well i've been reading All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele... and it's really a neat piece of work. not too over the top like Rhythms of English Poetry, but not exactly aimed at a complete stranger to poetry. It targets "beginners". i guess i'm abt there. so, well. there hv been some interesting ideas thrown around. i dont agree with everything, obviously, but then again, i think its quite stupid to raise those grouses here. well i'm abt halfway thru it, meaning that ive jus finished the half of the bk dedicated to iambic verse. so obviously things like examining the pattern of the iambic line and stuff like substitutions come up. and caesuras and enjambment. i kinda liked the chapter on elision though. elision doesnt really get covered normally this much in depth. then again, i guess there are studies that cover it more extensively. but for an entry level book on metre and versification or prosody, it's not half bad.
well the first few chapters, and a considerable part of the first half, deal with the idea of metre as a paradigm, and of its realization in speech as rhythm. so there will be lines whose rhythms more closely express the pattern by means of very strong and very weak speech stresses, and of course those that fall in the gray, so to speak. ok, all tts cool. then there was a section on rhythmical modulation, and about how it is not distorting the iambic line, or departing from it, but on modulating it while keeping to its structure by means of avoiding maximal- minimal feet and to some extent substitutions and hypermetric syllables or hypometric (?) syllables (well generally acephalous lines in iambic pentameter, though you have broken backed lines, too). hm in a nutshell i guess tts it. and then there was sum stuff abt rhythmical variation by means of caesura and enjambment, our happy couple, and grammar, which i thought was really cool, like syntax and syllable count (ok i know i dont do it justice by expressing it so poorly like this). anw... i cld go on all day wif a summary, so i guess heres where i'll jus put in what struck me.
its really very trivial, but: "Johnson raises here several interesting points. For one thing, as far as we can tell, it was easier to hear ancient Greek and Latin poetry, unaccompained by rhyme, than it is to hear rhymeless verse in Modern English (ie. meter comes across more strongly). All the available testimony (eg. Cicero, De Oratore 3.195-96 (hes quoted in full by Attridge, if i remember correctly, and i shld hv posted smth abt it earlier on in the year)) indicateds that even unschooled audiences, with no text before them and with no previous knowledge of what they were listening to, grapsed metrical patterns and objected to violations or slips in their use. (ok fine, but heres the really impt part..) And as Paul Maas has commented in comparing the verse of ancient Greece to that of modern Europe, "[W]ithout the aid of rhyme one cannot achieve that impression of closely knit discourse which Greek poetry, even in the loosest metres and in the least elevated style, never fails to give. ""
ok maybe i was just ignorant the first time i read it, but im sure the quote was used wrongly. here its quite obvious that it had nothing to do with the ear of the people of those times (though it might very well be, too, hm...), but that the very language of ancient Greece and thereby their verse, lent itself more suitably to perceiving a consistent rhythm and subsequently structure that English seems to be unable to emulate as well. and then rhyme comes in to lend a hand (though that can be easily disputed till no end).
so yea. cool stuff. maybe the nex post will be more critical haha.
