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"Every poem is music --a determined, persuasive,
reliable, enthusiastic, and crafted music.
"Without an understanding of this music, Shakespeare
is only the sense we can make of him; he is the wisdom
without the shapeliness, which is one half of the
poem.
"So , most of all, I wrote this book [about
metrical verse] to help readers of metrical poems enter
the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of
sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure. I hope their
understanding and pleasure of metric poetry will be deepened
and complicated, so much so that their response to the poems
becomes not only comprehension, but comprehension
accompanied by a felt experience.
"Why is it important for students -- for any of us, in
fact -- to have this experience?
"Poems speak of the mortal condition; in poems we muse
(as we say) about the tragic and glorious issues of our
fragile and brief lives: our passions, our dreams, our
failures. Our wonderings about heaven and hell -- these too
are in poems. Life, death; mystery, and meaning. Five
hundred years and more of such labor, such choice thought
within choice expression, lies within the realm of metrical
poetry. Without it, one is uneducated, and one is mentally
poor."
--Mary Oliver, page ix.
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