I now have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve lost me. And you seem more interested in insulting me than making your meaning clear, which doesn’t help.

Given that they lived a century apart, saying that Blake and Yeats ‘rediscovered metre’ is not a meaningful statement. I wasn’t aware that metre had been lost; it seems to show pretty clearly in the poetry of everyone preceding and surrounding Blake (Pope, Swift, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron) and Yeats (Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy)…

Please - make yourself clear. Put your grievances into plain English and I might be able to address them.

James

My error is trying to argue someone who has no regard for facts; one cannot, sorry. Now, I will make a better choice, the only kind when words won’t work! Silence.

p

I’ve no doubt that Northrop Frye and I would have had our differences, yes. But the whole point of this blog is to challenge, once in a while and with lashings of ironic self-awareness, the unquestioned authority of the western canon. People are too forgiving of good poets when they balls up; too much is excused, and no-one is prepared to point out that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

As for Yeats, I’m not sure what you mean exactly. Do you mean that his poetry also takes liberties with metre? Of course, it does, but Yeats does it with intent and artistry, and the result sounds more like the rhythms of natural speech than botched metricals, thus the possibly anapestic “I have SPREAD my dreams UNDer your FEET” becomes the more arhythmic “I have SPREAD my DREAMS // UNDer your FEET”, or so it seems to me. Or are you talking about Yeats’ opinions of Blake? Forgive me if I struggle to take Yeats - who over the course of his life entertained, successively, numerous political inclinations and almost every set of ridiculous superstitions under the sun - seriously as a critic of anything at all.

James

As to what you said about Blake, my own invective would diminish to pale politeness in contrast to what Blake himself would have to say if he could say about your remarks about his transformation of English prosody.

PM

Just looking through trying to find these remarks about Frye and Yeats. Struggling. Enlighten me, please.

Love,
James

Your criticisms of Blake are most irregular! Don’t you know he’s one of our national treasures - like jam trifle or Attenborough?!

Furthermore, your remarks are worryingly unpatriotic. If it ever got out that the author of ‘Jerusalem’ couldn’t actually scan his own verse-lines, it would be most embarrassing. We English have only had a handful of good poets in the last 200 years (Browning, Hughes, Larkin… but that’s about it!). Everyone thinks the Romantics are wonderful! We can’t hazard uncontested international pre-eminence just because Shelley, Byron, Blake and Coleridge turn out, on closer inspection, to have wasted everyone’s time.

Also, your deconstruction of Blake’s rhyme and scansion is most unfair. We have methods in place for dealing with literary cock-ups. If two words don’t rhyme, we say that the pronunciation is regional/archaic/regional and archaic. If the author was clearly born in Fulham in the nineteen seventies, then we call it slant rhyme.

So you see, all manner of poetic incompetence can be explained away thus. And if the verse is completely, irredeemably, bollock-scratchingly ametric, unrhyming, senseless and awful, there is the catch-all excuse: the writer was ‘playing cleverly with the literary conventions of the period’.

I urge you to be more forgiving with respect to our artistic heritage. Academics still think Blake was a ‘visionary’ (shhh…amazing, I know), and the public agrees. Don’t rock the boat, old boy; it doesn’t do.

Thanks for your comments.

p

Sincerely,

Philip Miller
Mount Union, PA