Friday 9 May 2014

Ancient and Effective

Amanda Jernigan mounts a defense of rhyme:
Somebody-or-other called rhyme "that ancient goddess of happy coincidence," and I like that very much — but rhyme is also closely associated with another ancient goddess: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. In this age of digitization, it is easy to forget that the real business of living is not to school computers but to school brains — "to school an intelligence and make it a soul," as Keats put it. So what is needed are not technologies that make things memorable to computers but technologies that make them memorable to human beings. Rhyme is one such technology. Metre is another. Ancient and effective, both.

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