Peoples who plant crops in orderly rows and put animals into pens, generally speaking, make a garden of language too. Their poets and storytellers domesticate the rhythms and patterns of speech into the forms we know as verse. When cultures begin to take dominion over the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms, they ordinarily seek dominion over the fourth kingdom, the realm of language also. Versification becomes, like history, a method of terracing, planting, and harvesting time. It becomes idealized language: something not at all synonymous with poetry but not infrequently given poetry's
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