3 December 2004. Last round on Shakespeare's "Sonnet 29," although my focus will be what makes me like a poem, or what criteria I use to determine that a poem is major. Here's what I look for, in order of importance:
1. something that puts the aesthiant (my latest term for one involved in an aesthetic experience) into a significant manywhere-at-once
2. something significantly fresh
3. an archetypal basis
4. sufficient coherence
5. reasonable unity
6. musicality
7. interesting subject matter
8. formal resonance
9. meaningful allusiveness
10. historical, biographical or sentimental values
Those are all I can think of at the moment, but it's possible I've skipped something, even something important. I'll stop here to give myself the explanation of each of these to make an entry of tomorrow.
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