More appreciation …

… The Neo-Latinate Imagination of Joseph Bottum | Acton Institute: (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is not only in their themes that these poems are revelatory. Bottum’s practice of poetry hovers always close to music and song. In English, our paradigmatic line is the iambic pentameter. The five-stress line is flexible enough to be musical when needed, but it can also accommodate the plainest speech and the most ornate and golden rhetoric. Bottum’s poems are usually one metrical foot shorter, in some sort of loose or tight tetrameter or trimeter. Tetrameter is the language of ballad and song, of music almost to the exclusion of rhetoric.