About David J. Rothman

Those who condemn form in poetry are often given to venting their wrath upon…received forms, and often chiefly on the grounds that they coerce the mind, limit the imagination, force language with Procrustean barbarity into set molds. But in fact our greatest formal poets—Donne, Herbert, Campion, Herrick, and Hardy—rarely embrace received forms apart from the [...]

1. Precursors / chronological by country A) England Gascoigne, George.  “Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English…” In The Posies of George Gascoigne. London: Richard Smith, 1575.[1] Puttenham, George.  The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition. 1589.  Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Lancelot, Claude. Quatre Traitez de [...]

Few fields have ever been transformed by bibliographical work in the way that literary prosody was changed by the publication of T. V. F. Brogan’s English Versification, 1570 – 1980: A Reference Guide with a Global Appendix (or “EVRG” to its admirers).  It is no exaggeration to say that what Brogan accomplished is comparable to [...]

Robert Benchley, the actor, critic and member of the Algonquin Wits, once quipped that “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.”  At the risk of murdering to dissect and conferring ontological status upon a distinction that is [...]

As Reviewed By: David J. Rothman Read David Rothman’s elegy here: “Going Like Hello” “All I want to do is have a little fun before I die.” -Bill Ripley “All I want to do is have a little fun Before I die,” says the man next to me Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing.He says [...]

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils [...]