Retro Poetry

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

As a sideline to someone elses topic (which since went to Outside and got locked) an interesting discussion started up, and I wanted to continue it.

Copying over my post and Harry's response here, for context:

Relevant bits of my post:

"I've noticed that the critters on PFFA, both mods and patrons, tend to take a modernist approach to poetry, frowning on inversions, archaisms, and various other tricks and tools from the older schools of poetry that have fallen out of fashion or otherwise been judged as poor form. However, this is only to be expected as this is the modern age and most people are students of modern poetry.
However, I've also noticed that if you do something particularly well, breaking the rules or flaunting current fashion as you do so, people let you get away with it, if just because folk realize there's a difference between people who don't realize what century it is and those who are making a conscious decision to be Retro."

Harry's response:

It's worth observing that 'modernist' in this sense describes a poetic trend that is now at least 90 years old - so it's less modern than movies with sound, for example.

I have some sympathy with the people who write cod-Edwardian verse, because I've done it myself; if you've read mainly from the older canon of classic English verse, it's understandable that you should try to reproduce it. But you should ask yourself why, when you don't listen to Edwardian music or drive an Edwardian horseless carriage, you should want to write Edwardian poetry.

Now my continuation of the discussion (new):

Harry--

With Edwardian music and Edwardian horseless carriages, people still do. In my neighborhood, I regularly see "kit cars," the type of thing that happens when someone takes a volkswagen bug and turns into a version of Mr. Toad's roadster. So far as music goes, one of my favorite new musical artists, Jill Tracy (grand prizewinner on the "Artists For Literacy" CD) does early style jazzy ragtime theatre music, with original compositions.
http://www.jilltracy.com/

Part of the business of having "Modernism" as a movement is that after it, you get "Post-Modernism." Likewise, there's Retro, which can be a great deal of fun.

19th century verse is rampant with 'tis and 'twas and e'en despite the fact that people did not use such words in everyday speech.

If everyone were writing what is currently the most popular, we'd all be writing Slam poetry.

Very few people worship the Greek or Roman gods anymore either, but we still have references to classical mythology running happily throughout the world of poetry, despite the fact that most people haven't been exposed to them beyond watching Herc and Xena.

If the point of poetry is to communicate to the reader, why is it so much worse to use an inversion, which will still be understood, than to say things like "fast as Atalanta" instead of "fast as Flo-Jo"?

Kevin

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited 05-05-2002).]

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited 05-05-2002).]

[Ted]

I think this would be better placed in Voyages.

Ted

[Dunc]

They say 'fast as Flo-Jo' because Flo-Jo never fell for that three-apples trick. Regards / Dunc

[Clive2]

Kevin - personally, I think all the resources of the language should be available to a poet.

Whether one is a poet or not is the question.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Clive--

Agreed. However, simply removing the 'tisses and 'twasses and inversions from a poem still isn't going to save it if it fails as poetry.

It's like a fashion consultant saying that petticoats, bustles and bum-rolls are out, instead of cutting to the heart of the matter and saying that the main problem is that the dress is just plain ugly and you might as well just burn the whole thing.

Kevin

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Tedward--

(and any mods lurking)

Agreed also that this should go to the Voyage of Disco. If someone could move it....

Kevin

[Clive2]

Petticoats, bustles and bum rolls are OUT?

Damn. There goes my summer wardrobe!


[This message has been edited by Clive2 (edited 05-06-2002).]

[Harry Rutherford]

Part of the reason that archaisms are so irritating is that the people who use them get them wrong so often, using 'thee' as the nominative, or using massively anachronisitc phrases in the same poem.

And they're almost never metrical, which would horrify any poet writing before about 1914.

[gecian]

It's easier to use one's own language imaginatively than someone else's. And that's what poetry is about, isn't it? Not to mention that it's much more difficult to manage sound in C17 English than in modern English. And what Harry said, of course.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Well, certainly in agreement on the annoyance factor of people getting things wrong. But to a certain extent, I think poetic diction and the assorted ragbag of tricks is very much like classical mythology--it gives the poet and the reader a common lexicon from which to draw.

If I were confining myself to the language I grew up with, I'd be writing sonnets in California valley girl/surfer dude dialect:

Hey look! That dude just biffed, a gnarly wave
It, like, just smacked his board! He's all, "Hey look!
I'm bitchin' Dude, I'm rad!" Then smack! he's all, "Oh save
me, Mr. Lifeguard dude!" An' all it took

You get the idea.

Val/surfer has some uses in Beat poetry (heavy cross-pollination there), but while I can chuckle at the idea of writing a crown of surfer sonnets, it isn't something I really want to do.

Kevin

[Clive2]

I suppose the point to be made, Kevin is that anything "off-limits" to the beginning writer - abstraction, archaism, cliche - can be used and should be available to be used by more experienced poets. The degree of success in this venture depends on the skill of the writer.

I recently saw a poem by Jennifer Reeser that used "thou" and one by Mark Halliday that had some "poetic diction" in it. Both were damn fine poems, but then both of them are damn fine poets.

Classical mythology - don't get me started. I hate classical references - HATE them. It's lazy gravitas in my opinion. But then again, if the writer is good enough even I can stand an Ode to Odysseus or whatever.

Here endeth the sermon,

Rev. Clive

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Hmm. Well, much as I dislike the poems (and other works) that use all of the above mentioned devices badly, or worse yet, use them to attach a false sense of importance to the work, it's often refreshing to see them used to full effect.

For which purpose, people need to learn how they're used. Just lining something off as off-limits isn't that useful from a learning standpoint.

Kevin

[Clive2]

I don't know about that, Kevin - when I was first starting out, I had a blacklist of words and phrases Not To Be Used. This forced me to find other ways of expressing "soul", "heart", "mind", "sadness" whatever. This has got to be a good thing for the newbie. In this way, they get to learn how to use language rather than rely on well-worn stock phrases to convey their meaning.

Seamus Heaney said it was something like 20 years before he felt comfortable about putting the word "soul" into one of his poems. If it's good enough for him, it should be good enough for anyone.

Clive

[This message has been edited by Clive2 (edited 05-07-2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Hmm, seems six of one, half dozen of the other.

I started in on this as a novelist, having as my guide E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," in particular the whole "Show, don't Tell" business and his whole rant on why it was bad to pause the action, take out a character's heart and show it to the audience.

Be interested to read your blacklist.

Myself, personally, I've found that "Show, don't Tell" is only half the equation. The other half is "Imply, don't Show."

"The Queen was very sad" is telling. "The Queen wept" is showing. "The Queen barely touched her food and her eyes were red around the edges" is implying, or better yet, "The courtiers did their best to talk of cheerful matters, but the Queen said nothing, retiring to her chambers early."

If you go at the game from implication, you generally never get around to outright mentioning abstractions, or if you do, you talk about ones other than the one you're dealing with.

Kevin

[Clive2]

FYI - my blacklist (a snippet):-

heart
soul
tears
mind
dreams
sadness (and its associated adjectives)
despair
depression (and its associated adjectives)
eternal
shards
dappled
thee thou thy dost doth &c

Just a selection of words from the list. There were also certain subjects on the list.



[This message has been edited by Clive2 (edited 05-07-2002).]

[gecian]

I don't see what you have against "dappled", Clive.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I think the case against "dapple" is that it's a word you never hear in reality unless you're talking about horses, but shows up all the time in poetic diction, especially with phrases like "sun-dappled meadows" and whatnot.

Hmm, I just did a poem with both "heart" and "tears" in it, though frankly, I used "tears" because I needed something with to rhyme with "gears" and "beers" didn't make any sense.

Kevin



[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited 05-07-2002).]

[Clive2]

Dappled? Ugh - it's one of those words that, as Kevin says, only turns up in poems about forests, spring time and such. Not that I have anything against nature poetry, but I do so dislike "dappled".

Other prejudices of mine include poems that start with an adjective such as: -

"Frozen, the chicken is removed from the fridge"

And poems that drop articles or possessive pronouns, such as:-

"rain hits head, bounces off bald pate"

YEAARRRRGGGGGHHHHH! Since when was Yoda-speak and telegraphese poetic?

[Dunc]

tear-dappled souls, perhaps? Or cloud-dappled ecstasy? Or apple-dappled chapels? And there's doranges an dapricots too. Regards / Dunc

[River Not]

Originally posted by Kevin Andrew Murphy: Part of the business of having "Modernism" as a movement is that after it, you get "Post-Modernism." Likewise, there's Retro, which can be a great deal of fun.

Postmodernism, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, is "language bewitchment."


Is the person who decides to be "Retro" physically displaced from a modern setting at their decision's inception, or are they still where they were when their fantasy commenced?

[gecian]

And poems that drop articles or possessive pronouns, such as:-

"rain hits head, bounces off bald pate"

This I wholeheartedly agree with. I detest dropped articles -- except in a very few cases.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by crowbowsow:
Is the person who decides to be "Retro" physically displaced from a modern setting at their decision's inception, or are they still where they were when their fantasy commenced?

It depends, but does it matter? It seems more appropriate to ask, what audience is the poetry intended for.

I hang out in the Goth culture a lot. There's a great fondness in that subgroup for Victorian mourning culture, Byronic poetry and so forth, and imitations and reproductions of same are appreciated.

I have a room in the house furnished as a Victorian parlor. Aside from a tv set and stereo, everything is either antique or reproductions of one sort or another, some heirlooms, some just things we found. Am I living a fantasy? How is it different to reproduce furniture styles that went out of fashion over a hundred years ago than to reproduce poetry styles that went out of fashion a hundred years ago, or to use Victorian ornaments on thoroughtly modern things?

I've seen snowboards decorated with medieval alchemists sigils, Victorian lithographs, modern illustrations of German fairytales (the Bremen town musicians, to be exact) and so on, mixed with the skatepunk graffiti script and other modern themes.

Snowboarders use the pictures because the old stuff is cool, the same as Chaucer wrote the Wife of Bath's tale as an Arthurian, despite the fact that he wasn't living in the days of King Arthur at the time.

We've got toys in the toybox. We might as well use them.

Kevin

[Harry Rutherford]

Originally posted by Kevin Andrew Murphy:
Snowboarders use the pictures because the old stuff is cool, the same as Chaucer wrote the Wife of Bath's tale as an Arthurian, despite the fact that he wasn't living in the days of King Arthur at the time.



The Wife of Bath's Tale has an Arthurian theme, but as far as I know, it's written in the same cutting edge C14th English as the rest of the Canterbury Tales.

There have been some great poems that were intentionally archaic, admittedly. Spenser springs to mind. For that matter, the use of 'thou' persisted in poetry for about two centuries after it stopped being used in normal speech.

But I'm pretty unconvinced, mostly because I've pretty much never seen a modern poem in an archaic style that had any more going for it than a fairly skillful regurgitation of the cosily familiar.

[River Not]

Originally posted by Kevin Andrew Murphy:I hang out in the Goth culture a lot.

Oh, no.

Unfortunately, and against my preferences, I have been associated with the Goth community also, once.


But, anyone who physically exists now can't physically exist anywhere else, so there's a fundamental flaw in the term "postmodern," because modern is the present state of any environment, which is always there, and independent of comparison by a standard removed from its associations for the simple fact that the body is inseparable from its surroundings, and all surroundings are limited by the person who perceives the situation; the segregated environment doesn't exist free of environments which the person doesn't acknowledge. Blah.


If someone goes retro and writes a poem full of thee's and such, there will be evidence of modern society's conditions. Is it worth anything but fun to pretend?

[This message has been edited by crowbowsow (edited 05-07-2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Harry Rutherford:
There have been some great poems that were intentionally archaic, admittedly. Spenser springs to mind. For that matter, the use of 'thou' persisted in poetry for about two centuries after it stopped being used in normal speech.

But I'm pretty unconvinced, mostly because I've pretty much never seen a modern poem in an archaic style that had any more going for it than a fairly skillful regurgitation of the cosily familiar.

The main thing that all the poetry of the past has going for it is that, with some exceptions, the tripe generally isn't reprinted.

But going back just slightly over a century, "Jaberwocky" has a large share of 'twasses and "Hast thou" and so forth, and holds up quite well as poetry. Admittedly it's a satire, but it wouldn't be half as fun without all the archaisms spiced in.

William Morris, also in the same time period, decided to write the first wholy original fantasy novels, using his own faux medieval diction. Mixed success, IMHO, but important as a benchmark in the fantasy field.

In the 20th Century? Well, "The Lady's Not For Burning" is written all in blank verse, with tons of Elizabethen verbiage, and is still being produced. Admittedly, that's a play, but it is in verse.

We're only a touch into the 21st, so I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but we've only got a couple years to look at here.

Kevin

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by crowbowsow:
But, anyone who physically exists now can't physically exist anywhere else, so there's a fundamental flaw in the term "postmodern," because modern is the present state of any environment, which is always there, and independent of comparison by a standard removed from its associations for the simple fact that the body is inseparable from its surroundings, and all surroundings are limited by the person who perceives the situation; the segregated environment doesn't exist free of environments which the person doesn't acknowledge. Blah.

If someone goes retro and writes a poem full of thee's and such, there will be evidence of modern society's conditions. Is it worth anything but fun to pretend?


You've already answered your own argument. If you state as a given that "There will be evidence of modern society's conditions," by definition, no poem or other work written with the modes, methods and techniques of the past can ever be successful.

I say that's hogwash. People do it all the time, and that's why there are literary historians who work to establish the provenance for various pieces.

There's also the happy middleground. I COULD write poetry in middle English if I really felt like it, but generally most people don't know enough of it to get that "drenched" meant "drowned" back then and various other bits. So if I want to write a poem set in the Chaucer era, I instead go through Chaucer and note all the verbiage that's still the same in the modern era, add in a spicing of a few words that aren't modern but are understandable (thees and thous and so on) and so on. The same as movies about the middle ages don't bother to put in all the smallpox scars, bad teeth and fleas.

As for Post-Modernism, I could say "Post Andy Wharhol" but it wouldn't be as useful because it's not the term most people use, even if the term is stupid. Language is about communication.

If I start a poem with "Thy lovely hands are lily fair" you get the general idea that the narrator is somewhere in Europe circa 1300-1600, which is a far more acceptable bit of shorthand than titling the poem "Ode to an Albigensian Milkmaid circa 1502."

Kevin

[River Not]

...no poem or other work written with the modes, methods and techniques of the past can ever be successful.

I'm not completely convinced the poem wouldn't be successful, but that depends on what the author desires, and what the author considers success to be. Surely one who feels inspired to write about their experiences and dreams wants to create their own "music", even if their music may resemble someone else's sound. So, you have a person imitating a style of speaking that's dead on life's streets. How does a person under the influence of inspiration not add their own perceptions of life while writing a poem or song? Why would anyone spend any amount of time writing a poem where they couldn't include their personnal opinion? Isn't a person's opinion determined by their life and the views they hold true in regards to that life? Basically, if someone's trying to write a "serious" poem and they're using archaic language, then the opinions of a modern person will be present, which prevents the seriousness from being taken seriously. If, on the other foot, someone were only trying to have fun or entertain a select few, then the success of a poem which makes use of dead english doesn't seem that far-fetched.


I say that's hogwash.

Oh, nO. Not the hogs man.




[This message has been edited by crowbowsow (edited 05-07-2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by crowbowsow:
[b]...no poem or other work written with the modes, methods and techniques of the past can ever be successful.

I'm not completely convinced the poem wouldn't be successful, but that depends on what the author desires, and what the author considers success to be.

*****
I consider success to be both an entertaining and successful piece AND true versimilitude to the era in question.

Surely one who feels inspired to write about their experiences and dreams wants to create their own "music", even if their music may resemble someone else's sound.

*******
If I want my own music to sound like something no longer current, why not? I write fantasy and science fiction. I have never personally met a dragon or an alien, and yet I write about these things, sometimes even from the first person. If I can write a story about a dragon, I can certainly write one about a 16th century Albigensian milkmaid.

So, you have a person imitating a style of speaking that's dead on life's streets. How does a person under the influence of inspiration not add their own perceptions of life while writing a poem or song?

******
By having a very careful eye to period sources and histories and making certain that the views and experiences ones character's express are reasonable in the given period. There are also times and periods of history that may be outside of ones own living memory, but not out of everyone else's living memory. My first published story was written, first person, from the viewpoint of a detective in 1962 Hollywood. I'm a Californian, so I had the Hollywood part down, but I was born in 1966. I did not want my character to read as an anachronism, some PC guy from the 90s dropped in the middle of 1962, having views ridiculous for the time period. So I researched, came up with a character I could like who would still be honest for the time, then wrote and sold the story. A few years later, I met another author who'd read the story when it came out, liked it, but was surprised I was not much older, since he'd been expecting someone his age or older, since he'd lived in 1962 Hollywood and my imagination and research matched his memories.

1962, 1862, 1662 -- what difference does it make?

Why would anyone spend any amount of time writing a poem where they couldn't include their personnal opinion?

*******
Opinions come and go like fashions, but there are some that seldom fall out of fashion: war is bad, or at least messy; human sacrifice is not nice; my girlfriend is really hot, especially naked. You write about those ones if you have a period piece that you want yourself and modern readers to identify with.

If you read "The Song of Solomon," that's nothing but "My girlfriend is really hot, especially naked." I don't know when it was written, but the sentiment has hardly gone out of fashion, and neither have most of the references.


Isn't a person's opinion determined by their life and the views they hold true in regards to that life?

******
Certainly. But I can find views in common with folk in different centuries the same as I can find them in common with people in other countries.

Basically, if someone's trying to write a "serious" poem and they're using archaic language, then the opinions of a modern person will be present, which prevents the seriousness from being taken seriously.

******
I write, as I say, in the speculative fiction field. People who can buy dragons and bug-eyed aliens generally don't balk at a few thees and thous. It may reduce my audience, but it expands the concepts I'm able to explore.

If, on the other foot, someone were only trying to have fun or entertain a select few, then the success of a poem which makes use of dead english doesn't seem that far-fetched.

**********
I think the crux of the matter is how large you consider the "select few" to be.

The rule I follow for fiction, and likewise for poetry, is don't use any literary device as a trick or a gimmick to "add interest" to a story, as you're bound to annoy a few readers. With fiction, that means setting your story in the past tense, either first or third person, and if third person, limited omniscient is most standard and generally useful. Thees and thous aren't warranted unless you're writing something set in Merry Olde England, King James Bibleland or something similar.

There are, of course, exceptions. I have a friend who wrote a novel in the present tense, not to be pretentious, but because she wanted to summon up some of the style of the 1920s hard-boiled mystery novels written with that style.

Archaisms, as with anything, are a trick to evoke a response in the reader. If you get them to work, you've used them right.

Kevin

[River Not]

What I've learned so far:

1) "postmodern", which is a new word, is a stupid word;

2) archaic words are cool, and using archaic words is acceptable if you use them correctly;

3) language is for communication.


ok, fair enough, and I'll leave the ethical arguments ("war is bad, or at least messy; human sacrifice is not nice...") alone.



[This message has been edited by crowbowsow (edited 05-07-2002).]

[Clive2]

Forsooth! Methinks I shall a sonnet write!
thou thinkest. Yet thy ink-well runneth dry.
Yea, though thou scratchest at thy head all night
no sonnet dost thou scribble. By and by,
thou com'st to the conclusion that thy muse
hath left thee for a modern kinda guy
no longer dress'd in breeches, pointy shoes
and ruff. And so, thou hang'st thy head and sigh.

Sorry - not taking the piss, just couldn't resist.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Mine art? 'Tis mine.
Thine art is thine
And there the twain commence.
Thou followst rules
Thou learnt in school.
Mine come from common sense.

[gecian]

Re the Jabberwock & his friends, nonsense verse/parody/humour is beside the point -- no one's debating the point that archaic diction can be funny.

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm!
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind does ramm!

The useful question is whether serious verse has a place for this sort of stuff. Narrative ("Ancient M.", "F. Queene" etc) might, depending on the story, but I haven't seen and cannot imagine any good use for archaism in lyric or dramatic.

It all depends on whether the logic of the poem demands archaic diction -- whether it seems the natural choice of diction for the poem. (Ditto Greek allusions.) Poetry that's "spiced up" because the poet thought the seasoning "cool" is bad poetry by definition.

[This message has been edited by gecian (edited 05-08-2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Well, with lyric, you don't have to look any further than "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": Mine eyes hath seen the glory of the coming of the Lord right there, first line. Written during the US civil war, and pulling it's diction straight out of the King James bible. Very popular at it's time, and still regarded as one of the few US patriotic songs that's any good. (Of course, it's also being compared to "My Country 'Tis of Thee," which is a bad set of alternate lyrics to "God Save the Queen," and the "Star Spangled Banner," which is okay as poetry, but has as a tune a 17th century tavern song that's main use was as a sobriety test {if you could sing it and stay on key, you were judged sober enough for another drink, explaining the cacophony when people try to sing along at baseball games.})

With Dramatic, what do you mean? Everything that's non-humorous? Serious poems about love, depression, etc? But without any narrative?

I think any poetry can be translated into Elizabethan, Chaucerian, surfer/valley dialect or Swahili for that matter, or written originally in such language. Whether it needs to be or not depends on the audience. Excepting Swahili, it's also possible to write poems that parse in all of those English variants, as there are certain words that haven't changed since Chaucer's day.

There's also, linguistically, and odd provenance for surfer/valley dialect from Elizabethan, since the southern California Renaissance Faire has over the past thirty odd years employed a large contingent of surfers, giving them Elizabethan grammar lessons which went back to the beach and started to filter into the slang, or simply affect word choices. (The Bill and Ted "Excellent!" is part of this.)

Kevin

[River Not]

Well, tempteth crap and thou wilt findeth doo


Thine art which thou doth privy dear,
Cometh forth as a virgin maid,
Though she keepeth a well-kept rear,
She lies a lot 'cause she's been laid.
'Tis with furlough her fare stays paid,
For jouissance jives a forlorn
Ball, wherewith garter, although frayed,
'Twas flungeth free with sickly scorn.
Therefore, my Lord, she's done been torn.


who cares about the friggin' meter - I got to use thou and jouissance!

[This message has been edited by crowbowsow (edited 05-08-2002).]

[Harry Rutherford]

Mainly, it's a cultural shift.

At various periods, people have looked backwards to find somehow truer and more authentic artistic traditions; now it's fashionable to look forward.

Personally, I'm a sucker for the zeitgeist.

[gecian]

("Mine eyes hath seen" sounds ungrammatical to me.) "Pulling its diction straight out of the King James bible" -- Biblical allusion + elevation makes Biblical language a logical choice.

Perhaps "lyric poetry" isn't quite the word I want. I wasn't thinking of marching-songs and sermons and that sort of thing, more of a poem like, say, Keats's odes or "Morning at the Window" or "Church Going" -- the descriptive/meditative poem, which is the commonest type of poetry today.

With Dramatic, what do you mean? Everything that's non-humorous? Serious poems about love, depression, etc? But without any narrative?

Verse-plays and dramatic monologues. Richard II, I Henry IV, Faust, The Ring and the Book, "Prufrock" and so on. Worth mentioning that Shakespeare's historical plays are written in Elizabethan and not Middle English.

I think any poetry can be translated into Elizabethan, Chaucerian, surfer/valley dialect or Swahili for that matter, or written originally in such language. Whether it needs to be or not depends on the audience.

I'm not sure I understand this. A monologue by a surfer would be most appropriately in surfer-dialect. C16 English might be fitting for a poem that attempts to describe C16 England from a C16 English viewpoint. The first is, of course, much easier to do than the second because we have seen more surfers than C16 Englishmen.

I believe, though, that a historical poem(/movie/play) about C16 England written in C21 would most appropriately be in C21 English.

I also believe that every good poem has a particular language/dialect/tone that's appropriate to the content & the setting -- so, if you're suggesting that Hamlet can be translated into valley dialect or Swahili (we do have a Swahili translation of Caesar by the late Nyerere, by the way) without loss of power & effectiveness & beauty, I disagree.

[This message has been edited by gecian (edited 05-08-2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by gecian:
[B]Perhaps "lyric poetry" isn't quite the word I want. I wasn't thinking of marching-songs and sermons and that sort of thing, more of a poem like, say, Keats's odes or "Morning at the Window" or "Church Going" -- the descriptive/meditative poem, which is the commonest type of poetry today.

******
Not that I can think of right now, but most poems like that deal with modern people and modern subjects, so modern language is the logical (and I'd say proper) choice.


Verse-plays and dramatic monologues. Richard II, I Henry IV, Faust, The Ring and the Book, "Prufrock" and so on. Worth mentioning that Shakespeare's historical plays are written in Elizabethan and not Middle English.

******
Read "The Lady's Not for Burning" Elizabethan verse play, but "modern" circa 1950s.

I'm not sure I understand this. A monologue by a surfer would be most appropriately in surfer-dialect. C16 English might be fitting for a poem that attempts to describe C16 England from a C16 English viewpoint. The first is, of course, much easier to do than the second because we have seen more surfers than C16 Englishmen.

I believe, though, that a historical poem(/movie/play) about C16 England written in C21 would most appropriately be in C21 English.

*****
More accessible, certainly, and therefore better for a mass audience.

I also believe that every good poem has a particular language/dialect/tone that's appropriate to the content & the setting -- so, if you're suggesting that Hamlet can be translated into valley dialect or Swahili (we do have a Swahili translation of Caesar by the late Nyerere, by the way) without loss of power & effectiveness & beauty, I disagree.

******

It depends on how loose or strict the translation is. I have a side-by-side translation of Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale," translated and illustrated by Gilbert Sheldon (underground cartoonist who did The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.) The translation is hilarious, but loose, and I think Chaucer would approve, Nicholas being penned in as basically a hippy occultist.

Strict translations almost always read terribly, as they lose the context and idiom. However, adaptations often work quite well, and are sometimes better.

Kevin

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Okay, seems the best examples for this topic come from sidebar discussions in "Outside."

Case in point: There was a poem about an evil Nicaraguan shaman cursing a child and so forth, with misused Elizabethan grammar, Scots dialect, and even (though no one mentioned it) German-American folklore (to "hex" someone is a way to curse or bewitch them, but it's hardly something you'd see in Elizabethan Nicaragua).

Buried in among all this business was a word -- "aggroup" -- which everyone thought made up, given all the misused words, strange elisions and so on. However, it is a real word:
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=aggroup

It's also in my (current by fifteen years) Webster Unabridged. Not even listed as archaic diction, "chiefly British dialect," or any of the other usual warning labels.

Since "aggroup" is followed by "aggroupment," I suspect it's a common word to statisticians, accountants and other people who'd have a lot of use for it, while being completely abstruse to everyone else.

However, beside all the other misuses, it looked made up.

I think this is what he should have been told, as opposed to steering him towards writing poems about Muffy at the Mall.

I'm harping on this point because there's a long--and respectable--tradition in the fantasy literature field of writing fanciful verse set in long ago, far away, or made up places, using elaborate verbiage, poetic diction, and oodles of achaisms. To cite a few, there's "Cassilda's Song" in Robert Chambers THE KING IN YELLOW (1895), lots of stuff by H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (who was more known as a poet than as an author), and so on, up to the present day.

I can guarantee you, however, that all those poets got their archaic and fanciful verbiage spot on.

However, if someone is attempting this sort of poetry--and failing--I don't see why they should be steered into writing contemporary verse styles on subjects that do not interest them.

Instead, steer them towards some of the classics of the field. All of Smith's poetry is online now, here:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/wri/poetry/index.html

Here's a shorter one as a sample:

The Witch with Eyes of Amber
Clark Ashton Smith

I met a witch with amber eyes
Who slowly sang a scarlet rune,
Shifting to an icy laughter
Like the laughter of the moon.


Red as a wanton's was her mouth,
And fair the breast she bade me take
With a word that clove and clung
Burning like a furnace-flake.


But from her bright and lifted bosom,
When I touched it with my hand,
Came the many-needled coldness
Of a glacier-taken land.


And, lo! the witch with eyes of amber
Vanished like a blown-out flame
Leaving but the lichen-eaten
Stone that bore a blotted name.


Mirrors
Clark Ashton Smith

Mirrors of steel or silver, gold or glass antique!
Whether in melancholy marble palaces
In some long trance you drew the dreamy loveliness
Of Roman queens, or queens barbarical, or Greek:
Or, further than the bright and sun-pursuing beak
Of argosy might fare, beheld the empresses
Of lost Lemuria; or behind the lattices
Alhambran, have returned forbidden smiles oblique

Of wan mysterious women--mirrors, mirrors old,
Mirrors immutable, impassible as fate,
Your bosoms held the perished beauty of the past
Nearer than straining love might ever hope to hold;
And geeing faces, lips too phantom-frail to last,
Found in your magic depth a life re-duplicate.




Admittedly, the diction is mostly modern, though "bade," "wanton" (as a noun) and "lo!" are certainly old fashioned, and certainly not current for the time he was writing. While "geeing" is a real word as well (though I had to look it up).

Good poetry is good poetry, yes, but even the best poetry has genres. If someone wants to write dark supernaturual poetry with an archaic flavor, we should point them to the classics in the field, not to some modern anthology of mainstream verse.

Kevin

[This message has been edited by Kevin Andrew Murphy (edited 05-12-2002).]

[Harry Rutherford]

Originally posted by Kevin Andrew Murphy:

Admittedly, the diction is mostly modern

No it's not. It reads like a second-rate imitation of Keats on one of his more self-indulgent days; so that's nearly 200yrs old, and he was being self-consciously archaic then.
Admittedly, second-rate by fairly exacting standards - I would probably let it stay in High (where I would expect it to get a fairly rough ride) - but I still can't see the point. It just seems to be an exercise in mutual frottage between the writer and reader.

Apart from anything else, it offers such a boring, limited view of history. The whole C19th Gothic revival (which is the tradition this stuff is in) was so patronising - the Middle Ages have so much more to offer than witches and goblins.

This stuff has the intellectual sophistication of Disney with none of the artistic importance.

[This message has been edited by Harry Rutherford (edited 05-12-2002).]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Clark Ashton Smith had a lot of influence on the whole sword and sorcery genre, including the poetry thereof.

Second-rate Keats? Maybe. Here's the beginning of "The Dark Eidolon," one of his short stories:

Thasaidon, lord of seven hells
Wherein the single Serpent dwells,
With volumes drawn from pit to pit
Through fire and darkness infinite --
Thasaidon, sun of nether skies,
Thine ancient evil never dies,
For aye thy somber fulgors flame
On sunken worlds that have no name,
Man's heart enthrones thee, still supreme,
Though the false sorcerers blaspheme.
-- The Song of Xeethra

On Zothique, the last continent on Earth, the sun no longer shone with the whiteness of its prime, but was dim and tarnished as if with a vapor of blood. New stars without number had declared themselves in the heavens, and the shadows of the infinite had fallen closer. And out of the shadows, the older gods had returned to man: the gods forgotten since Hyperborea, since Mu and Poseidonis, bearing other names but the same attributes. And the elder demons had also returned, battening on the fumes of evil sacrifice, and fostering again the primordial sorceries.

Many were the necromancers and magicians of Zothique, and the infamy and marvel of their doings were legended everywhere in the latter days. But among them all there was none greater than Namirrha, who imposed his black yoke on the cities of Xylac, and later, in a proud delirium, deemed himself the veritable peer of Thasaidon, lord of Evil.

Fantasy novelists have had a habit since of putting quotes from mythical books into their fantasy novels. Actually, I think the tradition started more with Chambers and Morris, but Smith definitely influenced a lot of people.

There was recently a new anthology of "Tales of Zothique" by modern authors.

The middle ages may have had more of interest than witches and goblins, and some people write about that. There's the whole genre of medieval cloiser whodunits and similar things. However, if you dismiss the witch and goblin stuff, you dismiss some of the more interesting writing out there.

Certainly Chaucer liked supernatural stories. The Wife of Bath's Tale and the Merchant's Tale are both straight-out fantasies.

Kevin

[Urizen]

Hey Kevin,

I'm surprised you haven't mentioned E.R. Eddison yet. I have his "Zimiamvia" trilogy, though I only managed to get about half way through it. Eddison's style is decidedly Elizabethan. Some of the dialogue could have come straight out of a Shakespeare play (though Eddison himself prefered John Webster). There are quite a few poems scattered through-out that Trilogy, though I can't honestly say they are very good. I realize Eddison isn't exactly modern, but the style he wrote in was nearly as obsolete in 1935 as it is now, so I thought I'd put in a plug for him. Tolkien was one of Eddison's admirers.

Also, shouldn't we say something about Thomas Chatterton? I'm sure most of us here have heard of him. I don't know the exact details, but didn't Chatterton claim his works were penned by a sixteenth century monk? Or something like that? I also believe that Chatterton killed himself at eighteen, which makes his work all the more remarkable. If I can, I'll find some of Chatterton's work online and come back to post a link. Damn good stuff for a teenager.

Let's also not forget Ezra Pound. His first few books were filled with poetry written in an archaic style.

Over-all, I think poetry written in any style whatsoever can succeed, if it is done exeedingly well. The problem is, as lots of the others have said, is that most of that kind of stuff is just too poorly executed to generate a lot of interest.

Bill


Here's a Chatterton sample. If the date here is correct (1768), then Chatterton was only sixteen when he wrote it. Sure, 1768 was a long time ago, but the style of this stuff here was still very, very "retro" even for that time.
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/chattert1b.html

[This message has been edited by Urizen (edited 05-13-2002).]

[Clive2]

I'm sorry, but all that sword and sorcery poetry just makes me cringe with embarrassment. The whole genre makes me cringe anyway, so that's not really a surprise.

I suppose my beef with this is that these faux-Victorians give metre and rhyme a bad name. There are blinkered people who already believe that these venerable poetic devices are irrelevant to modern poetry without some dope filling his verse with thees and thous to make the point for them.

And why do they all aspire to writing like Tennyson on a severely bad hair day? Personally, were I to embark on writing archaic poetry, I would far rather emulate the good peer, Sir John Wilmot, Earl Of Rochester: -

Song

Quoth the Duchess of Cleveland to counselor Knight,
"I'd fain have a prick, knew I how to come by't.
I desire you'll be secret and give your advice:
Though cunt be not coy, reputation is nice."

"To some cellar in Sodom Your Grace must retire
Where porters with black-pots sit round a coal fire;
There open your case, and Your Grace cannot fail
Of a dozen of pricks for a dozen of ale."

"Is't so?" quoth the Duchess. "Aye, by God!" quoth the whore.
"Then give me the key that unlocks the back door,
For I'd rather be fucked by porters and carmen
Than thus be abused by Churchill and Jermyn."

John Wilmot, Earl Of Rochester (1647-1680)

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Urizen:
Over-all, I think poetry written in any style whatsoever can succeed, if it is done exeedingly well. The problem is, as lots of the others have said, is that most of that kind of stuff is just too poorly executed to generate a lot of interest.


Bill--

I think you're hitting the nail on the head here. However, just because someone's poorly executing X doesn't mean they should scrap it and take up Y. Among other things, if you have no engagement with the material, your work will generally suck. I may have the experience to write a "Muffy at the Mall" poem, but I have neither the interest nor the inspiration to do so, take exception if people tell me to do it, and also take exception when I hear others told to go write things they have no interest in.

Innovations also come about because of people trying new things and doing what they are inspired to, even if they are sometimes less than fully successful. William Morris, in 1895, wrote "The Wood Beyond the World," the first novel EVER to be set in a miraculous fantasy land of the author's own invention, as opposed to simply times of myth and legend. How well did Morris do this? Well, frankly, not as well as Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, but he inspired them (Lewis's Wood Between the Worlds in "The Magician's Nepphew" is a pretty obvious tap-of-the-hat to WM).

Here's the first to paragraphs of the novel, typed directly from the 1st edition of 1895:

Chapter I: OF GOLDEN WALTER AND HIS FATHER

A while ago there was a young man dwelling in a great and goodly city by the sea which had to name Langton on Holm. He was but of five and twenty winters, a fair-faced man, yellow-haired, tall and strong; rather wiser than foolisher than young men are mostly wont; a valiant youth and kind; not of many words but courteous of speech; no roisterer, nought masterful, but peacable and knowing how to forbear: in a fray a perilous foe, and a trusty war-fellow. His father, with whom he was dwelling when this tale begins, was a great merchant, richer than a baron of the land, a head-man of the greatest of the Lineages of Langton, and a captain of the Porte; he was of the Lineage of the Goldings, therefore he was called Bartholomew Golden, and his son Golden Walter.

Now ye may well deem that such a youngling as this was looked upon by all as a lucky man without a lack; but there was this flaw in his lot, whereas he had fallen into the toils of love a woman exceeding fair, and had taken her to wife, she nought unwilling as it seemed. But when they had been wedded some six months he found by manifest tokens, that his fairness was not so much to her but that she must seek to the foulness of one worser than he in all ways; wherefore his rest departed from him, whereas he hated her for her untruth and her hatred of him; yet would the sound of her voice, as she came and went in the house, make his heart beat; and the sight of her stirred desire within him, so that he longed for her to be sweet and kind with him, and deemed that, might it be so, he should forget all the evil gone by. But it was not so; for ever when she saw him, her face changed, and her hatred of him became manifest, and howsoever she were sweet with others, with him she was hard and sour.

I detest bad doublet-and-hose verse, but I am equal opportunity in things I detest. Kitchy hearts and kittens poems are bad too. Likewise clichee-filled love poetry.

But if someone writes bad love poetry, you don't tell them to work on their depressing poems or humorous verse.

If Clark Ashton Smith reads as Yeats-on-crack, so be it, but I've read stuff in Smith that I've never seen in Yeats.

Much of this is likely because Smith and Lovecraft were both wanting to be Lord Dunsany, and Dunsany was trying to be Yeats. However, they were all best when they were being themselves. Dunsany did some dark fantasies. Lovecraft and Smith did them maybe not better, but darker and far more elaborate.

They're more to 20th century literature than Hemingway or Sylvia Plath.

Kevin

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Clive2:
I suppose my beef with this is that these faux-Victorians give metre and rhyme a bad name. There are blinkered people who already believe that these venerable poetic devices are irrelevant to modern poetry without some dope filling his verse with thees and thous to make the point for them.

Clive,

The people aspiring to be Tennyson on a bad hair day are doing nothing to verse that has not already been done by greeting cards, friendship plaques, and Christian rocky lyrics. Are the goths doing the bad Lord Byron imitations really that horrible compared to these other three? Take a look around the neighborhood!

People who believe rhyme and meter irrelevant are hardly going to go out and find a Clark Ashton Smith collection to make their point for them any more than they'll buy a greeting card and point to that as an example of how rhyme and meter are a crime
against humanity.

People who believe metered verse irrelevant are generally those who don't understand it because it scares them. Or they're stupid. My poetry teacher back at college (an idiot on many levels) insisted that "clawed" was 2 syllables and "Claude" was 1 because the first one ended in "-ed." That was the way he'd learned to count it. And this guy was a published free verse poet who'd managed to get a post as a visiting lecturer.

Kevin

P.S. To answer the question of why people want to emulate Tennyson instead of the other guy, that piece was funny, but a dirty joke doesn't need to be set in a certain time period to be funny, whereas an Arthurian DOES need to be set back in time.

[Clive2]

Ah, Kevin, but if these people wanted to be truly authentic and write in the style of the knights and damsels period, they would be better off learning to write in Middle English than BAAAAAAD Victorian.

My posting the Rochester poem was to make the point that poets of yore wrote more varied verse than the wince-inducing dragon-drivel the archaic-addicted scrawl today.

Clive

[Harry Rutherford]

You see, I can see the point of fantasy novels - if you can write a good story, with the novelistic virtues of decent characterisation, plotting and so on, then a fantasy world can be an interesting background for that action to take place. It's the same with SF, or historical novels.

But archaic short poems - what's the point? What is the archaic/fantasy/gothic element going to bring to the poem other than the reassurance of the cosily familiar? At least when Coleridge did it, it was still a new and exciting literary trend; it doesn't even have that going for it anymore.

It's the same with Pre-Raphaelite paintings - they have a certain immediate superficial appeal, and that's it. The painters were fascinated with the trappings of a certain kind of mock-medieval culture, and successfully produced paintings that were full of those trappings but had nothing else going for them.

I'd be happy to be proved wrong, of course. If anyone posted a poem who actually knew something about poetry and had put some thought into it (as opposed to just thinking that 'thou' sounded poetic), but wrote fantasy poetry out of affection for that genre, I would try and crit it on its own terms.

As I've never seen an archaic poem posted at PFFA that met the basic requirements to be taken seriously (some sign of effort from the writer, correct use of archaic language, and avoidence of anachronism), it's never been an issue.

[gecian]

"But archaic short poems - what's the point?"

Quite so. (Of course, if one wants to write a fantasy set in old England pre-Defoe, it's sensible to write it in verse.) Apart from that, the idea seems silly.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Harry Rutherford:
You see, I can see the point of fantasy novels - if you can write a good story, with the novelistic virtues of decent characterisation, plotting and so on, then a fantasy world can be an interesting background for that action to take place. It's the same with SF, or historical novels.

********
And having created those worlds, you then write poetry within them?

Two main examples of modern writers spring to mind: Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" and Mercedes Lackey's "Valdemar." The first is SF (though with SF dragons) and the second fantasy. Both have bards as a big part of the storyline, including the whole "Harper Hall Trilogy" for the first and "The Heralds of Valdemar Trilogy" for the second.


But archaic short poems - what's the point? What is the archaic/fantasy/gothic element going to bring to the poem other than the reassurance of the cosily familiar? At least when Coleridge did it, it was still a new and exciting literary trend; it doesn't even have that going for it anymore.

*******
Call it a revival. I don't see you throwing the "not an exciting literary trend" at the people writing sonnets, which are pretty hoary when you look at them in that light.

But beyond the "cosily familiar" (never an attraction for me), people like the archaic/fantasy/gothic element for the same reason fairytales often start with "long ago and far away"--the exotic and the uncanny are far more interesting to some people than the humdrum everyday world. The supernatural element adds interest, and more than that, pushes the envelope of the type of story that may be told.

It's the same with Pre-Raphaelite paintings - they have a certain immediate superficial appeal, and that's it. The painters were fascinated with the trappings of a certain kind of mock-medieval culture, and successfully produced paintings that were full of those trappings but had nothing else going for them.

*******
They were pretty, they were entertaining, and let's face it, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's portrait of Lilith is hot.

I'd be happy to be proved wrong, of course. If anyone posted a poem who actually knew something about poetry and had put some thought into it (as opposed to just thinking that 'thou' sounded poetic), but wrote fantasy poetry out of affection for that genre, I would try and crit it on its own terms.

*********
You seem to have rather high entrance requirements for the genre. How many bad "Aaah! I was raped! Die, you bastard!" poems have you read at PFFA? Do you expect everyone who's doing those to be Sylvia Plath straight out the gate?

As I've never seen an archaic poem posted at PFFA that met the basic requirements to be taken seriously (some sign of effort from the writer, correct use of archaic language, and avoidence of anachronism), it's never been an issue.

*********
So you're saying that such poems must immediately come in at the High or Merciless level... This sounds like a bit of a double standard. I've seen archaic poems that have had some effort--and commented on them, while everyone else was busy laughing. Correct use of language? Look at how many people misuse modern English, and remember, this is a workshop. If someone continues to misuse "thee," call them on it, but people do have to learn somewhere.

As for anachronisms, there are sometimes reasons to have them in. One is that they do fall under the "cosily familiar" category that is useful if not necessary to make things accessible to a modern audience. Look at Julius Caesar--how many times does Shakespeare throw in a "By Mary!" or "Lo! The clock strikes!" despite the fact Caesar wasn't worshipping the Christian pantheon and they didn't have clocks back then? Does the whole play suck and not fit to be taken seriously because it had these anachronisms?

Besides which, part of the point of having a fantasy world is that you can have anachronisms which are not actually anachronistic, since you have a different timeline. Middle Earth is not Merry Olde England, so you can have hobbits eating potatoes and smoking pipeweed (tobacco by any other name) without it being out of place.


Kevin

[gecian]

Call it a revival. I don't see you throwing the "not an exciting literary trend" at the people writing sonnets, which are pretty hoary when you look at them in that light.

A sonnet's a poetic form, no more distinctively Elizabethan than Newton's Laws are C17. There's nothing "dated" about it. There is, however, something "dated" about Victorian English -- it isn't spoken anymore.

Millay/Auden (arguably)/Heaney are considered good sonneteers because they adapted the form so effectively to modern English.

As for things being "hot", that only goes so far. Bukowski is "hot" -- does that mean we should start writing like him?

Re Shakespeare's "anachronisms" -- there's nothing particularly Italian about any of his plays. He wasn't trying to depict Italy or Caesar as they actually were; merely to use them for a dramatic purpose.

I haven't seen a good recent serious "archaic" short poem that a. works, or b. wouldn't benefit vastly from modernisation.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by gecian:
[B]
A sonnet's a poetic form, no more distinctively Elizabethan than Newton's Laws are C17. There's nothing "dated" about it. There is, however, something "dated" about Victorian English -- it isn't spoken anymore.

*****
Oh, it still is. Certain words have fallen out of fashion, some have shaded meaning, but it's still pretty much the same. The one difference is that the Victorians were okay about the idea of having one language for literature and another for everyday life.


Millay/Auden (arguably)/Heaney are considered good sonneteers because they adapted the form so effectively to modern English.

*******
If all you're going with the the framework, there's nothing about it that goes out of date. Likewise with the Sapphic and so forth. Maybe not the best analogy to have made.

As for things being "hot", that only goes so far. Bukowski is "hot" -- does that mean we should start writing like him?

******
I meant "hot" meaning "sexy." I don't think anyone ever accused Bukowski of being sexy. Rossetti's picture of Lilith, however, is.


Re Shakespeare's "anachronisms" -- there's nothing particularly Italian about any of his plays. He wasn't trying to depict Italy or Caesar as they actually were; merely to use them for a dramatic purpose.

******
So if someone wants to use the trappings of Elizabethan grammar for dramatic purposes, it stands to reason that should be okay too. We know that real Italians didn't have clocks in Caesar's day, so by that logic, throwing a few "thees" around is perfectly fine.

Kevin

[rift]

If we are talking about poetry as more than entertainment – as art – than the argument for archaism falls flat. Poetry, and art in general, is sparked by a desire to express ourselves. Therefore, delving into dead English, which hinders attempts to convey universal meaning, is an offense akin to poorly punctuating after reading some cummings. Now, I am guilty of the latter of those two offenses, and I understand the allure of attempting to use a device which is not my own. But I've moved on. In essence, that's what archaic poetry is – a tempting concept which ultimately weakens anything you wish to convey.

A note on the Bard: if Shakespeare put clocks in his stage directions, it was for a dramatic or thematic reason. He wasn't simply jazzing up the mantles.

I bid ye goodnight.

-Eli

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Eli--

You're taking an awful lot of things as givens here. In order:

[QUOTE]Originally posted by rift:
[B]If we are talking about poetry as more than entertainment – as art – than the argument for archaism falls flat.

*****
Given #1: Poetry, written for entertainment purposes, can never transcend into art except as a conscious choice on the part of the poet.

Poetry, and art in general, is sparked by a desire to express ourselves.

*******
Given #2: Art is sparked by desire to express oneself. Logic flaw: What if I desire to express myself by entertaining people?

Therefore, delving into dead English, which hinders attempts to convey universal meaning,

Given #3: Anything which hinders attempts to convey universal meaning is bad. Archaisms are not easily understood, so are bad and should not be used. Problem: Where do you draw the line and who draws it? What if we decide that using any verbiage more advanced than "Hop on Pop" is bad? Many people have small vocabularies and won't understand any word beyond the first grade.

is an offense akin to poorly punctuating after reading some cummings.

Given #4: Style is no excuse. Avoid anything which breaks the accepted rules of mainstream English.

Now, I am guilty of the latter of those two offenses, and I understand the allure of attempting to use a device which is not my own. But I've moved on.

Given #5: The allure of such things as archaisms, e.e.cummings punctuation, etc. are false blandishment and distractions from the pure and noble path to the philosopher's stone of TRUE POETRY, for I have seen the ONE TRUE PATH! Give up these vain pursuits for lo, I shall lead a crusade...

In essence, that's what archaic poetry is – a tempting concept which ultimately weakens anything you wish to convey.

Given #6: Fie! Heretic! Thou hast fallen prey to the practiced wiles and withered charms of the aged harlot, Archaism!

If you understood the sarcasm, I believe my point was made, even under your terms--I had a desire to express myself, and I just used archaisms to do it. They are still a useful and vital part of the language.

Oh yes, there was also

Given #7: Archaisms are Dead Language.

Untrue. If they were dead, you wouldn't know what they meant.

Kevin

[Donner]

Originally posted by Kevin Andrew Murphy:


Given #7: Archaisms are Dead Language.

Untrue. If they were dead, you wouldn't know what they meant.

Kevin

Now you're just splitting hairs. Ancient Greek and Latin are called "dead" languages, even though they're still used in specific disciplines, studied and known. We just don't walk around saying, Et tu, Kevin! in our everyday speech any more than we wish thee well.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Donner:
Now you're just splitting hairs. Ancient Greek and Latin are called "dead" languages, even though they're still used in specific disciplines, studied and known. We just don't walk around saying, Et tu, Kevin! in our everyday speech any more than we wish thee well.

I hear et tu and thee more often in conversations than I hear "ensorcelment," "phantasmagorical," or "panoply," and more people know what they mean.

The common archaisms are brought out like grandma's silver on holidays and people still know what they are and what they're for. That doesn't fit the description of "dead" language to my mind.

Kevin

[Dunc]

Kevin, old trout, some of us who are hooked on languages have enjoyed our travels in OE like Maldon and Beowulf, in ME like Langland and Chaucer and the lyrics, and so on up to the present. If we find ourselves outflanked by an archaism, we look it up, but we don't frown. What makes us frown is the context - is this the time (and tone) to use Latin, Greek, French, Swahili, English archaism, or is it not? It's that delicate crossover point for poets and other writers between atmosphere and communication. Regards / Dunc

[Clive2]

Kevin, th'art flailing, sirrah! Methinks 'tis time to lay it to rest. Forsooth, this argument circular could spin round and round for aye.

Clive

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Ay, verily, that it could. 'Tis an old chestnut methinks, and forsooth, nae do I think we've been the first to argue it, nor shall we be the last.

An' Dunc be making his point well.

Kevin