Experimental Poetry
Daryush
Imagine
step
outside of the box—
imagination cries
to be freed
just for a moment, wait
hesitate and dream...
and receive
The daryush
form, named after Elizabeth Daryush, the English poet
1887-1977, is a triplet sequence 'accentedal'. The triplet
has 6/5/3 syllables that encompasses a complete thought; the
verses may be linked to cover a topic.
Elizabeth
Daryush (8 December 1887[1] – 7 April 1977[2]) was an
English poet. She was the daughter of Robert Bridges; her
maternal grandfather was Alfred Waterhouse. She married Ali
Akbar Daryush, whom she had met when he was studying at the
University of Oxford and spent some time in Persia; most of
her life was spent in Boars Hill, outside Oxford. Some of
her early work was published as Elizabeth Bridges.
Daughter of British poet laureate Robert Bridges, Elizabeth
Daryush had a privileged upbringing in Victorian and
Edwardian England. Although she followed her father's lead
not only in choosing poetry as her life's work but also in
the traditional style of poetry she chose to write, the
themes of her work are often critical of the upper classes
and the social injustice their privilege levied upon others.
This characteristic was not present in her early work,
including her first two books of poems, published under the
name Elizabeth Bridges, which appeared while she was still
in her twenties. According to John Finlay, writing in the
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Daryush's "early poetry is
preoccupied with rather conventional subject matter and owes
a great deal to the Edwardians."
Daryush took her father's experiment in syllabic verse a
step farther by making it less experimental; whereas
Bridges' syllable count excluded elidable syllables,
producing some variation in the total number of pronounced
syllables per line, Daryush's was strictly aural, counting
all syllables actually sounded when the poem was read aloud.
It is for her successful experiments with syllabic meter
that Daryush is best known to contemporary readers.
Beyond its social content, Daryush's work is also recognized
for a consistent and well-defined personal vision. As Finlay
noted, "For her. . .poetry always dealt with the `stubborn
fact' of life as it is, and the only consolations it offered
were those of understanding and a kind of half-Christian,
half-stoical acceptance of the inevitable." However, he also
argued that Daryush's best poems transcend such fatalism,
"dealing with the moral resources found in one's own being.
. .and a recognition of the beauties in the immediate,
ordinary world around us."
References:
-
Catherine Phillips: Robert Bridges: a biography.
Oxford: OUP, 1992. p 141.
-
Orlando Project
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Daryush"
8-13-2011
