(I might take this opportunity to strike out the word “bar” in that passage and replace it with “club.” Football fans go to bars, rugby supporters to clubs, and rarely to this day in the U.K. or its dominions do the twain ever meet.

The difference is that today there’s far more poetry in the bars than the clubs.)

“What we often forget is how steeped in the Classics all education was until very recently, and that nobody STUDIED poetry as such, what is more Modern Poetry. If you were from the tiny elite that got to study at all, you studied the Classics, Latin and Greek, and scanning as much as grammar was the discipline through which you became that educated man who could rule Estate and Empire without blinking. Everybody in that class had Horace in their pockets, even as they went into battle, the bar or the boardroom. But they were officers, not toughs in the ranks, and it would have to wait until the toughs in the ranks got to school to give anyone the chance to start majoring in English!”

Well said, Mr. Woodman.

“Well, Mr. Woodman, had I known beforehand I was entering into an exchange with a peer of John Milton’s I would have demured.”

Lighten up, Tere.

.

Terreson, you’re insight is correct; I’m a mere hack, imitating Poe. Truly! I’ll fully admit that’s all I am.

The Modernists tried to bury Poe, but, as I’ve shown, Eliot read Poe (and stole Poe’s critical ideas) and Ezra Pound’s whole ‘pedantic yet rude’ schtick comes right from Poe, even while Pound and his prissy pals, Yeats, Eliot, Winters, both the Euro-trash Modernists and their American, ‘tough guy,’ Fugitive, New Critical, Creative Writing establishment soldiers were bashing Poe–and that other great Amercian, Millay.

(The ‘practical’ bridge between European & America Modernism may be glimpsed in Ford Madox Ford–who was an Ezra Pound in interconnection and energy between these two wings, facilitating London’s Little Magazine Modernism while also working for Britain’s propaganda War Machine and then coming to the U.S. and working with Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Lowell)

“Football’ (soccer) was played by the lads in Manchester and Liverpool, Rugby, or versions thereof, by the boys at the great ‘Public Schools” (oh, the ironies!), Winchester, Harrow and, yes, Rugby.

I’m no peer of John Milton, Tere, partly because I’m a football fanatic. Indeed, I was heartbroken by the recent results in Rome.

Famous for rugby, when you went up for your interview the Master of Christs threw a rugby ball to you as you entered his rooms. If you came from the right school that gave you an advantage–if you caught the ball instead of dribbling it you were in.

‘Football’ was for louts.

Terreson

“Poe’s essential idea was right,” you concede at the end. From your tone it’s obvious you yourself didn’t need Poe’s help to arrive at that conclusion, the position being so obvious. So perhaps it’s “the slash and burn tactic in his forensics” you find so derivative in Thomas Brady, almost as if you weren’t using the tactic yourself in the post.

I myself am not too concerned about this problem of scansion, mainly because I don’t know too much about it. I use the established terminology I grew up with and simply apply it to what I hear in the verse I want to understand better, or discuss with a friend. For me, it’s just terminology that I can do what I want with, and most often, antique and rigid as it is, it still helps me more or less to muddle out what I hear in the verse.

It wasn’t always like that, because I grew up in the last throes of a classical education, and would have failed my Vergil if I’d done what I do now with the lines. In fact, I did fail my Vergil, but mainly because at that time I was bored and delinquent.

What we often forget is how steeped in the Classics all education was until very recently, and that nobody STUDIED poetry as such, what is more Modern Poetry. If you were from the tiny elite that got to study at all, you studied the Classics, Latin and Greek, and scanning as much as grammar was the discipline through which you became that educated man who could rule Estate and Empire without blinking. Everybody in that class had Horace in their pockets, even as they went into battle, the bar or the boardroom. But they were officers, not toughs in the ranks, and it would have to wait until the toughs in the ranks got to school to give anyone the chance to start majoring in English!

And that’s why we are where we’re at—products of an educational system that was never designed for us democrats. And we still play the games by the rules that were formed, like those for tennis and rugby, in the courtyards of Harrow—or Christs, my and John Milton’s college.

Christopher

Christopher

Since the derailment is established I just made a discovery I wish to share. I’ve for long wondered why Thomas Brady, in argument, tends to the slash and burn tactic in his forensics. Upthread he quotes from Poe’s essay, “The Rationale of Verse.” So I pulled down my Everyman’s Library copy of Poe’s poems and essays. And I scanned the Verse essay in order to refresh my memory of his thesis. To some surprise I’ve discovered the source of Master Brady’s forensics.:

” ‘But if this is the case, how,’ it will be asked, ‘can so much misunderstanding have arisen? Is it conceivable that a thousand profound scholars, investigating so very simple a matter for centuries, have not been able to place it in the fullest light, at least, of which it is susceptible?’ ”

“A leading defect in each of our treatises, (if treatises they can be called,)…”

“A grammarian is never excusable on the ground of good intentions.”

“So general and so total a failure can be referred only to radical misconception. In fact the English Prosodists have blindly followed the pedants.”

“On account of the stupidity of some people, or, (if talent be a more respectable word,) on account of their talent for misconception…”

“Were anyone weak enough to refer to the Prosodies for the solutions of the difficulties here…”

“Now, had this court of inquiry been in possession of even the shadow of the philosophy of Verse…”

“All the Prosodies on English verse would insist upon making an elision in ‘flowers,’ thus (flow’rs), but this is nonsense.”

So there it is. Speaking as a student of human behavior I am fascinated by the extent to which Master Brady has adopted, or absorbed, the forensics of EA Poe. Mind you, I don’t disagree with the essay quoted from. Poe’s essential idea was right and he might have been the first to realize as much: that the system of scansion still followed, and based on Classical, syllabic quantitative, prosodics, has never, can never, will never, snugly fit the syllabic accentuated English language poetry. It ain’t going to happen and never has happened. I am just fascinated by the extent to which Poe’s pugilistic style of rhetoric is on display again.

Terreson

I’d rather read the phone book. A random list of names would be more interesting to me than ‘Spring and All.’

lines ending with ‘the?’ Grab my coat, the revolution’s startin’!

Tell me the secret
handshake so I, too, can
appreciate
‘Spring and All.’