Bad poetry...necessary for developing mature prose?
by
wgoconnel
08/12/2007, 12:51 PM #
Whatever one might think of bad poetry it must be considered a useful exercise to jostle one from the superfluous, yet necessary, euphony of youth onto the stabilized prosody which maturity calls for.
I must say that I don't particularly admire myself for not having shaken myself clear of the ecstatic bestial rhythms I've often found myself feeling as a youth, and less so, as an adult.
However, and this brings up and compromises so much for me James Joyce’s "Ulysses," but as a child I admired the poetic prose of the novel but now find it puerile and condescending. Could it be that James Joyce was pandering to the youthful audience by invoking the Vico-like idea that the young think poetically whereas the old have shed their rythmic ways so much as snakes sheds their own skin?
I'm of the emphatic opinion that, yes, what I say is correct, which is perhaps as immature and stupid as anything I could possibly say. Yes, music/poetry is quite like mathematics, the more one inundates oneself with these pernicious influences as a youth, the more out of control one becomes. It's really not until one is older that one might deign to have anything to do with music or mathematics, and that is only to play the pied piper to the much more energetic and ecstatic youth which need to be controlled lest they put old folks to their graves early.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Food for thought? Or more fodder to be chopped up and fed back to me? I can never know, but I'm quite sure I'll be insulted or something. Well I don't care Slate! do your worst if you haven't done insidiously so - or are already doing so.
Anyway fighting bad poetry is just stunting people's growth like so much algebra and whatnot.