Mark J. Reed scripsit:
> One usually has to count syllables explicitly to
> notice whether a given haiku actually adheres to the 5-7-5 pattern or is
> merely close. Whereas we can hear rhyme and feel rhythm without
> devoting conscious effort to analyzing them.
I think what we are able to hear/feel is a matter of what kind of poetry
we are used to.
> So-called "free verse" is, as far as I can tell, prose with
> randomly-inserted carriage returns. Not what I consider poetry at all.
A good counterexample is Amy Lowell's "Patterns", which although
it is free verse, has a great deal of subtle structure in it.
See http://alt.venus.co.uk/weed/writings/poems/alp.htm for the full
text. I think it's best viewed as stress-verse with a variable number
of stresses per line: the pattern of line lengths interacts with the
pattern of rhyming.
--
[W]hen I wrote it I was more than a little John Cowan
febrile with foodpoisoning from an antique carrot jcowan@reutershealth.com
that I foolishly ate out of an illjudged faith www.ccil.org/~cowan
in the benignancy of vegetables. --And Rosta www.reutershealth.com