Hendiadys at Old Poetry

Guest Book

1 - 4 of 4

on So You Want To Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski, on October 17

Thoroughly clichéd, alas.
on Breadfruit by Philip Larkin, on September 22

Brilliant!
didn't know this poem before, but it ticks so many boxes! The rhythm is clever, It absolutely requires a pause between the first and second lines The parenthesis in line 5 in mock clarification is neat. The switching of stresses between iamb and trochee here and there is cunning, as is the rhyming of sand/and in stanza 1, while the slyness of "uncorrected" is clever. The only weakness I detect (and I'm sure Larkin did too) is to grow a "silver birch" in order to have a rhyme for "church". Even "weeping" would kave been a little less forced, although it might have lost the note of suburbia that I expect Larkin wanted. But the near-pathos of the last six lines is terrific.
on On Losing A Pencil In French River (Sonnet XIII.) by George Jehoshaphat Mountain , on September 17

Help!
Mock heroic. Over-done. Result - corn! Waste of perfectly capable rhythmic and rhyming skills.
on Don't Take Your Troubles to Bed by Edmund Vance Cooke , on September 17

Corn!
How does one "get inspired" by this level of banality?