Novalis: A Tribute

[milo]

"Harold Bloom" is definitely my top guy, but then Blake was my focus.

"M.A. in philosophy in psychoanalysis" Wow, and your still alive

"After reading the meter sticky, my understanding of your major complaint about the deficiency in meter is that I don't really make iambs. This is by virtue of the fact that the second syllable of each pair, in many cases, falls on part of a word, and not a whole one. Does that sound right, or is there something else I'm missing?"

Actually you do make iambs, but only part of the poem is composed of them. The rest is in various meters or non-meters.

An iamb is composed of two syllables, the first is soft or non accented, the second hard, or accented. Example:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

It is sort of a de-DUM sound.

Read some Elizabethan sonnets to get the feel of how iambs sound. Elizabethan sonnets are generally written in Iambic pentameter, that is five feet of iambs.

"two of my teachers were prize winning poets, neither did very much by way of teaching the basics of formal poetry."

Well their lack does not have to disable you

Dale

A minor correction

Shakespeare started many of his sonnets with a trochee. In this case it is:

SHALLi comPARE theeTO aSUM mer'sDAY