Absolute Gentleman

Consider the following sentence that I’m considering:

Human beings desire the dramatic.

Then consider

Human beings desire drama.

In the interest of brevity and conciseness, which is something I demand from my students, the latter wins by a nose. However, in the interest in rhythm, the former is the obvious choice. John Gardner discusses this in The Art of Fiction extensively. In demonstrating different rhythmic possibilities, he places accent marks over the syllables in the spots he might tap his foot if he were keeping time. I don’t know if I’m explaining this clearly enough, but anyway. Here’s how the second sentence can be accented, demonstrated by the bold, capitalized letters:

HUman BEings desIre drAma.

He might say that the sentence is too rhythmically stunted, that there isn’t enough play in between the accented marks. The first sentence seems to be stretched out more:

HUman BEings desIre the draMAtic.

Admittedly, there’s a slight variance, but this sentence features words with 2, 2, 3, 1, and 3 syllables, respectively. Since the first sentence contains words with 2, 2, 3, and 2 syllables, there might be too much syllabic repetition (what I’m calling it).