Quote:
Originally Posted by W T Clark
Moral sentiment is nice; mastery is eternal. Pity is unforgivable.
If moral sentiment is more important than "skill" then why read poetry? Prose will do just as well for that.
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You speak as though poetry can be measured purely objectively, and that what you call "mastery," which it seems you equate with technique (a false equivalence, in my view) is far more important than the emotional impact on a reader or the moral takeaway. What I've always loved about formal poetry is that the best formal poems strike a balance between the objective and the subjective. Technique can be learned, but if you're not using that technique to produce something that is interesting, redolent, emotionally engaging, moral, or any number of other subjective metrics, what's the point for writing a poem? Case in point is with Sam's
last thread on Wordsworth. Most of these lesser-known Wordsworth sonnets are
technically masterful. But they're absolute bores.
This isn't a Musing on Mastery thread, so I won't go much further down this road here, but just for the sake of argument... You mention that "pity is unforgivable." Would you argue that Yeats's "
Leda and the Swan" isn't a masterful poem with pity at its core?