05-07-2014, 02:31 PM
Boy, do I feel strongly about this!
The poet has various tools at his or her disposal, and inversions are one of them. I agree that inversions CAN stick out, but not always. A poet who is writing in meter and/or form may need to use inversions more in order to fit the meter or form, whereas a free-verse poet won't need to use them so much.
I posted a poem "Youth" (which was deleted while I was "banned") which had these lines:
Implies powers no longer mine —
```Not ever mine, perhaps,
Nor theirs now, though it appears so
```To hungry mortal eyes
Like mine, mesmerized by the sight
```Of youth's trail vanishing.
Yet if youth could be mine today,
```It would be in my way.
The one person who commented on the poem suggested that I write the sixth line "Of youth's vanishing trail", but to me it sounds more beautiful the way it is.
I recently finished a poem that has these lines:
And when the animal has left
Remains the intellectual disgrace
A poet friend of mine doesn't like the second line, feeling that it should be written "The intellectual disgrace remains"; but again, to me that is far less beautiful and interesting.
Inversions are out of fashion now, but they will come back into fashion some day. I'm not saying that they should be used for the sake of using them; but there are times when they really do contribute to the beauty of the poem. Inversions can have a haunting or unpredictable quality if they are done right.
In the Youth poem above, the first line of the top stanza used to say "Bespeaks powers no longer mine", but I changed it to "implies" at the urging of the person who gave me the critique. "Implies" works well enough, but it doesn't have the forceful sound of "bespeaks". "Bespeaks" isn't even an archaic word, yet I can't use it without sounding old-fashioned!
As for capitalization, which I think that Billy mentioned: I got into the habit of capitalizing the first word of each new line just as a way of cueing the reader that the line break was intentional, and that a new line was starting. Now I use first-word capitalization in poems with a formal sound, and lower-case in poems with an informal sound.
The poet has various tools at his or her disposal, and inversions are one of them. I agree that inversions CAN stick out, but not always. A poet who is writing in meter and/or form may need to use inversions more in order to fit the meter or form, whereas a free-verse poet won't need to use them so much.
I posted a poem "Youth" (which was deleted while I was "banned") which had these lines:
Implies powers no longer mine —
```Not ever mine, perhaps,
Nor theirs now, though it appears so
```To hungry mortal eyes
Like mine, mesmerized by the sight
```Of youth's trail vanishing.
Yet if youth could be mine today,
```It would be in my way.
The one person who commented on the poem suggested that I write the sixth line "Of youth's vanishing trail", but to me it sounds more beautiful the way it is.
I recently finished a poem that has these lines:
And when the animal has left
Remains the intellectual disgrace
A poet friend of mine doesn't like the second line, feeling that it should be written "The intellectual disgrace remains"; but again, to me that is far less beautiful and interesting.
Inversions are out of fashion now, but they will come back into fashion some day. I'm not saying that they should be used for the sake of using them; but there are times when they really do contribute to the beauty of the poem. Inversions can have a haunting or unpredictable quality if they are done right.
In the Youth poem above, the first line of the top stanza used to say "Bespeaks powers no longer mine", but I changed it to "implies" at the urging of the person who gave me the critique. "Implies" works well enough, but it doesn't have the forceful sound of "bespeaks". "Bespeaks" isn't even an archaic word, yet I can't use it without sounding old-fashioned!
As for capitalization, which I think that Billy mentioned: I got into the habit of capitalizing the first word of each new line just as a way of cueing the reader that the line break was intentional, and that a new line was starting. Now I use first-word capitalization in poems with a formal sound, and lower-case in poems with an informal sound.