to say that I actually like the poem, but just cannot agree it's a sonnet, that's all. I think "Divorce" on its own would be a good, subtle, title for it.)