Re: Best last lines

In article <Xns9A66D876F6045genewardsmithsbcglob@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Gene
Ward Smith <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> Bill Snyder <bsnyder@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in 
> news:9dl3u3t0c4s7cjeulr7rai44h3r8dqe0na@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> > Ah, I see Stalinist indoctrination has slithered over from the
> > Heinlein thread and poked its snout into the tent.
> > 
> 
> What literary criticism needs is a better mathemtical method. It's one
thing 
> to say Mark Twain is better than Booth Tarkington, but where's the
proof?


To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter,
rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions: 1) How artfully
has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How im****tant is
that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2
rates its im****tance. And once these questions have been answered,
determining the poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.

If the poem's score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a
graph and its im****tance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating
the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.

A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on
the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score
high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area,
thereby revealing the poem to be truly great.

   --DEAD POET'S SOCIETY by Tom Shulman

-- 
David M. Palmer  dmpalmer@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (formerly @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
)