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EPILOGUE Poets, like Disputants, when Reasons fail, Have one sure Refuge left, and that’s to rail. Fop, Coxcomb, Fool, are thunder’d through the Pit, And this is all their Equipage of Wit. We wonder how the Devil this diff’rence grows, 45 Betwixt our Fools in Verse, and yours in Prose: For, ‘Faith, the Quarrel rightly understood, ’Tis Civil War with their own Flesh and Blood. The thread bare Author hates the gawdy Coat, And swears at the Guilt Coach, but swears afoot: 50 For ’tis observ’d of ev’ry Scribling Man, He grows a Fop as fast as e’er he can; Prunes up, and asks his Oracle the Glass, If Pink or Purple best become his Face. For our poor Wretch, he neither rails nor prays, 55 Nor likes your Wit just as you like his Plays; He has not yet so much of Mr. Bays. He does his best; and if he cannot please, Wou’d quietly sue out his Writ of Ease. Yet, if he might his own grand Jury call, 60 By the Fair Sex he begs to stand or fall. Let Cæsar’s Pow’r the Mens Ambition move, But grace you him, who lost the World for Love! Yet if some antiquated Lady say, The last Age is not copy’d in his Play; 65 Heav’n help the man who for that face must drudge, Which only has the wrinkles of a Judge. Let not the Young and Beauteous join with those; For shou’d you raise such numerous Hosts of Foes, Young Wits and Sparks he to his aid must call; 70 ’Tis more than one Man’s work to please you all.
John Dryden, “Prologue and Epilogue to All for Love, or the World well Lost”

Pipeline

Triage
Your reader's stimulus (Dorn's 'Price is Right') collides productively with your preoccupation (5: physical mechanics of form, and 2: where difficulty lives and which direction it faces). Dorn is notorious for compression and syntactic opacity—the opposite register from the plainness you've been testing with Herbert and the explicitmechanism you found in Cavendish. Test whether Dorn's difficulty operates as sabotage (like Leapor's logical structure) or as something else entirely: difficulty as the poem's refusal to make its own work visible. This is the fourth test case your Leapor taxonomy needs—a poet working in a deliberately obstructed register where the reader cannot access the circuit diagram Cavendish provides. Does the mechanism still operate when the machinery is hidden? Does obscurity change whether form contradicts content, or does it just change which direction the contradiction faces?
The problem
Your reader's stimulus (Dorn's 'Price is Right') collides productively with your preoccupation (5: physical mechanics of form, and 2: where difficulty lives and which direction it faces). Dorn is notorious for compression and syntactic opacity—the opposite register from the plainness you've been testing with Herbert and the explicitmechanism you found in Cavendish. Test whether Dorn's difficulty operates as sabotage (like Leapor's logical structure) or as something else entirely: difficulty as the poem's refusal to make its own work visible. This is the fourth test case your Leapor taxonomy needs—a poet working in a deliberately obstructed register where the reader cannot access the circuit diagram Cavendish provides. Does the mechanism still operate when the machinery is hidden? Does obscurity change whether form contradicts content, or does it just change which direction the contradiction faces?
Search queries
Dorn's difficulty as refusal—where does the reader's body resist the poem's syntax, and what does that resistance reveal about the poem's actual argument?
Composition mode
engage
Chunk ID
john-dryden-delphi-complete-poet-prologue-and-epilogu-001-dup17
Source
self_engage_self