richa20 Apr 2005

It is incorrect to say that all your critics are old and only critical because of this. Many of your critics can write like this but have chosen not to because they believe the style is not particularly valuable. Most decent poets can rhyme well and most decent poets will throw away many perfectly good rhymes because they have set their poem a structure to fulfil. This is called discipline. Now jam poetry or rap poetry or whatever you wish to call this traditionally has less discipline. If this style is to be good you must use some. Now if you were to write a poem about the criticism of goad then certain things would not naturally come up, castration for instance. The good poet would therefore look for a more suitable word. There is no use of metaphor in this poem. Now there is no law to say you need to use metaphor, but metaphor at least conveys reflection of an idea and an attempt to represent that idea in an interesting way. I would take issue with your point about Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare did to a certain extent break the rules, what he did not do was make the same mistakes that every other uneducated hack poet made in his day. Bad poets have forever made the same mistakes such as vagueness, forced rhyme and incoherence. If you make these mistakes they are not suddenly going to become revolutionary just because they are not found in published poetry. The question of punctuation and grammar is important. There is an argument that a bad critic will focus on poor grammar and use that to make conclusions about the poet and poetry as a whole. This is analgous to a poet using the metaphor of a rose to infer that all pretty things have thorns. It is unwarranted. However poor grammar and punctuation can contribute to the poet being unable to get his message across. To attack grammar for grammar's sake therefore is entirely valid. There is no advantage to a poet writing poor grammar and therefore any rectification of it is a good thing.