Re: Off topic: New Year's frivolity

["David B. Kronenfeld" kfeld@xxxxxxxx]

For those who care, when shown the exchange my poet wife
offered:


Not sure it has a particular name, but John Hollander does it in every
possible way in his versification handbook, Rhyme's
Reason.


        
        
        
        
        David Kronenfeld
(husband of Judy Z. Kronenfeld !)


At 03:54 PM 1/3/2005, you wrote:

Very good, Carl and Robert. (A
fine kettle of fish though when the tech

wizards also outpace the Eng. Lit. profs.) Yes, it's blank verse.
Well,

it scans. The first few lines just came to me after I had been
editing

something where three and a half feet popped up in what was supposed
to

be straighforward prose (not the first time that had happened). Then
I

worked on it a bit to finish it off. And kind of you not to mention
the

hysteron proteron in the penultimate line: should be


some feet, a line, or half a dozen more


But what, what does one call something that is what it discusses?
The

only other example I can think of is Swinburne's Roundel beginning
"A

roundel is wrought..." (Fowler cites it under technical terms;
I

shouldn't want anyone to think I READ Swinburne.) I mean a specific
term,

like anacoluthon, hysteron proteron, hendiadys, and the like. I'm
sure

there's one, but I cannot think of it.


But I hate to tell you, there are people out there who do not know
what

scansion means. They cannot hear meter. What's that image in Boethius?
As

deaf to it as a donkey to music? I've caught misquotations by the
dozen

because they just didn't scan, so I knew it couldn't be what the
poet

wrote. O tempora!

Patricia