The Gospel According to MGM.

permit,” he has simply abandoned everything that would interfere with the forward drive of statement and passion—including the rhymes, which in English pentameter simply happen too often and restrict the idiom too severely. His pentameter, lightened with many extra short syllables, is impetuous without contortion, and ceremonious without frigidity. It does not mumble, it does not seesaw.

Momentum, in such a version, is everything. It stands as a homage to Racine’s strength of construction, which it displays with no recourse to local felicities, and to the expressive power of his themes, on which Mr. Dillon’s prefaces have eloquent and sensible things to say. Phaedra, he notes, should have a special interest for us, since “it is concerned with the sense of guilt, which is thought to be our most frequent substitute for the conviction of sin. Here the emotion of guilt exists in an unqualified and unendurable form. It is the result of no action whatever, but rather demands and induces an action that will be outrageous enough to justify it.”

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Francis Russell

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permit,” he has simply abandoned everything that would interfere with the forward drive of statement and passion—including the rhymes, which in English pentameter simply happen too often and restrict the idiom too severely. His pentameter, lightened with many extra short syllables, is impetuous without contortion, and ceremonious without frigidity. It does not mumble, it does not seesaw.

Momentum, in such a version, is everything. It stands as a homage to Racine’s strength of construction, which it displays with no recourse to local felicities, and to the expressive power of his themes, on which Mr. Dillon’s prefaces have eloquent and sensible things to say. Phaedra, he notes, should have a special interest for us, since “it is concerned with the sense of guilt, which is thought to be our most frequent substitute for the conviction of sin. Here the emotion of guilt exists in an unqualified and unendurable form. It is the result of no action whatever, but rather demands and induces an action that will be outrageous enough to justify it.”