Beauty Begets Emotion

"Beauty Begets Emotion" is my 52nd extensive 100-poem, or more volume of my classical rhyming poetry. As with the majority of my most recent published works, I separated them into ten sections beginning with love and romance; continuing with humorous material; working through wisdom, wit and advice; and concluding with patriotic values and solemn pronouncements of our social deterioration. Somewhere in between are nostalgic emotions, creative experiences, exciting thoughts, myths from various cultures spotlighted, and imaginative mysteries. As a classical poet, my first and foremost literary responsibility is to write poetry that rhymes. To write with rhyme and rhythm takes patience, grammatical adjustments, tweaking word formations and concentrated effort. My secondary effort is to evoke and extricate emotional reactions that entrance, eviscerate, entangle, elevate, or emulate the spirit within each of us. The third endeavor is to attempt to maintain a regulated meter throughout the poem, though as a tertiary undertaking, the prior two have priority. This takes discipline and mental adeptness, a penchant for precision and a commitment to lasting verse of a higher order. Didactic scholarly critics may decry the occasional inattentiveness to meter (in their view) as a wayward classical poet engaged in unremitting, undisciplined rhetoric unworthy of their praise, yet Shakespeare, even in the most disciplined of straitjacketed verse, the Sonnet, at times added a syllable to a line either for the sake of euphony, or for a point he was trying to make at the time. Regional pronunciations also apply and change the metrical flow.. Whatever my faults and shortcomings, at least I refused to descend to the muck and mire of modern poetry that lacks rhythm, rhyme and substance. I have always regarded myself as a poet of the people, but not a panderer to the putrid tastes of decadence.