The Poet's Dictionary [antikvár]

Every trade, every art and craft has a language of its own which the practi- 1. , tioner proudly learns and often pretends he does not know. For the poet this i language is prosody. If a steelworker balanced on a girder seventy stories . ; above the city calls to his mate for a rivet and instead is tossed a trendle, the ;' mistake may be fatal. The vocabulary of a craft may seem secret, almost ' ;. hieratic, but it binds the artist to his art. The poet's dictionary, when available, because they are always going out of date, supplies the neophyte with all the poetic options he can use. Any poet, history tells us, who defects from the prosody, unless he supplies a new one, does so at his peril. But the poet's dictionary is more than a glossary. It is also an anthology, a garland of expertly chosen illustrations, without which the dictionary would be dry bread. These illustrations are some ancient and famous, some from other languages, some modern, some contemporary, most of them touchstones of one variety or other, the jewels in the crown, real or paste, as the case may be. It has been the experience of this writer that it was a forgotten poet's dictionary which started him writing poetry. In later years, when he was himself a teacher of poetry, he tried to get this long-out-of-print book back into publication, and failing this compiled one of his own, a prosody handbook which served several generations of students. A new poet's dictionary is indispensable. The twilight of the twentieth century is given to prodigies, a little-noticed one of which is the phenomenon of simultaneous prosodies. It has never happened before that all prosodies, ancient, modern, and experimental, are exercised at the same time in the same place. Such a situation can be viewed as simple chaos or as a historical first. These multifarious prosodies are mostly mutually exclusive but nevertheless coexist and are united if at all only in the poet's dictionary. In this bewildering museum of forms, or zoo, the poet makes his way. Only those of consummate skill and virtuosity can possibly cncompass these diverse prosodies (Auden, for example) from the most loft)' IX