Friday, April 12, 2013

Prophecy and Poets

Robert Penn Warren sounds like a writer with a substantial body of work. Though his work about his 'Audobon' character sounds the most interesting. A series of poems (at least one of which is "long") about a quest for deeper understanding of the world. To me it sounds like a sort of Kino's Journey, but in poetic rather than animated form.

More interestingly, though, is this idea that there's a prophetic cadence. From what I can tell (based on the example poem Hollander used to showcase this cadence) it's a marching sort of beat, very steady and shuffling forward. It's the sort of speech rhythm that you might fall into if you're giving slow, deliberate instruction. And that makes some sense, prophets want to be believed, and that rhythm sounds very authoritative.

I'll need to study this cadence more closely, though - I need to punch up a little something for the sake of my fiction.

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