Cover
Click image to order
Never miss a post
Your email address:*
Name: 
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Categories

« Stocks and Bonds for Poets | Main | This Week: Sports Desk, Alaska Adventures, Akiro Kirasawa, and Endings »

January 10, 2010

Comments

Nice post. You might argue that certain types of repetition -- such as anaphora, the insistent repetition of a phrase at the beginning of a line -- make up for the absence of traditional form, the absence of the constraints of rhyme, meter, and the like. It's easy to see why American poets, practitioners of free verse for the most part, would be attracted to such patterns. What complicates this line of thinking is that, as you note, repetition figures as prominently in Shakespeare or Sidney, Keats or Shelley too. It's possible that all speech is repetition, just as the poet's imagination is, according to Coleridge, "a repetition in the finite mind of the infinite act of creation in the eternal 'I am'." Anyway I'm glad that the end of this post is a provisional one and I look forward to further installments of "Ending a Poem."

Some folks might like to check out this ol' classic on the subject, Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End - click here for more.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Your Information

(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)

Cover
click image to order your copy
That Ship Has Sailed
Click image to order
BAP ad
Cover
"Lively and affectionate" Publishers Weekly

Radio

I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark


from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

StatCounter

  • StatCounter