Quote:
Originally Posted by Rose Novick
• corollary #1: any metrical system that recognizes more than two degrees of stress (stressed, unstressed) is baroque and unhelpful.
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That corollary I agree with. Corollary #3 I do not, if only because I have spent a lot of effort, and will spend more D. V., making poems with spondees and worse, like three stresses in sequence. Should you want examples, Kelsay Books will sell you a book of mine (Allen Tice) called "Of Course," for $19. I'm disgustingly happy with most of the imitations and changes I have rung on early Greek and Latin metrical patterns, full of spondees and triple stress rows. (I seldom bother with "sapphics".) Music of the spheres for those with 2,000 year-old ears, as satisfying to me in its way as Classical Chinese.
We can both be right in our practice.
PS from the thread linked at the top of the first post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Allen Tice
Some very eminent scholar of English prose prosody declared that no two adjacent syllables could ever share the same stress. Ergo, no spondees. Well, shut my mouth !
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