Word: sonneteering
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...easy way out of the bondage of fixed metres, but requires an even finer ear for rhythm, and should compensate for the absence of regularity of account and rhyme by still subtler musical' effects. What they give us is rather vague prose, spoiled by inversions. Mr. Denison's "Sonnet" has a good tenth line spoiled by an unmetrical eleventh, and is somewhat over-weighted by the simile in the octave. In his "Night Song," Mr. Sanger has an interesting theme, but does not keep quite close enough...
...poets have ease and imagination, and are by no means lacking in musical sense; the story-writers are fluent and entertaining; the editorials, deploring Harvard architecture and commending smokers, glass flowers and the Scholarship Service Bureau, are admirably expressed and sound beyond cavil. But barring that final sonnet, none of it, to drop into the vernacular, "proves anything." To Mr. E. C. MacVeagh '18 we owe our thanks for demonstrating that it is not impossible for an undergraduate to write good verse and still to remain aware of the big things that are happening in the world he lives...
...verse poem on "The Sphinx's Silence" by Mr. J. Gazzam, Jr., is a dignified effort. It includes several excellent lines, but several others, too, which are far from pentametric. With its conclusion that woman is hard to understand there will be no general disagreement. Mr. Heffenger's thoughtful sonnet "Success" is simply but unpoetically expressed. One is less certain of Mr. Rogers' ideas in the long poem "Death"--a large subject--pent in a rather exacting rhyme scheme. If the author had been less vague and more self-disciplined, it might have been easier to share his vision...
...refuge in the ancestral sailor's life. Sluggish oceans of local color, however, have swamped the hero whom the Atlantic surges could not harm. Condensation is sadly needed. Mr. Putnam would voice the emotions of a Nietzschean Superman trying to behave like an Elizabethan gallant, with disastrous results. His Sonnet (the form should not be divided like a Petrarcan sonnet, into octet and sestet) is a rash venture into archaic realms. Mr. Sanger's "Children's Land," faintly reminiscent of the song that thrilled the Brushwood Boy, is mildly pleasing though not distinguished. An occasional awkward line mars the smoothness...
...which might well summon the budding genius to his best. The judges, in picking out the prize poem, acted without reference to creed or country. Their business was simply to determine the best poem among the ten or fifteen submitted, judged as a poem. Because it was a good sonnet, and not because it was anti-German or anti-anything, "Gott Mit Uns" received the prize. "Dieu Avec Nous," written with equal skill, would have received equal honor...