Grief Without Measure

  • Andrea Brady
Chapter
Part of the Early Modern Literature in History book series (EMLH)

Abstract

While line breaks and rhetorical segmentation might make poetry formally analogous to the breakdown and vulnerability of the human frame, it also allows elegiac writers to master interruptions (either semantic or prosodic) and hypothetically to conquer the finitudes of mortal life with the continuity of poetry. O. B. Hardison, referring to the ancient belief in poetry’s constitutive power, notes that

From the point of view of the ars metrica, poetry does not represent or ‘imitate’ a pre-existing reality. It is, rather, a medium adapted to the ‘bodying forth’ of a kind of reality that cannot be otherwise be bodied forth, and meter is the element that makes the bodying forth possible.1

Keywords

Seventeenth Century Civic Virtue Early Modern Period Dead Child Birthing Woman 
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Notes

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Copyright information

© Andrea Brady 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  • Andrea Brady
    • 1
  1. 1.Brunel UniversityLondonUK

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