Uncle! Enough people have called me on it, in comments below or by email, that I had to go look at some of Saintsbury's criticism beyond the metrical work. Blame it on my lousy almost-New Critical-the-text-matters-not-the-life education in criticism, or on my past-50-I'll-remember-what-I-want-to-mostly memory, or just on my thick-headedness, but I was wrong about Saintsbury as a critic.
And after reading Aaron Haspel's "School of Poetry," I think I was wrong, too, I think, in so strongly denigrating the ability to scan as part of the critic's tool kit. Let me try that again. There's usually not much need to treat scansion directly in criticism: one wouldn't try to scan a line of free verse, and there won't be many occasions when one has to scan a line of metrical poetry in order to make a critical point. Still, a critic who cannot sensitively scan a line of verse—and I don't mean just name the meter—is unlikely to be a very good critic of any kind of poetry. That critic won't even be able to read much metrical verse, and won't understand what has been traded away when reading free verse. Writing excellent free verse is hard.
But I still think Saintsbury was pigheaded about elision.
5:12:23 PM 
|
|
