Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Great Regulars: American artists as different as Robert Frost

and William Carlos Williams belong more or less in the "ordinary speech" category. On the other, "Miltonic" side of that division about word order in the mother tongue, consider the expressive eccentric Emily Dickinson, who in her magnificent poem 1068 ("Further in Summer Than the Birds") writes this quatrain about the sounds of invisible insects in the summer fields:

Antiquest felt at Noon
When August burning low
Arise this spectral Canticle
Repose to typify

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: The American John Milton: The poet and the power of extraordinary speech

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