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Unread 05-15-2022, 07:44 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: New York
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John, I am not one of your students, so you can spare me the condescension that your students are apparently accustomed to. When I said I didn't understand your question, it was a relatively polite way of saying that you didn't pose a coherent question in the first place. It was not a confession of ignorance, but an invitation perhaps for you to stop "restarting" the thread and simply tell us what you're on about.

And yes, of course different formal choices carry with them different ways of looking at the world. What did I say that was different? Limericks carry with them the bawdy, punny, mostly light-hearted way of looking at the world, whereas elegies have a different outlook. My point was that the form doesn't impose itself on the poet and make the poet adhere to a particular worldview, but the poet chooses the form because it seems to fit the poem the poet has in mind to write.

As Frost famously said, if you have an urge to say something for eight lines and take it back for six lines, you may find yourself writing a sonnet. But in Frost's formulation, the poet chooses the form based on the shape and tone of what she wants to say. The form generally doesn't come first, but the impulse to write a poem comes first, and the form follows from the specific nature of that impulse.
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