Re: RAT Re: John Sylvain and "grammar"

["William Houts" <houts.w@ghc.org>]

>TravSD@aol.com wrote:
>
> Yo, John Sylvain--Shakespeare didn't give a fuck about grammar because no
> dogma about english grammar existed in the Elizabethen period! He is the
> master of the split infinitive, the mixed metaphor, and the extra foot of
> meter-- in short, he is a great writer simply BECAUSE he bent the language to
> his will and the fucking pedants, schoolmarms and "style mavens" hadn't yet
> spread their feces around the field of human expression, straight-jacketing
> the very words as they escape from our brains. Fuck the details! so said

When you have mastered formal constraint, then it is no longer a rabid bear but a trained one, and you can make it do tricks, jump through hoops, dance, wear a tutu if you like.
This mastery  is why Mr.
 Shakespeare is a great  poet, and Mr. TravSD is not.

> Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Plautus, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Walt
> Whitman and so say I ..


I am not veryconversant with Plautus and Rabelais, to my shame.  But the Greeks you mentioned were  strict metrical poets, even (or especially) the comic poet  Aristophanes, who typically broke metrical and grammatical constraints when depicting Persians and non-Athenian Greeks  --in other words, complete backwater rubes

As for the others, Chaucer was responsible to some extent for inventing poetic English, but I don't see how you can cut any ice with him.  The CANTERBURY TALES are several thousand rhymed couplets    in fairly regular iampic pentameter.  And while Mr. Whitman isn't in this metricist camp, his sentence  construction was regular enough to make  any schoolmarm proud. 

(Though his Sentiments might make her blush.)



    --William L. Houts