[Tim McGrath]

Rhyming is a gift like any other. Shakespeare was a great rhymer who only occasionally resorted to off-rhymes. John Claire was also a good rhymer. Bob Dylan too. As Johnny Cash once said, he can rhyme the tick of time. So could Emily Dickinson, but sometimes, out of perversity, she would rhyme tick with tock, which is cute, but no poem that has imperfect rhymes can be considered perfect. ED was not a perfectionist, but she often achieved perfection without even trying. Few stanzas written by anyone are as purely poetic as this, an ode to the Civil War dead:

They dropped like flakes,
They dropped like stars,
Like petals from a rose
When suddenly across the June
A wind with fingers goes.

[John Riley]

Yes, it was "cute" because it didn't represent facile notions of superficial perfection.

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Tim McGrath

no poem that has imperfect rhymes can be considered perfect

It depends who is doing the considering, I suppose. Your view is not widely shared.

[Tim McGrath]

As someone who was practiced in the art of self-denial, Dickinson was capable of intentionally sabotaging her poems.

Some overreaching Dickinson scholars find meaning in whether one of her dashes is slanted up or down. If a dash is meant to be a pause, then it disrupts the 4/3 meter that Dickinson so loved.

Statistically, her capitalizations are randomly distributed. Take, for example, the word "night." She uses it 150 times and capitalizes it 60. Which means that she capitalized at whim.

A poem is not a visual production. A poem, like a mathematical object, exists in a realm beyond the paper it is printed on.

Yes, I am a Platonist.

[mignon ledgard]

I'm enjoying this thread and wish there were more illumination thrown in from those who know her work best.

However, this line gives me pause:

"Statistically, her capitalizations are randomly distributed. Take, for example, the word "night." She uses it 150 times and capitalizes it 60. Which means that she capitalized at whim."--
Especially, the conclusion drawn: "Which means that she capitalized at whim." Even if it were true, it would still be a 'false' conclusion: a conjencture.

That she did not always capitalized does not 'mean' that she did so 'at whim.'

Come on, Tim! Numbers prove no such thing. I say this confidently because the same could be said of my poems, while I always have a reason when I do capitalize a common noun--not that I always wish to divulge it.

I'm beginning to think this is more like a truncated game for which rules and a board have not yet been procured.

[Roger Slater]

"As someone who was practiced in the art of self-denial, Dickinson was capable of intentionally sabotaging her poems."

You're getting very bizarre here. Emily Dickinson sabatoged her own poems and now we have Tim, who claims to love Dickinson's poems as much as anyone, doing a statistical analysis to save Emily from her own self-destructive impulses and whims. This is right out of the Twilight Zone.

[Max Goodman]

Tim, you're free to read and create as you please, but you sound ridiculous making rules for others and proving that Emily Dickinson didn't do what she did.

Originally Posted by Tim McGrath

A poem is not a visual production.

Thanks for correcting my lying eyes.

[W T Clark]

You have the mind of a nineteenth-century publisher, Tim.

[Tim McGrath]

Yes, I do. I am the love child of Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

[RCL]

Growth of Man - like Growth of Nature -
Gravitates within -
Atmosphere, and Sun endorse it -
But it stir - alone -

Each - its difficult Ideal
Must achieve - Itself -
Through the solitary prowess
Of a Silent Life -

Effort - is the sole condition -
Patience of Itself -
Patience of opposing forces -
And intact Belief -

Looking on - is the Department
Of its Audience -
But Transaction - is assisted
By no Countenance -

Johnson 750; Franklin 790 (includes the final dash)