Alexander Pope in aquamarine gloss
(12th March 2008) - Polite Society
was to police provincial diction
to remove the slang & guttural stench
from Shakespeare's lower speeches -
all that was relevant & real to those in the pit -
to use the dictionary to cleanse the language
as Fielding used the police to rid the City
of vice. (Daniel Foe, a son of a butcher,
added a De & took to snuff). Pope
a hunchbacked businessman attaching
a levy to the transvestite verb. Defoe
never did snuff in the butcher's shop.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

the new concrete: an online course in attentive poetics

poetry objects

talk to that & other poems