Epicinian: Poetry Is a Victory if We Do Not
Bastardize It
“The continuous efforts of English poets in every generation to rediscover a ‘language really
used by men’ would have been incomprehensible to a[n ancient] Greek.’” ~ Michael
Schmidt, The First Poets, 15, quoting W. H. Auden, The Portable Greek Reader (New York,
1948), 4.
Why bother? Why endeavor to make verse
Sound common like a laborer at tea
Time? Poems like that turn into a curse
Or mumbling, not the soaring apogee
Of language Homer made and Sappho sang.
Why rape the beauty of the poet’s aim
And make it sound like dialectal slang?
Yes, humor might result, but what a shame
To turn the gold of poetry to lead.
The argot of the plumber does not pair
With sonnets. Accents of the potting shed
Will mar the sound of hieratic prayer.
..So Wordsworth and drugged Coleridge were wrong.
….We do not want the football pitch in song.