RAT RE: Mr. William Houts

[TravSD@aol.com]

"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."

A. I did not say that Shakespeare had not mastered formal constraint; I 
consider him the greatest poet who ever lived --althought the French 
neo-classicists, among others considered him slip-shod in his construction. 
However, I GUARANTEE you that Shakespeare was not the slightest bit concerned 
about how he spelled a single word in his body of work--he was writing PLAYS. 
If someone had called him on a spelling or punctuation error (had such things 
existed), I imagine he would have swatted him like a fly. AS Mr. Jonoh1 was 
astute enough to point out in a seperate communication, this my only real 
point. 
B. I am flattered to know that Mr. Houts is familar enough with my work to 
have so scornful opinion of it. Which of my plays, songs, poems, articles or 
stories are you referring to, Mr. Houts -- or is it the entire body of work 
you have evaluated?
 
" 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"

I did not say Aeschylus or Aristophanes (the only two greek playwrights I 
mentioned) were non-metrical. I only possess enough Greek to order a gyro. In 
addition, I find myself too busy READING poets to scan them. However, I'll 
trust Edith Hamilton, who said this about Aesychlus:" A kind of splendid 
carelessness goes with surpassing power. The labor of the file was not for 
Aeschylus as it was not for Shakespeare. These are not to be pictured pacing 
the floor through nights of anguish, searching for le mot unique." As for 
Plautus in the latin: the Romans did not even possess punctuation and ALL the 
letters are caps! Hah! AS for Chaucer's rhyming couplets...h'm...somehow the 
rap community manages to remain ungrammatical despite the constant use of 
this device. 

But I am growing tired of this discussion, and so must you be. After all, 
defending the status quo...it's a little easy, don't you think?