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Versification—Ergon or Parergon?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Charles Race
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Extract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , October 1955 , pp. 125 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1955

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References

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