An ode to tone-deaf poets

In a letter to her friend, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop crystallised Thomas’s singular genius: I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death … He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation. The ineluctable fact is that there are few poets. Some even try to emulate the style of others. Many bore us to death with their prolix prose piece, ostensibly written in some verse format; deflowering many a pristine page. Of developing an argument, bringing it to a conclusion without any lacuna, they’re invariably prime clueless scribblers. Oh, for poets who were not tone-deaf hacks! Also see The Palinode, dated 15 May 2022. An example of a reverse rhopalic verse. In poetry: where each word is one syllable fewer, or it might decreases each line in a stanza by one syllable (per my example), or a metric foot. IN THE SAME CATEGORY OF CONSTRAINED WRITING Rhopalism: A rhopalic sentence is one in which each successive word is one letter longer than the previous one. In poetry: where each word is one syllable more, or it might increase each line in a stanza by one syllable (see my example, The Coward, posted earlier), or a metric foot. The Rhopalic Couplet, also called Wedge Verse, was first used by Homer in the Iliad 3.182. A poetic unit of two rhopalic lines (rhyme optional), each word progresses adding one more syllable than the preceding word in the line. The sequence of the syllable count can be identical in the second line, or it may be reversed. rhopalic(also ropalic) - Origin: Late 17th century; earliest use found in Thomas Browne (1605–1682), physician and author. From post-classical Latin rhopalicus (adjective) (of a line or passage of verse) in which each word contains one syllable more than the one immediately preceding it (3rd century) from the ancient Greek word meaning "cudgel thicker towards one end". NB The difference between this poetic device and the Etheree poem is that the latter is limited to 10 lines and unrhymed; usually centred on the page. The Etheree poem is a syllabic verse form created by the Arkansas poet Ms Etheree Taylor Armstrong (1918—1994).