When one speaks of traditional form, one is speaking about the haphazard product of a culture's literary history. How many poetic forms arose naturally out of a particular culture or language? Borrowed, grafted, adapted, one could even say ‘translated’, forms are not inherent to the culture and its language. Trial & error, chance, and the arbitrariness of custom all play a role in the development and perpetuation of forms within any language's poetry. There is nothing particular to the Italian temperament that naturally spawned the fourteen-line sonnet.
No comments:
Post a Comment