Lucy Vickery

Double dactylic

issue 02 December 2017

In Competition No. 3026 you were invited to submit topical double dactyls.
 
The double dactyl was dreamed up in 1951 by the poet Anthony Hecht and the classical scholar Paul Pascal. My well-thumbed copy of Jiggery-Pokery, a wonderful 1967 compendium of the form edited by Hecht and the poet John Hollander, reveals with pride that Auden (to whom the book is dedicated) used the form ‘thrice’ for the choruses in his Aesopian playlets Moralities.

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