Brief Solace
Rage at the overturning of Roe V. Wade
I have spent a good part of yesterday and today on Twitter, scrolling through my timeline. No matter how long I scroll, no matter how far down the feed I look, I will not reach the end of the rage that my fellow citizens and I feel about the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to overturn Roe V. Wade and roll back human rights in this country. We are all tweeting and scrolling and blogging and screaming, yet none of our words, nor all of them together, can really capture or channel that primal fury.
At times like this, I think of Wordsworth.
William Wordsworth, the 19th century Romantic poet, helped launch a literary movement that broke away from — or broke through — polite poetic forms favored by established critics of his time. These forms included such things as Petrarchan sonnets, epics, or occasional poems written in heroic couplets (two lines of iambic pentameter whose final syllables rhyme), replete with allusions to classical literature, and expressing an explicit propositional argument. John Dryden experimented with this form, Alexander Pope perfected it, and Samuel Johnson approved it.
Wordsworth used heroic couplets in some of his work, but he is better known for challenging the strictures of formalism: for breaking rules of poetic diction that required “elevated” or…
