RE: RAT Re: John Sylvain and "grammar"

["Sylvain, John" <jsylvain@station.sony.com>]

Bill, is that you?!?!?

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	William Houts [SMTP:houts.w@ghc.org]
> Sent:	Friday, October 22, 1999 9:47 AM
> To:	rat-list@whirl-i-gig.com
> Subject:	Re: RAT Re:  John Sylvain and "grammar"
> 
> 
> 
> >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
>