#john lennard

...any particular form is a tiny, temporarily frozen portion of an endlessly fluid medium, only seeming a solid object through its repeated use by different poets.

Profoundly different as they are, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Dickinson, Eliot, Walcott, and Plath could readily converse about the techniques of which they are common masters; few undergraduates I have encountered know much about meter beyond the terms 'blank verse' and 'iambic pentameter', much about form beyond 'couplet' and 'sonnet', or anything about rhyme more complicated than an assertion that two words do or don't. The commonest fault of their own writing is an inability to use any punctuation beyond full-stops and commas (parentheses, colons, semi-colons, dashes, and hyphens might as well not exist) and a consequent tendency to connect clauses in an endless series at the cost of all subtlety. Yet it is exactly techniques of ordering to which close reading must attend.