Thinking poetically would be thinking
prosodically
metaphorically
meta/linguistically
These would correspond to Pound's three types of "charging language with meaning."
A little child acquires the prosody of a language before anything else: intonation and accentuation. Little kids respond well to rhyme and to pounded out accentual rhythms. So prosodical thinking is inherent in language acquisition itself.
Yet I had a high-school teacher who couldn't scan Shakespeare. There is a higher level, of being able to feel the variety of the iambic pentameter line in tension with the abstract pattern.
Then an even higher level: being able to achieve originality in one's handling of prosody.
No comments:
Post a Comment