Robert Pinsky at Poetry Daily:
I first read “Johnson on Pope” by David Ferry in his 1960 first book, On the Way to the Island. I felt immediately that I had learned something about the art of poetry. Ferry’s poem demonstrated the crucial difference between prose and poetry as vocal: a matter of sound. That limited, technical point had its power.
Possibly the poem also made me think again of Emily Dickinson’s words: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies/ Too bright for our infirm Delight/ The Truth’s superb surprise.”
I may or may not have actually read Samuel Johnson’s sentences about Alexander Pope, but as an earnest, bookish poet in my twenties I could imagine them. David Ferry had converted them into iambic pentameter and added some erratic but unmistakable rhymes. That vocal transformation made Johnson’s asserted, documentary truths into something illuminated aslant, at an angle through darkness.
How had the sound of verses made prose from the eighteenth century into a modern poem I would not forget?
More here.
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