Timeline for When and why did "No man is an island" start being regarded as a poem?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
19 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 25, 2021 at 2:44 | vote | accept | verbose | ||
| Mar 21, 2021 at 11:18 | comment | added | verbose | @GarethRees FWIW I recently realized that a character Will Stanton's 1971 story refers to "No man is an island" as "a line of poetry." See also this answer. | |
| Mar 17, 2021 at 11:43 | comment | added | Joshua Taylor | @GarethRees Ah, "thine friend's" jumped out so strongly that I missed the swapped ordering completely, and I'd interpreted your bolded text as "grammatical error" introduced, rather than the broader "misquotation (regardless of type)". | |
| Mar 16, 2021 at 21:00 | comment | added | Gareth Rees | @JoshuaTaylor Compare the corrupt and original text carefully and you'll see why I bolded "thine own". | |
| Mar 16, 2021 at 20:24 | comment | added | Joshua Taylor | Does OP's question misquote the original text? It uses "thy friend's" and "thine own". In the various misquotations cited here, "thine friend's" is bolded as an error (which makes sense--it should be "thy friend's"), but so is "thine own". I thought the convention here was the same as "a" vs "an"--depending on whether the following word starts with a vowel. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 21:09 | comment | added | Gareth Rees | @gidds: Just for you, I added an example from 1989. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 21:09 | history | edited | Gareth Rees | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 15, 2021 at 20:17 | comment | added | gidds | “predates the widespread use of the Internet”…? The earliest date quoted is 1996, a few years after the Eternal September of 1993, so it doesn't even pre-date widespread use of the Web, let alone the Internet. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 15:39 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Google translate renders this as: “When the Nazis took the Communists, I was silent; I wasn't a communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I was silent; I wasn't a Social Democrat. When they called the trade unionists, I was silent; I wasn't a trade unionist. When they fetched me, there was no one left to protest." (No mention of Jews in this version, although they were in some other ones.) | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 15:31 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.“ | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 15:31 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @verbose: looking at German Wikipedia, it seems to say (my German is really bad) that Neimöller said these words in several different ways in various speeches. But he eventually settled on an "official version": | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 14:22 | comment | added | verbose | @PeterShor I actually think both the Donne passage and the Neimöller one read better as prose. My understanding is that the latter is not even a quotation or translation, it’s just a rendition of sentiments Neimöller often expressed. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 13:55 | history | edited | Gareth Rees | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 611 characters in body
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| Mar 15, 2021 at 13:41 | comment | added | Rand al'Thor♦ | @PeterShor James Thurber does the same thing, disguising poetry as prose, although his writing is quite stylised anyway. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 13:14 | comment | added | Peter Shor | And from 1989, in Google snippet view (New Breed, Vol. 1, Issues 20-24). To see it, at least on my browser, search for "no man is an island" in the page this takes you to ... the link replaces the quotation marks with html code that Google books doesn't recognize. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 12:12 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Conversely, in his novels David Mitchell likes hiding rhyming poetry in prose (removing the line breaks and any punctuation that hints it is poetry) and seeing whether anybody notices. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 12:09 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @verbose: this is pure speculation on my part, but by representing a prose passage as poetry, the beauty of the writing is emphasized. The same thing has been done for the "poem": First they came for the Communists // And I did not speak out // Because I was not a Communist ... | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 11:39 | comment | added | verbose | Thanks! This addresses the when part pretty comprehensively. Any speculations as to why? The passage gains nothing by being relineated as verse; one might argue both that it’s better as prose, and that it misrepresents Donne’s actual poetry. | |
| Mar 15, 2021 at 11:31 | history | answered | Gareth Rees | CC BY-SA 4.0 |