Wright, Charles (Vol. 146) - Peter Stitt (essay date Summer 1984)

Peter Stitt (essay date Summer 1984)

SOURCE: “The Circle of the Meditative Moment,” in Georgia Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 402-14.

[In the following excerpt, Stitt discusses aspects of circular poetic structure and offers a positive evaluation of The Other Side of the River.]

When we speak of poetic form we usually mean patterns of rhyme and meter; I would prefer, however, to begin with the definition given by W. P. Ker in his book Form and Style in Poetry: “… it is the scheme or argument that is the form, and the poet's very words are the matter with which it is filled. The form is not that with which you are immediately presented, or that which fills your ears when the poem is recited—it is the abstract original scheme from which the poem began.” Form, we may say, is the pattern of thought which organizes and precedes everything else, including the words of the poem, its sound patterns, its content,...

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