Olson

His exaggerated used of quick quick, quick, more, more, more (388) was an easy read and had appropriate comma usage, compared to the rest of the writing,  where I felt like a seven year old sounding out words.  I also liked his blunt example “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/ the HEART, by way of the  BREATH, to the LINE.”  I actually agree with this point, too, because how else,  when reading poetry, are you able to so closely connect mentally with the words and feel them resounding inside you at the same time? However, I feel like he should have simply said this from the beginning because it took me several times of rereading portions like “It would do no harm, as an act of correction to both prose and verse as now written, if both rime and meter, and, in the quantity words, both sense and sound, were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable, if the syllable, that fine creature, were more allowed to lead the harmony on” to fully understand the point he was trying to make about the relationship between line and syllable. Throughout the entire piece portions like the above came up again and again where I felt lost and that I was only reading the words, not comprehending. After working thorough it, though, he did make several valid points about poetry.


I also found his comparison of the typewriter to stanzas very compelling. It  was a totally fresh outlook on the use of commas and spaces for poets. Musicians  have the ability to put in breath marks, whole notes, eight notes, or even a  sixteenth rest to convey their emotions or mood of the song. So on page 393 when
he talks about how this is now accepted and used in poetry, it made more sense to  me as to why it’s important.

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