by Jongleur » Fri Jun 30, 2017 10:14 am
I certainly know what you mean about someone risking putting out a bad product among one's oeuvre while trying to reach higher. Even someone as well respected as Shakespeare has certain of his plays harshly criticized (I am thinking here of Henry VIII).
I wonder though how this thought plays out in terms of formal poetic elements. If the elements were correct (consistently patterned metre and rhyme scheme, for example), if the criticism could be levelled still against those particular elements? I admit that the wording of the title of this thread is confusing if it is taken to imply that it could be that following formal rules of poetic composition are all that are needed to make a poem beautiful, because the use of language, imagery, subject, would not necessarily have any formal categories to adhere to. Also, I am at least not sure that there is any formal rules for rhythm in poetry. As far as I can tell it is rather a quality of the linguistic medium. I suppose for clarity I could have named the thread "Does Following Rules Make Poetry More Beautiful", or something like that. I am even partly doubtful of the wordchoice "rules", but that is another matter...
Your last question I think is also significant. Is beauty even, or else entirely, an inherent aspect of things or does it partly have to do with its relationship to other things? Meaning, for example, is rarity a quality of beauty?
At one point sonnets were the height of fashion and later other poetic forms were preferred or created. So, following previously established rules could, as you said, end up being something limiting and a hindrance to further forms of beauty.
One thing that came to my mind though was, at what point, in being completely free of form, does a poem stop being a poem and become something else, rather prose, for example? Is it only the form of short stacked lined, so that if I put this response in the form of short fairly consistent lines, would it suddenly be poetry whereas because it had been formatted another way it was prose? Just a rumination I had...
Another thing I was thinking is, even if we accept a great degree of freedom from form, is there a limit to that? If a poetic work freed itself entirely from semiotic rules and semantics, even if it accomplished other things like rhyming sounds and metre, might it not become tiresome much more quickly than for example an epic poem which had clarity and followed traditional poetic forms as well as attained a semantically well composed and developed narrative? I understand that you said that not every work is comparable to a great, I am wondering more if there might be limits to freedom of form where on the one hand a poem could be considered tiresome and on the other hand pleasant, enthralling, or what have you. This is also a general consideration for the thread.