Sherry Chandler

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Richard Moore

Richard Moore is an apologist for meter whose work I discovered at West Chester. Here is an excerpt from an on-line essay “Poetic Meter in English: Roots and Possibilities:”

With examples like these [referring to poems from Yeats and Frost] to inspire, it is surprising that more recent productions in regular iambic have so frequently tended to sound like speeches from Gorboduc, that first blank verse play in English and inexhaustible storehouse of sterile pentameters:

O king, the greatest grief that ever prince did hear,
That ever woeful messenger did tell,
That ever wretched land hath seen before,
I bring to you: Porrex, your younger son,
With sudden force invaded hath the land
That you to Ferrex did allot to rule,
And with his own most bloody hand he hath
His brother slain, and doth possess his realm.

If the contemporary effort to write strict iambic has so frequently resulted in rhythms that sound like that, then the possibility should at least be considered that after four centuries strict iambic is indeed dead and ought to be replaced by something else. (The problem in part may be that the lines of the iambic / free verse controversy were first drawn in Whitman’s time, when iambic had already lost much of its early music. In consequence, the verse of the metric conservatives, even to this day, partakes of a tradition, starting with Longfellow and Colonel Higginson, which, like A. E. Housman at his worst, valued excessive regularity and suggested to poets like William Carlos Williams the stultifying proprieties of Victorian times.)

This essay is from Moore’s book The Rule That Liberates (Pine Hill Press, 1994). In it, Moore argues that the iambic pentameter line as practiced by masters like Milton is actually a 4 beat line with caesura, referring back to early English poetry. What makes it that, if I understand, is the frequent use of irregular feet like anapests and pyrrhics.

For those of you who are really tired of reading about Poetry Wars, I provide a link to Moore’s epigrams. He puts new ones up about once a week.

The panel on Moore, “Serious Laughter: Richard Moore and the Rule that Liberates,” included a discussion of his epigrams. Here is one of my favorites, it being that time of year here in Kentucky: