Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them.
—John Milton, "The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime," introduction to 1674 edition of Paradise Lost
la grande permission
Years ago I interviewed John Ashbery for the Irish Times. He was reading in a small market town to the south of Dublin. It took me about an hour to drive down. It was a drizzling, shimmering spring afternoon. Many of his answers about his work and his aesthetic were eloquent. One in particular stuck with me for years. I asked him whether he was a surrealist and he told me that he himself had asked the French poet Henri Michuax the same question. No, Michaux replied, he was not a surrealist. But, for him, surrealism had been la grande permission.
—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)
—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)
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