No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Man was born metrical, yet everywhere we find him writing free verse. Why this arrogant and lazy assumption that Parnassus can be climbed without feet? Or that the ascent is valueless?
In the eighteenth century versification was a grace and an elegance; in the nineteenth a virtue, perhaps a duty. What is it in the twentieth? A parergon? A morbidity? Versus laudatur et alget? Immo laude caret! Do we regard as an oddity the sixth-former who is prepared to put into practice his belief that language exists to make precise statements in elegant form? We do not; but we are flanked on the right by those who, having denied the utility of Latin in the fourth form, in the sixth know no written English but Latinese; on the left we are flanked by those who have no palate for the waters that inspired A. D. Godley, C. S. Calverley, and Vincent Bourne, preferring, if athirst for the Muse after years in the Waste Land, what Hippocrene is available at the Cocktail Party.
page 125 note 1 This article has been condensed from a talk given on 6 March 1954 at Birmingham University to the Birmingham and Midlands Branch of the Classical Association.
page 126 note 1 I.A.A.M. Memorandum, The Teaching of Classics (Cambridge, 1954).Google Scholar
page 126 note 2 Barnard, A. S. C., A First Latin Course, Part II (London, Bell, 1935).Google Scholar