Poetic Form, Notes

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Poetic Form: An Introduction
Michael D. Hurley, Michael O'Neill
Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511982224
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Chapter
Notes pp. 213-236
Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511982224.011
Cambridge University Press

Notes
Introduction
1 See Paul Muldoon et al., ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet: A Trialogue’, in
he Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p. 9.
2 Quoted from ‘Burnt Norton’, section V. he Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot
(London: Faber, 1969).
3 Quoted from he Norton Anthology of heory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch
(New York: Norton, 2001) p. 71.
4 Norton Anthology of heory and Criticism, p. 36.
5 For relevant and stimulating ‘relections’, see Simon Jarvis, ‘For a Poetics of Verse’,
PMLA 121.4 (2010): 931–5 (p. 933).
6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter
Jackson Bate, vol. 7 (2 parts), in he Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
16 vols. (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1972–2001). Bollingen Series 75,
II. 12.
7 See Richard Elridge’s distinction between ‘genre form’ and ‘individual form’ in his
entry on ‘Form’ in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. David E. Cooper (Oxford: Black-
well, 1992) p. 159.
8 See the entry on ‘form’ in A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, ed. Roger Fowler
(London: Routledge, 1972) p. 99.
9 See Paul Muldoon’s remarks in ‘Contemporary Poets and the Sonnet’, p. 10.
10 Genette is quoted from Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A heory of Lyric
Reading (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) p. 8.
11 Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, p. 8.
12 his is not to overlook the fact that the term sonnet was oten ‘up to the early seven-
teenth century’ used for ‘any short lyric poem’, John Lennard, he Poetry Handbook
A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism, 2nd edn. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005) p. 385.
13 Quoted in Jon Cook, Poetry in heory: An Anthology, 1900–2000 (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004) p. 9. Cook’s introduction contains (pp. 9–13) a valuable account
of ‘twentieth-century debates about lyric form’, p. 9.
14 Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, p. 7.
213
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214 Notes to Pages 6–15
15 Biographia Literaria, II. 14

16 For a rewarding study, see Robert Pinsky, he Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
17 Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960) p. 64
(with an explanatory footnote by Winters). See also Terry Eagleton’s account of
the ‘Incarnational Fallacy’ in How to Read a Poem (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007)
pp. 59–64.
18 John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 51.
19 Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, 2nd edn.
(Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002) p. 75.
20 See Eagleton’s discussion of ‘Form versus Content’ in his How to Read a Poem,
pp. 70–9.
21 Quoted from Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry, p. 172.
22 Anne Barton, ‘Byron and the Mythology of Fact’, in Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed.
Alice Levine (New York: Norton, 2010), p. 823.
23 Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Athlone,
1989), p. 53.
24 Quoted in Cook, Poetry in heory, p. 383.
25 John Keats, ‘To Benjamin Bailey, 13 March 1818’, he Letters of John Keats, 1814–
1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1958), I. 243.
26 Quoted in Cook, Poetry in heory, p. 3.
27 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, in William Wordsworth, he Major Works, ed. Stephen
Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 597.
28 For further discussion of how a poem ‘knows’, see Michael O’Neill, Romanticism
and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also
Eagleton’s remark that poetry is ‘always at some level language which is about
itself ’, How to Read a Poem, p. 21.
29 John Keats, ‘To J. A. Hessey, 8 October 1818’, he Letters of John Keats, I. 374.
30 Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: he Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) pp. 2–3 (where Wolfson quotes
Terry Eagleton’s ‘Ideology and Literary Form’).
31 Quoted in Wolfson, Formal Charges, p. 6.
32 Quoted in Cook, Poetry in heory, p. 358, and see Wolfson, Formal Charges,
pp. 6–7, 19.
33 See Meredith Martin and Yisrael Levin, ‘Victorian Prosody: Measuring the Field’,
Victorian Poetry 49.2 (2011): 149–60 (p. 150).
34 See Herbert F. Tucker, ‘he Fix of Form: An Open Letter’, Victorian Literature and
Culture (1999): 531–5 (p. 533).
35 Exemplary igures here are diverse in their practices and also straddle the linguis-
tic and literary-theoretical ‘turn’ of the twentieth century, such that a line may be
drawn from, say, Dr Johnson or George Saintsbury (see Michael D. Hurley, ‘New
Impressions XIV: George Saintsbury’s History of English Prosody’, Essays in Criticism
Notes to Pages 15–18 215
60. 4 (2010): 336–60) to contemporary critics such as Christopher Ricks (see his
essay ‘Literary Principles as against heory’, in Essays in Appreciation [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996], pp. 311–332) or Angela Leighton (see her study On
Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007]).
Chapter 1 The Elements of Poetic Form
1 Notebook entry from 19 November 1958 in he Nightisherman: Selected Letters of

W. S. Graham, ed. Michael and Margaret Snow (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999)
p. 162.
2 Humphry House and Graham Storey, ed. he Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley
Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) p. 84.
3 Italics original; translation Michael D. Hurley’s: Œuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris:
Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1957) I, p. 1289. For an account of
Valéry’s thoughts on poetic rhythm and why it resists deinition, see David Evans,
‘Paul Valéry and the Search for Poetic Rhythm’, Paragraph 33.2 (2010): 158–76.
4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094b 11–27, quoted in Sarah Brodie, Ethics with
Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 17.
5 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of Poetry (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955) p. 32.
6 House and Storey, Journals and Papers of Hopkins, p. 85.
7 Roman Jakobson ofered this ‘principle of parallelism’ as the deinition of literari-
ness itself: ‘the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection
to the axis of combination’. (‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’, in homas
A. Sebeok, ed. Style and Language (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1960) p. 358).
8 William Empson, ‘Rhythm and Imagery in English Poetry’, British Journal of Aes-
thetics 2 (1962): 36–54.
9 Gurney (1880), quoted in he New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed.
Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (New York: Princeton University Press, 1993)
p. 773.
10 Kristin Hanson and Paul Kiparsky, ‘A Parametric heory of Poetic Meter’, Language
72.2 (1996): 287–335 (p. 288).
11 he Open Society and Its Enemies. 2 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 2003),
I. 66.
12 he U.S. spelling is ‘meter’; British English inherits the Greek word métron
(μέτρον), meaning ‘a measure’, via the French mètre, and so prefers ‘metre’. See
Derek Attridge on why the syllable must not be approached as something ‘merely
acoustic, or merely visual, or merely theoretical’, but ought instead to be recogn-
ised as ‘a perceptual unit of rhythm, probably originating in the neurological and
psychological production of language’. he Rhythms of English Poetry (London and
New York: Longman, 1982) pp. 60–2.
13 he New Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 769.

14 John hompson, he Founding of English Metre (London: Routledge, 1961).
15 Sometimes also called ‘rhythmical tension’, this efect that has long been noticed by
poets and readers has more recently received interest in the ield of cognitive poet-
ics: see, for instance, Reuven Tsur’s account of how, far from being a vague meta-
phor, such felt ‘tension’ has a cognitive, if not a neurological, location in Toward a
heory of Cognitive Poetics (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1992) p. 172.
16 he Poetics of French Verse: Studies in Reading (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) p. 94.
17 he Poetics of French Verse, p. 2.
18 He irst made || for the children of men / Heaven as a roof || Holy Creator.
19 homas Cable, ‘Kaluza’s Law and the Progress of Old English Metrics’, in Develop-
ment in Prosodic Systems, ed. Paula Fikkert and Haike Jacobs (Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 2003) pp. 145–58.
20 Rhythms of English Poetry, p. 325.
21 Claude Colleer Abbott, ed. he Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges.
2nd imp. rev. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955) p. 46.
22 Claude Colleer Abbott, ed. he Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Rich-
ard Watson Dixon. 2nd imp. rev. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955) p. 23.
23 Quoted from Gerard Manley Hopkins: he Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 110.
24 Abbott, he Letters of Hopkins to Bridges, p. 103.
25 Abbott, Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon, p. 21 (italics mine).
26 Claude Colleer Abbott, ed. Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins including
his Correspondence with Coventry Patmore. 2nd edn (London: Oxford University
Press, 1956) p. 335.
27 ‘Sprung Rhythm’, in Phonetics and Phonology, Vol. 1: Rhythm and Meter, ed. Paul
Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989) pp. 305–40.
28 See Marina Tarlinskaja, Strict stress-meter in English poetry compared with German and
Russian (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1993) and ‘Rhythm and Syntax in Verse:
English Iambic Tetrameter and Dolnik Tetrameter (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centu-
ries)’, Poetics Today, 18.1 (Spring 1997): 59–93. Lewis Turco, he New Book of Forms: A
Handbook of Poetics (London: University Press of New England, 1986), uses the term
podic (pp. 20–4); Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1995), uses the term ‘four beat stress verse’ (pp. 147–58).
29 Tarlinskaja, ‘Rhythm and Syntax in Verse’, p. 60.
30 See Attridge’s account of dipodic rhythm, in which he elaborates this example
among others: Rhythms of English Poetry, pp. 114–22.
31 Brogan, ‘Dipody’, in he New Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 296.
32 John H. Middendorf, ed. he Lives of the Poets, 3 vols. (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2010) vol. 3 (p. 1204–5).
33 Ibid., p. 1225.
34 See homas Cable, ‘Issues for a New History of English Prosody’, in Studies in the
History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, ed. Donka Minkova and
Robert Stockwell (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002) pp. 125–51
(p.126).
35 Other critics argue against using spondees and pyrrhics in scanning English verse.
While it is tempting to dismiss such diferences as exemplifying the pettifogging
habits of prosodic theorists, the disagreement over terms here rests on an abso-
lutely central concern: namely, how abstract a descriptive category metre is taken
to be in relation to a real or imagined rhythmical performance. As such, ‘to divide
[foot-based] metrists into those who admit and those who deny the possibility
of pyrrhics and spondees in English verse is perhaps as sensible a way of classi-
fying them as any other’ (Fitzroy Pyle, ‘Pyrrhic and Spondee: Speech Stress and
Metrical Accent in English Five-Foot Iambic Verse Structure’, Hermathena 107
(1968), p. 49). For a debate on the usefulness of spondees and pyrrhics, see Meter
in English: A Critical Engagement, ed. by David Baker (Fayetteville: University of
Arkansas Press, 1996), and Timothy Steele, All the Fun’s in How You Say a hing:
An Explanation of Meter and Versiication (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999)
pp. 46–9.
36 Quoted from William Wordsworth, he Prelude: he Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805,
1850) ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995).
37 See Eric Griiths, ‘Lines and Grooves: Shakespeare to Tennyson’, in Tennyson
Among the Poets, ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst and Seamus Perry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009) pp. 132–59.
38 he Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (Longman Annotated English Poets,
2nd edn. 3 vols, 1987) vol. 2 (p. 120).
39 See Robert B. Shaw’s rounded exploration of feminine endings in Blank Verse: a
Guide to Its History and Use (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007).
40 ‘Author’s Preface’, in Hopkins: he Major Works, pp. 106–7.
41 his example from Frost is given by Timothy Steele, who treats the subject of eli-
sion lucidly and at length in All the Fun’s in How You Say a hing. See also Derek
Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995) pp. 126–131.
42 See Paul Fussell, heory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London:
Connecticut College Monograph No. 5, 1954).
43 George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988); J. F. A. Pyre, he Formation of Tennyson’s Style (Madison, 1921).
44 Murray Krieger, ‘he Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry;
or Laokoön Revisited’, in Close Reading: he Reader, ed. Frank Lentricchia and
Andrew DuBois (London: Duke University Press, 2003) p. 88.
45 Sound and Form in Modern Poetry, 2nd edn. (Michigan: University of Michigan
Press, 1996) p. 22.
46 hom Gunn, ‘he Art of Poetry’, he Paris Review, 135, LXXII (Summer 1995),
p. 161.
47 See ‘he Iambic Pentameter’, in he Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody,
ed. Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, revised edn. (New York: he Ecco Press,
1979) pp. 173–93. See also: Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980).
48 English Verse: heory and History (he Hague: Mouton, 1976) p. 4.
49 Quoted from Christopher Marlowe, he Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1969).
50 Rhythms of English Poetry, pp. 12–13.
51 See, for instance, Wright’s Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, Tarlinskaja’s English Verse:
heory and History, Cable’s ‘Issues for a New History of English Prosody and Shaw’s
Blank Verse: a Guide to Its History and Use.
52 George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith irst formulated their theory of relative
stress in An Outline of English Structure (Washington: American Council of
Learned Societies, 1951); it was based on Otto Jespersen’s, ‘Notes on Metre’, in
Linguistica: Selected Papers in English, French and German (Copenhagen: Levin
and Munksgaard, 1933) p. 252, though Jesperson’s has four to stand for strongest
and one for weakest, whereas the Trager–Smith model has it the opposite way
round (which is unhelpfully counterintuitive). For examples of how verse might
be phrased by four levels of stress, see Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a hing,
pp. 31–8.
53 Stephane Mallarmé, Selected Prose Poems, Essays and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956) p. 18.
54 In an address entitled ‘he American Scholar’ (1838), in Nature, Addresses, and
Lectures (Boston: Houghton, 1884) p. 113.
55 Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (London: University
of Arkansas Press, 1990).
56 Sam Haynes, ed. Further Speculations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995) p. 72.
57 Virginia Woolf, ‘Aurora Leigh’, in he Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew
McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986) pp. 202–13, 211.
58 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner, 1925) p. 125. Richards’s account of ‘he Metrical Frame’ is elaborated in
Hollander’s important essay of that name (Vision and Resonance, ch. VII).
59 Relections on Vers Libre (1917), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode
(London: Faber, 1975) p. 34.
60 C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1965) p. 103.
61 See his Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London: Longman, 1992)
62 In William Wordsworth: he Major Works, p. 596.
63 For an account of the origin of the term semantic halo, see Marina Tarlinskaja
and Naira Oganesova, ‘Meter and Meaning: he Semantic “Halo” of Verse Form
in English Romantic Lyrical Poems (Iambic and Trochaic Tetrameter)’, American
Journal of Semiotics 4. 3–4 (1986): 85–106.
64 Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965)
p. 13.
65 Robert Conquest, New and Collected Poems (London: Hutchinson, 1988) p. 199.
66 See John Hollander, Vision and Resonance (New York: Oxford University Press,
1975) ch. IX; also, Michael D. Hurley, ‘he Status of Poetry as an Aesthetic Object’,
Semiotica 169.1/4 (2008): 71–92.
67 his is T. V. F. Brogan’s suggestion, he New Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 769.
68 he Realms of Verse: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005) ch. 6.
69 For elaboration on these arguments, see Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a
hing, pp. 8–14.
70 See Roger Fowler, ‘hree Blank Verse Textures’, in he Languages of Literature:
Some Linguistic Contributions to Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1971) ch. 12.
71 L. C. Martin, ed. he Poems of Robert Herrick, (London: Oxford University Press,
1965) p. 178.
72 Hallam Tennyson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1897)
pp. 469–70. Tennyson likewise contests by counter-specimen Patmore’s claim that
the iambic tetrameter is necessarily ‘rapid’ and ‘high-spirited’.
73 Reuven Tsur, A Perception-Oriented heory of Metre (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University,
1977) p. 84.
74 Freidrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Origin of Poetry’, in he Gay Science ed. Bernard
Williams, trans. Josepine Nauckhof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001) pp. 83–6.
75 In William Wordsworth: he Major Works, p. 610.
76 W. B. Yeats, ‘he Symbolism of Poetry’, in Essays and Introductions (London &
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1961) p. 159.
77 Respectively, I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 4th edn. (London:
Harcourt, 1930) p. 124; Seymour Chatman, A heory of Meter (London; he Hague;
Paris: Mouton and Co., 1965) p. 223.
78 he Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, he Early Years, 1787–1805, ed.
Ernest de Selincourt; revised, Chester L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967) p. 434; see also
Brennan O’Donnell, he Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art
(Kent, Ohio; London, England: he Kent State University Press, 1995).
79 See David Perkins, ‘How the Romantics Recited Poetry’, Studies in English Lit-
erature, 1500–1900, vol. 31 (1991): 655–7; and Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing
and Romanticism: he Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003).
80 Reproduced on a CD by he British Library Board in 2003 (he Spoken Word:
Poets). See sound-archive@bl.uk.
81 Lives of the Poets, v. 1 pp.78–9.
82 Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 48.
83 See James McAuley on how ‘the metre points the way to the right reading’ in
Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems (Versiication: A Short Introduction
(Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1966) ch. IV (p. 48); and also
Wright’s more thoroughgoing account of how metre may be used to expressive

efect, in his Shakespeare’s Metrical Art.
84 Cable, ‘Issues for a New History of English Prosody’, pp.125–51 (pp. 146–7).
85 See Hopkins’s letter to Coventry Patmore, 7 Nov. 1883, in Further Letters.
86 For an account of the ‘New Prosody’ of the Victorian period see Dennis Taylor’s
introductory chapter to his Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1988), which also ofers valuable observations on other ways metrical
verse has been igured in diferent eras. In the last decade, a number of books and
articles have shown special interest in the unspoken cultural-historical assump-
tions (philosophical, ideological, even sexual) that inform purportedly universal
claims about metre.
87 For a psychoanalytical and philosophical account of readers’ cognitive experience
of prosody, see, respectively, Amittai Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in
Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and Simon Jarvis, ‘Pros-
ody as cognition’, Critical Quarterly 40.3 (Autumn 1998), 1–14.
88 History of English Prosody, 2. 6. Saintsbury’s comment is quoted and Shakespeare’s
use of enjambment insightfully discussed in Shaw’s Blank Verse: a Guide to Its His-
tory and Use, p. 41–9.
89 Earl Roy Miner, William Moeck and Steven Edward Jablonski, Paradise Lost, 1668–
1968: hree Centuries of Commentary (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press,
2004) p. 140.
90 Quoted from T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909–1962, reset ed. 1974 (London: Faber
and Faber, 2002) pp. 87–8.
91 See Christopher Ricks on ‘non-temporal’ pauses, in ‘William Wordsworth 1: “A
Pure Organic Pleasure From he Lines”’, in he Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002) pp. 89–116.
92 he Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995) p. 49.
93 ‘he Critic as Artist’, Part I, in Oscar Wilde, he Major Works (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1989) p. 244.
94 See William Harmon, ‘Rhyme in English Verse: History, Structures, Functions’,
Studies in Philology 84. 4 (1987): 365–93.
95 Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 2003) p. 210.
96 See Ernest Sprott, Milton’s Art of Prosody (Oxford, Blackwell, 1953); Percy G.
Adams, Graces of Harmony: Alliteration, Assonance and Consonance in Eighteenth-
Century British Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977).
97 his quotation comes from W. K. Wimsatt’s classic essay on ‘One Relation of
Rhyme to Reason’ in he Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (London:
Methuen, 1970) p. 153. See also William Keach, Arbitrary Power: Romanticism,
Language, Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) ch. 3. Keach sug-
gests that Keats’s dramatisation of linguistic arbitrariness through rhyme assumes
a polemical, political signiicance (p. 46f ).
98 he Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, vol. 1 ed. Elvan Kintner
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1969) p. 464.
99 Algernon Charles Swinburne: Major Poems and Selected Prose ed. Jerome McGann and
Charles L. Sligh (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004) pp. 33, 35.
100 Hilaire Belloc, he Modern Traveller (London: Edward Arnold, 1898) p. 25.
101 A History of English Prosody (London: Macmillan, 1906–10), 3. 242.
102 R. Bentley, ed. Letters of E. B. Browning to R. H. Horne, (London, 1877) p. 264.
103 Lennard, Poetry Handbook, 2nd edn. p. 340.
104 See Maureen Quilligan, ‘Feminine Endings: he Sexual Politics of Sidney’s and
Spenser’s Rhyming’, in he Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing
the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1990) p. 315. For a broader view, see Julie Crawford, ‘Sid-
ney’s Sapphics and the Role of Interpretive Communities’, ELH: Journal of English
Literary History 69.4 (Winter 2002) pp. 979–1007.
105 Ibid.
106 he term is Andrew Osborn’s; see ‘Skirmishes on the Border: he Evolution and
Function of Paul Muldoon’s Fuzzy Rhyme’, Contemporary Literature 61.2 (Sum-
mer 2000): 328–58.
107 From Don Paterson’s T. S. Eliot lecture: he Dark Art of Poetry, 30 October
2004. Quoted from Poetry Library, <http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/news/
poetryscene/?id=20>. 26 April 2011.
108 From Tony Harrison, Collected Poems (London: Viking, 2007).
109 See Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: Macmillan, 1974) p. 228; also, Sarah
Gates, ‘Poetics, Metaphysics, Genre: he Stanza Form of In Memoriam’, Victorian
Poetry 37 (1999): 507–19. Unbeknown to Tennyson, the In Memoriam stanza had
earlier been employed by Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Ben Jonson.
110 Quoted from Edmund Spenser, he Faerie Queene¸ ed. homas P. Roche, Jr with
the assistance of C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).
111 Letters of the alphabet are used to describe patterns of end rhymes: the irst rhyme
sounds are described as ‘a’, the next as ‘b’, and so on. If the same sound recurs more
than twice at the line end, it is described by the letter given to the sound in its irst
occurrence; as in for instance, ‘aabaabb’.
112 Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum, A Prosody Handbook (New York, Evanston, and
London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965) pp. 124–5.
Chapter 2 Lyric
1 In Joseph Brodsky, Less han One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1986).
2 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. M. E. Hubbard, Classical Literary Criticism, ed. introd. and
annot. D. A. Russell and Michael Winterbottom, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1998) pp. 50–90 (p. 50).
3 Scott Brewster, Lyric (New Critical Idiom) (London: Routledge, 2009) p. 2.

4 Helen Vendler, Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, 2nd edn.
(Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002), p. xlii.
5 J. S. Mill, ‘What is Poetry?’, Literary Essays, ed. introd. and annot. Edward Alexander
(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Herrill, 1967) p. 56.
6 See Donald Davie’s ‘Sincerity and Poetry’, in he Poet in the Imaginary Museum:
Essays of Two Decades, ed. Barry Alpert (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977): ‘In part at
least, the measure of a poet’s sincerity is, it must be, inside his poem’, p. 146.
7 See Jonathan Culler’s ‘Apostrophe’ for a distinction between lyric and narrative
which proposes that ‘the lyric is characteristically the triumph of the apostrophic’
and that ‘Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a tem-
poral sequence but a now of discourse, of writing’, he Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics,
Literature, Deconstruction, with a new preface by the author (1981) (London: Rout-
ledge, 2001) pp. 165, 168.
8 Quoted from Penguin Modern Poets: Volume 10: Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, Iain
Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1996).
9 he question of whether gender issues are at stake in this overt undermining of
the stable subject position is relevant, but it needs to be set alongside the twinned
observations that many male and female poets (such as Philip Larkin or Elizabeth
Bishop) who use a supposedly stable ego in lyric frequently write poems in which
that self is shown as losing its initial assurance, and, conversely, that the self proves
a stubborn identity to slough of, even in the most ego-hostile work, as Riley’s lyric
evinces and realises.
10 Quoted in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks, rev edn. (Harlow:
Pearson-Longman, 2007) p. 266 n. 4.
11 Cleanth Brooks, he Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, 2nd edn.
(London: Dennis Dobson, 1968) pp. 141–2.
12 Ibid., p. 142.
13 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (1972) (London: Macmillan, 1978) p. 199.
14 In discussing the notion of ‘the heresy of paraphrase’, Cleanth Brooks anticipates
and outlanks the commonplace rejection of his argument when he says that ‘he
dimension in which the poem moves is not one which excludes ideas, but one
which does include attitudes’, he Well Wrought Urn, pp. 164, 167.
15 See Chapter 1 for an explanation of these prosodic terms.
16 See Eric Griiths, he Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989) p. 128.
17 Again Tennyson may be transforming an echo, this time to Byron in Don Juan,
when he addresses the theme of ‘irst love’ with comparable intensity. (‘But sweeter
still than this, than these, than all, / Is irst and passionate love’ Lord Byron, Don
Juan, I. 127. 1009–10, he Major Works, ed. Jerome McGann, World’s Classics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
18 John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason, p. 40.
19 homas coalesces two passages from the play, it might be argued: one when Juliet
has forebodings about her ‘contract’ with Romeo, ‘Although I joy in thee, | I have
no joy of this contract tonight. | It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, | Too
like the lighting which doth cease to be | Ere one can say it lightens’ (2. 1. 158–62)
and one when Romeo picks up his lover’s image just before his suicide, ‘How ot,
when men are at the point of death, | Have they been merry, which their keep-
ers call | A lightning before death! O, how may I | Call this a lightning?’ (5. 3.
88–91).
20 For the form’s function as suitable for a tyro, one might think of its use by Stephen
Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
21 See line 3 of the poem.
22 See note in Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poetry, ed. Catherine Philips (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 228.
23 W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, ed. he Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th
edn. rev. and enlarged. (1967; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 279.
24 his lyric is from Nashe’s play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600).
25 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘he Poetic Principle’, in he Fall of the House of Usher and Other
Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews, ed. introd and annot. David Galloway
(London: Penguin, 2003) p. 449.
26 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Study of homas Hardy’, in Selected Critical Writings, ed. introd.
and annot. Michael Herbert, World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998) p. 39.
27 Quoted from Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London:
Faber, 2007).
28 Hart Crane, ‘General Aims and heories’, in he Complete Poems and Selected Let-
ters and Prose of Hart Crane, ed. introd. and annot. Brom Weber (New York, NY:
Liverlight, 1966) p. 221.
29 Donald Davie, homas Hardy and British Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973) p. 26.
30 Quoted from John Donne, he Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London:
Penguin, 1996).
31 F. R Leavis invites us to ‘consider the way in which the stress is got on “Did,” and the
intonation controlled’, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry
(1936) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 18.
32 Helen Wilcox notes that ‘One of the most fascinating and paradoxical features of
Herbert’s Temple as a whole is the simultaneous sense it gives of order and random-
ness’, in he English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (2007; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011) p. xxii. Herbert’s poems are quoted from this
edition in this chapter.
33 See he English Poems of George Herbert, p. 579.
34 W. B. Yeats, Selected Criticism and Prose, ed. A. N. Jefares (London: Pan/Macmil-
lan, 1980) p. 266.
35 Quoted from William Carlos Williams, he Collected Poems: Volume 1: 1909–1939,
ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000)
p. 181. Page numbers are supplied for prose quotations from this work.
36 Williams, he Collected Poems: Volume I, p. 189.
Chapter 3 The Sonnet
1 T. W. H. Crosland, he English Sonnet (1917); this quotation is taken from the

revealingly titled second chapter, ‘Sonnet Legislation’ (London: Secker, 1917)
p. 31.
2 he Sonnet (London and New York: Methuen, 1986) p. 1. his book is not cited as
a negative exemplar but as an example of how even the best studies may lapse into
this fallacy about the absolute superiority of the Italian form.
3 Michael R. G. Spiller makes the point that the ‘very minor’ Italian poet, Nicolo
de’Rossi (c. 1285–1335), wrote many sonnets in the form abba; abba; cdcd; ee. But,
crucially, he ‘rarely makes his last two lines into a unit of thought’ (he Develop-
ment of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London and NY: Routledge, 1992) p. 200 n4).
Spiller also notes the development of the ‘tailed sonnet’ – reducing the syllable
count from eleven to seven – which achieves something like independent status;
but this form was only for comic use.
4 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Rutledge & Kegan Paul,
1965) p. 5, pp. 11–13.
5 Maurice Cruttwell, he English Sonnet (London: Longmans, 1966) pp. 10–11.
6 See Douglas L. Peterson, he English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1967) ch. 3.
7 See John Fuller’s analysis: he Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972) p. 18f.
8 David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, MA.:
Harvard University Press, 1965) ch. 5, p. 133.
9 Cruttwell, he English Sonnet, p. 21.
10 Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, pp. 127–8.
11 See A. D. Cousins’s account of this diversity: ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (he Cambridge
Companion to the Sonnet) p. 128.
12 he Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor, ed. John Forster (Chapman and Hall,
1876) vol. 8, p. 49.
13 See Spiller’s account of how such strong pauses were characteristic among the early
Italian poets, as marked in modern editions by a full-stop, semi-colon or a comma
(he Development of the Sonnet, p. 3f ).
14 Undated letter of 1833, Letters, iii, 31–2.
15 Catherine Bates, ‘he Love Sonnet in Early Modern England’, he Cambridge Com-
panion to the Sonnet, p. 108.
16 Quoted in Raymond Dexter Havens, he Inluence of Milton on English Poetry
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922) p. 484.
17 See J. S. Smart’s Sonnets of Milton (Glasgow, 1921) pp. 19–34.
18 he Inluence of Milton on English Poetry, p. 486.
19 Ibid., p. 487.
20 Havens made the irst sustained attack on this received wisdom in his study of 1922;
more modern studies that demonstrate the continuity of sonnet writing across
this period include Stuart Curran’s Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986) ch. 3; and R. S. White, ‘Survival and Change: the
sonnet from Milton to the Romantics’, in he Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet,
ch. 9.
21 See Daniel Robinson, ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Son-
net Claim’, European Romantic Review 6 (1995): 98–127; and Joseph Phelan, he
Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005).
22 Dictated to Isabella Fenwick in 1843. Quoted in Susan J. Wolfson, Romantic Inter-
actions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010) p. 318.
23 Phelan, he Nineteenth-Century Sonnet p. 9.
24 Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, vol. 2, p. 170.
25 See Margaret M. Morlier, ‘Sonnets, From he Portuguese and he Politics of
Rhyme’, Victorian Literature and Culture (1999): 97–112 (p. 98). he irst important
study demonstrating how Barrett Browning’s rhymes were not careless but calcu-
lated was ‘Experiments in Poetic Technique’, in Alethea Hayter, Mrs. Browning: A
Poet’s Work and Its Setting (1962); a more recent complement to Morlier’s essay is:
Tim Sadenwasser, ‘Rhyme, Form, and Sound in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “he
Dead Pan”’, Victorian Poetry 37 (1999): 521–38.
26 Quoted in he Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell (London & Edinburgh:
William P. Nimmo & Co., 1882) ch. LXI, p. 515.
27 Hopkins clariies that it is the longest sonnet ‘by its own proper length, namely by
the length of its lines; for anything can be made long by eking, by tacking, by trains,
tails and lounces’ (Letters, 246). See also his speculations, too long to quote here,
on why ‘the sonnet has never been so efective or successful in England as in Italy’
in Hopkins: he Major Works, pp. 246–7.
28 ‘Introduction to the Sonnets’, in Poetical Works. vol. 16, ed. J. C. C. Mays. (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 2001) in he Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. 16 vols. (Bollingen Series 75) p. 1236. Coleridge wrote sonnets him-
self, though he recommends a liberal approach whereby (he remarks in the third
edition of his Poems [1803]) the handling of metre and rhyme are subject to the
writer’s ‘own convenience’.
29 Correspondence of Hopkins and Dixon, p. 138.
30 Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s
Best Poems (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005) pp. 114–18.
31 e. e. cummings, Complete Poems 2 vols. (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968) vol. 1.,
p. 78.
32 Burt and Mikics argue indeed that that Berringan’s collection is among the most
important sonnet sequences of the twentieth century (he Art of the Sonnet
[Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010] p. 23).
33 For a discussion of Lowell’s ideas about his loosened sonnet form, see Steven Gould
Axelrod’s Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton University Press, 1978).
34 Quoted from Tony Harrison’s ‘On Not Being Milton’ in Collected Poems.
35 See Rob Jakaman’s discussion of this idea in Broken English/Breaking English: A
Study of Contemporary Poetries in English (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses, 2003), where Williams’s quotation is also cited (p. 27).
36 William Carlos Williams, from his foreword to Merrill Moore’s Sonnets from New
Directions (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1938) pp. 5–6.
37 Paul Oppenheimer, he Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the
Invention of the Sonnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) pp. 3–4.
38 Marilyn Hacker, Winter Numbers (New York: Norton, 1994) p. 85.
39 Geofrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) p. 160.
40 Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–98 (London: Faber, 2001) p. 76.
Chapter 4 Elegy
1 Margaret Alexiou, he Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge

2 Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: he English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1990) p. 4.
3 his catalogue is ofered (and elaborated) by Peter M. Sacks in his valuable study,
he English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1985) p. 2.
4 Abbie Findlay Potts, he Elegiac Mode: Poetic Form in Wordsworth and Other
Elegists (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967) p. 37.
5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), trans. Joan Riviere, in Gen-
eral Psychological heory, ed. Philip Rief (New York: Macmillan, Collier Books,
1963) pp. 164–79. his point is well made by (among others) Sacks, (he English
Elegy, p. 1), and explored by David Kennedy, Elegy (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 2007) ch. 3, 5; and by William Watkin, On Mourning: heories of Loss in
Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
6 Quoted from Edmund Spenser, he Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (London:
Penguin, 2002).
7 Kay, Melodious Tears, pp. 35–6.
8 Ibid., p. 36.
9 Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) pp. 55–9.
10 John Crowe Ransom, he New Criticism (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941) pp.
108–14.
11 Alastair Fowler, Conceitful hought: he Interpretation of English Renaissance Poems
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975) pp. 38–58.
12 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 41. Kay seeks supporting literary-historical authority from
R. Garland’s Greek Way of Death (1985; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) pp.
26–31, and Alexiou’s Ritual Lament, pp. 6, 11–12.
13 Kay, Melodious Tears, pp. 45–6.
14 Ellen Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from heocritus
to Milton (Chapel Hill: he University of North Carolina Press, 1976) pp. xv–xvi.
15 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 47.
16 Johnson, Lives of the Poets, v.1 pp. 175–6.
17 Helen Darbishire, ed. he Early Lives of John Milton (London: Constable, 1932) p. 54.
18 See Christopher Kendrick. ‘Anachronism in Lycidas,’ ELH 64 (1997): 1–40.
19 In homas Hardy: Poems of 1912–13, ed. John Greening (London: Greenwich
Exchange, 2007).
20 E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London: Chatto and Windus 1930) pp. 79–80.
21 J. Martin Evans, ‘Lycidas’, in he Cambridge Companion to Milton ed. David
Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp. 46–7.
22 Sacks, he English Elegy, p. 133.
23 Frederick L. Jones, ed. he Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1964) 2: 294.
24 See, for instance, he English Elegy, ch. 6; Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies
in English Elegy (Ipswich, Eng: Boydell Press, 1977) ch. 4; and Earl Wasserman, he
Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959).
25 Smith, By Mourning Tongues, pp. 59–60.
26 Sacks, he English Elegy, p. 147.
27 Adonais is quoted from Percy Bysshe Shelley: he Major Works, ed. Zacahary
Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
28 ‘“he Two Spirits”, Adonais and he Triumph of Life’, in Shelley: A Collection of
Critical Essays ed. George M. Ridenour (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965) p. 168.
29 See Erik Gray’s introduction to the Norton critical edition, In Memoriam, 2nd edn.
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).
30 his praise for Tennyson’s melliluousness and polish is ofered by Edmund Gosse in
his A Short History of Modern English Literature (1898) (London: William Heinemann,
1903), p. 363, and these epithets remain the predictable terms in which his prosodic
achievement is admired, thereby obscuring the vital ways that, every much as Robert
Browning, he found expression through phono-rhythmical dissonance.
31 Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: he Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. x–xi.
32 For discussion on this subject, see ‘he Elegy and the Elegiac Mode’, in Renais-
sance Genres, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard
University Press, 1984) p. 148–9, and John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two
Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 200.
33 Kennedy, Elegy, p. 8.
34 Smith, By Mourning Tongues, ch. IV.
35 On Form, p. 241. Leighton’s two essays on elegy (‘Forms of Elegy’ and ‘Elegies of Form’)
range across the poetry of Stevenson, Plath, Muldoon, Hill, Fisher and Bishop.
36 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 1.
37 Ibid., p. 3
38 Douglas Dunn, Elegies (London: Faber and Faber, 1985).
39 A History of English Prosody (London: Macmillan, 1906–10), 3. 334.

40 Quoted by Nicholas Wroe, he Guardian, Saturday 18 January 2003.
Chapter 5 Epic
1 ‘Yet it may be better, if we must, / To praise a stance impressive and absurd / han
not to see the hero for the dust’. Donald Davie, ‘Remembering the hirties’, in Col-
lected Poems, ed. Neil Powell (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002).
2 Virgil, he Aeneid, trans. with intro and notes David West (London: Penguin, 2003).
3 Ibid., bk 4, pp. 80, 81.
4 he Latin reads videmur (‘we seem’); ibid., bk 12, p. 289.
5 Quoted from Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber, 1990) p. 28.
6 For the allusion to Paradise Lost, II 624–5, see he Prelude: he Four Texts (1798,
1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 607. his
edition is used for quotations from he Prelude in this chapter.
7 Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2008) p. 17.
8 Ibid., p. 17n.
9 Quoted from Edmund Spenser, he Faerie Queene, ed. homas P. Roche, Jr, with
the assistance of C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).
10 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Major Works, p. 692.
11 Quoted from Spenser, he Faerie Queene¸ ed. homas P. Roche, Jr, p. 15.
12 Ibid., p. 16.
13 See ‘Lecture III’ in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. homas Middleton
Raysor (London: Constable, 1936) p. 36.
14 See for example C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967).
15 he Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones II. 71n.
16 Frank Kermode, ed. Spenser: Selections from the Minor Poems and ‘he Faerie
Queene’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 202.
17 C. S. Lewis, he Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford:
Clarendon–Oxford University Press, 1936) p. 312.
18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he Statesman’s Manual, he Collected Works of Samuel Tay-
lor Coleridge, ed. R. J. White (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972) vol. 6, p. 30.
19 C. S. Lewis, he Allegory of Love, p. 358.
20 Quoted from Milton, Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966).
21 For a discussion of this matter, see Joseph Anthony Wittreich, ‘he “Satanism” of
Blake and Shelley Reconsidered’, Studies in Philology 65.5 (1968): 816–33.
22 See for example A. J. A. Waldock, ‘Paradise Lost’ and Its Critics (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1947).
23 From Hazlitt’s essay on Coriolanus; he Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed.
Duncan Wu (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998) vol I. p. 125.
24 Robert Graves, ‘Introduction’ he Anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad, trans. R. Graves

(1959; London: Penguin, 2008) p. 23.
25 Emrys Jones, ‘Pope and Dulness’, Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Maynard
Mack and James A. Winn (Brighton: Harvester, 1980) pp. 618–9.
26 Barbara Lewalski, ‘Introduction’, John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara Lewalski
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) p. xxii.
27 Milton: Poetical Works, p. 207.
28 Christopher Ricks comments that ‘the vitality in Milton’s style [is] … that of a scent,
active and beautiful both as a harbinger and as a memory. Anticipations, echoes,
reminders: all these exist in Paradise Lost not only in explicit narrative and action,
but also take a local habitation’, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 1963) p. 48.
29 Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of Poetry p. 73.
30 Davie quoted from discussion in Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style, p. 42.
31 Ibid.
32 he Prelude: he Four Major Texts, p. 619.
33 Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, ed. John Milton: A Critical Edition of the
Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 170.
34 As set out by C. H. Douglas in, for instance, Social Credit (London: Eyre & Spot-
tiswoode, 1924).
35 Quoted in Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
(London: Faber, 1979) p. 228.
36 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (London: Peter Owen, 1952) p. 135.
37 Ezra Pound, he Cantos (London: Faber, 1975).
38 See for example Hugh Kenner, he Pound Era: he Age of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (London: Faber, 1975) p. 361.
39 Peter Brooker, A Student’s Guide, p. 237.
40 See Pericles Lewis, he Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007) p. 148.
41 Claude Rawson, Introduction to he Cambridge Companion to the English Poets
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p. 13.
42 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 39.
Chapter 6 Soliloquy
1 Quoted from John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lines 1–2; Robert Browning,
‘Andrea del Sarto’, 1–2; William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 4. 4. 12.
2 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010) p. 106.
3 Marlowe’s plays are quoted from Christopher Marlowe, he Complete Plays, ed. J.
B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
4 he term eventfulness is used by Stephen Booth in connection with Shakespeare’s lan-
guage in his essay ‘Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time’,
Shakespeare Survey 50 (1998): p. 5. For comments on the inal soliloquy in Dr Faustus

as involving ‘the severest test yet put upon the metre’ of blank verse (as well as for
comments on the passage from Tamburlaine), see Enid Hamer, he Metres of English
Poetry (1930; London: Methuen, 1969) pp. 64–6 (quotation from p. 65).
5 Faustus’s ‘meanings’, writes Empson, ‘are jarring in his mouth’, in Seven Types of
Ambiguity, p. 240.
6 Quoted from Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Philip Brockbank (London: Benn, 1968).
7 Ian Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford
8 James Longenbach, he Art of the Poetic Line (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf
Press, 2008) p. 113.
9 T. S. Eliot, ‘Poetry and Drama’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 142.
10 In her introduction to the play, Norton Shakespeare, p. 1150.
11 Coleridge praises, in the Player’s speech, the ‘admirable substitution of the Epic
for the Dramatic, giving such a reality to the impassioned dramatic Diction of
Shakespeare’s own Dialogue, and authorized too by the actual style of the Tragedies
before Shakspeare’, Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 5. 2. pp. 300–1.
12 W. B. Yeats, he Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1994).
13 A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the hinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
p. 199.
14 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (London: Allen Lane, 2000) p. 113.
15 For a defence of this reading as opposed to that in the second Quarto (‘What’s
Hecuba to him, or he to her …’), see the argument in Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s
Language, p. 114.
16 John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 196.
17 For a nuanced discussion of the meaning of ‘conscience’ here, see the long note in
Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982) pp. 492–3.
18 he gloss in Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, p. 271n.
19 For signiicant work in this area, bearing on the question of how Shakespeare uses
patterning of stresses to work expressively though ‘form’, see George T. Wright,
Shakespeare’s Metrical Art. Wright’s comment on the iambic pentameter’s ‘uncanny
capacity to vary the metrical norm without fundamentally violating it’ (p. 6) is of
particular relevance to the discussion here.
20 See Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art for discussion of the way in which ‘he iam-
bic pentameter line has … amplitude and asymmetry suicient to carry signiicant
English speech’, p. 6.
21 F. R. Leavis, ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero: Or he Sentimentalist’s Othello’,
in he Common Pursuit (1952) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) pp. 136–59.
22 Quoted in Helen Gardner, he Art of T. S. Eliot (1949; London: Faber, 1969), p. 128.
23 See Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2000) for discussion of ‘the tragic struggle’ dramatised in Shakespeare
‘between individual autonomy and some shaping force … which limits that
autonomy’, p. 117.
24 his reading grants Othello more awareness of the diiculties involved in his
command than appears to be conceded by Lawrence Danson who argues that ‘To
speak of Othello as he is, without special pleading, would require nothing less than
the re-enactment of the play’, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres, p. 133.
25 See the entry on ‘Monologue’ (under which heading soliloquy is subsumed) in
Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn. p. 529.
26 Quoted from Byron’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Alice Levine (New York: Norton,
2010).
27 Simon Bainbridge argues that in Manfred ‘the initially isolated voice of the protag-
onist becomes increasingly subject to the questions and observations of other ig-
ures’, ‘he Poetic Conversations of Byron and Shelley’, in A Companion to Romantic
Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) p. 205.
28 ‘Poetry and Drama’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 139.
29 Ibid., p. 132.
30 Ibid., p. 139.
31 Ibid., p. 138.
32 W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays (1952; London: Macmillan, 1982).
33 For the view that ‘he strong opinions voiced in Yeats’s late controversial prose …
are relected much more damagingly in Purgatory than in the classic calm of “Why
should not Old men be Mad?”’, see Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Yeats and the Drama’,
in he Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats, ed. Marjorie Howes and John Kelly
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006) p. 111.
34 For Shakespeare as a liberating example of escape from the constraints of a blank
verse in danger of losing touch with the rhythms of ‘ordinary colloquial speech’,
see T. S. Eliot, ‘Poetry and Drama’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 145. See also
Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, p. 155, for the view that ‘In many passages, and
in the late plays oten, Shakespeare apparently preferred the number of syllables to
be problematical’.
35 Soliloquy is a potent presence in Eliot’s drama in which characters seem to converse
but oten talk past one another or as though they were part of a single self under-
lying apparent diference of personality: ‘I was not there, you were not there, only
our phantasms’, as Harry says to Agatha in he Family Reunion, he Collected Poems
and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969). heatrically, it survives in the prose
plays of Samuel Beckett, as in Vladimir’s address to the sleeping Estragon towards
the close of Waiting for Godot, but, with the virtual collapse of the attempted revival
of original poetic drama, it is a form that has become part of the printed poet’s
repertoire, oten in close association with forms of dramatic monologue.
Chapter 7 Dramatic Monologue
1 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association (Jan.
2008): pp. 201–6 (pp. 201–2).
2 W. K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York:
Knopf, 1957) p. 675.
3 Stephen Gill, ed. William Wordsworth. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) pp.
65–6, 57.
4 See Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London & NY:
Routledge, 1993) Introduction (pp. 12–13).
5 Quoted from Shelley: he Major Works, pp. 701, 232. A few contrary expressions on
this matter may be found in less formal utterances, as described by W. K. Wimsatt
Jr. and Cleanth Brooks in Romantic Criticism: A Short History (London: Compton,
1970) p. 423.
6 Quoted from Shelley: he Major Works.
7 Quoted from Robert Browning: he Major Works, ed. Adam Roberts (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
8 Quoted from he Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman,
1972).
9 Reported in Henry Taylor’s Autobiography (London: Longmans, Green and Co,
1885) ii. p. 193.
10 hese two excerpted comments on ‘Ulysses’, to Eversley and James Knowles
respectively, are quoted in he Poems of Tennyson, vol. 1, p. 613.
11 See J. Pettigrew’s article, ‘Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: A Reconciliation of Opposites’, Victor-
ian Poetry 1.1 (1963): 27–45.
12 M. W. MacCallum, “he Dramatic Monologue in the Victorian Period”, Proceed-
ings of the British Academy 1924–25, p. 276.
13 See Matthew Reynolds’s elaboration of this point as it applies to Clough and
Browning in he Realms of Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) pp.
159–60.
14 See Stephen Maxield Parrish’s article on the poem as dramatic monologue, from
where this quotation by Wordsworth is taken: ‘“he horn”: Wordsworth’s Dra-
matic Monologue’, ELH 24.2 (June 1957): 153–63.
15 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (New York: he Macmillan Press Ltd, 1972) p. 138.
16 Quoted from he Poems of Tennyson.
17 See Hunt’s review of 1842 in he Church of England Quarterly Review (Oct. 1842).
18 Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, p. 108.
19 he Formation of Tennyson’s Style (Madison, 1921) p. 149.
20 See A. Allen Brockington, ‘Robert Browning’s Answers to Questions concerning
some of his Poems,’ Cornhill Magazine (March 1914): pp. 316.
21 See Hiram Corson, An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning’s Poetry, 3rd
edn. [Boston, 1899]: viii.
22 See Robert Browning: Selected Poems, pp. 70–1. Critics cited in support of this
view include Langbaum in he Poetry of Experience: he Dramatic Monologue in
Modern Literary Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and M.
Mason, ‘Browning and the Dramatic Monologue’, Writers and their Background:
Robert Browning, ed. Isobel Armstrong (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1974)
pp. 255–7. he Longman edition also explains that when the poem now known as
‘Porphyria’s Lover’ was grouped with ‘Johannes’ in 1842, these poems were jointly
given the title ‘Madhouse Cells’; when reprinted separately in 1849, it was given the
title ‘Madhouse Cell’ (‘Porphyria’s Lover’ being used as a subtitle).
23 See Alan Sinield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen [etc.], 1977) ch. 2.
24 Notes on Poems and Reviews (1866): quoted in Swinburne: he Critical Heritage ed.
Clyde K. Hyder (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) p. 49.
25 London Review 4 August 1866, in Swinburne: he Critical Heritage, p. 35.
26 haïs E. Morgan, ‘Dramatic Monologues: Sex and Ideology’, Victorian Poetry 22.2
(1984): pp. 175–95 (p. 176).
27 Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago, London:
University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 203.
28 Catherine Maxwell, Swinburne (Devon: Northcote House Publishers, 2006) p. 18.
29 On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 112. See Allen Austin,
‘he Consistency of T. S. Eliot in His heory of Personal Expression’, PMLA 88.3
(May 1973): pp. 523–4.
30 Hugh Kenner, he Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1973) pp. 190, 191.
31 Glennis Byron, Dramatic Monologue (London: Routledge, 2003) p. 6.
32 See Diana Collecot, H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999) pp. 154–5 (passim)
33 ‘A Frog’s Life’, London Review of Books, 23 October 2003. ‘How much she shares
with her creator is’, Wood suggests, ‘one of the device’s loitering teases’: ‘he frame
story allows Coetzee to share ideas while obscuring his possession of them’.
34 Adam Kirsch, he New Republic, 3 December 2008.
35 Giles Foden, ‘Just how good is he?’: he Guardian, 6 February 2001.
36 Simon Armitage, Tyrannosaurus Rex versus the Corduroy Kid (London: Faber,
2007) pp. 27–31.
37 Poetry Matters, <http://www.towerpoetry.org.uk/poetry-matters/reviews/reviews-
archive/179-peter-mcdonald-reviews-tyrannosaurus-rex-versus-the-corduroy-
kid-by-simon-armitage> (accessed 8 Aug 2011).
38 he quotation comes from Krieger’s Ekphrasis: he Illusion of the Natural Sign (Bal-
timore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and it is used by Michael
P. Clark as the title for the collection of essays he edits, Revenge of the Aesthetic:
he Place of Literature in heory Today (Berkeley; London: University of California
Press, 2000), which collection is relevant to the present study in arguing ‘the import-
ance of aesthetic values and formal characteristics speciic to literary texts’ (p. 1).
39 Roger McGough, Collected Poems (Penguin: London, 2004) pp. 242–3. First pub-
lished in Melting into the Foreground (London: Viking, 1986).
40 he New York Times Book Review (17 February 1974) p. 7. Ostriker’s reference
to Swinburne may helpfully remind us that that the earliest practitioners of the
dramatic monologue proved capable of more thoroughly disquieting creations
than than anything Ai has imagined into verse: to make the comparison explicit,
Swinburne’s own exploration of necrophilia in ‘he Leper’ (1866) is by degrees

more disturbing for being irst primed through the thrill of sex with one who ‘shed
life out by fragments’ (98).
Chapter 8 Ballad and Narrative
1 “Narrative poetry,” In he Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics ed. Alex

Preminger, enlarged edn. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 542.
2 Eavan Boland and Mark Strand, he Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of
Poetic Forms (New York: Norton, 2000) p. 75.
3 For relevant discussion of lines 97–8, see Humphry House, Coleridge: he Clark
Lectures 1951–52, (London: Hart-Davis, 1953), p. 99.
4 he irst published version in 1820 difers considerably from the version quoted
here deriving from Keats’s holograph manuscript (a letter of 1819). he irst pub-
lished version revises the ballad through efects that switch between greater and
even ironic distancing (the ‘knight at arms’ (1) becomes a Spenserian ‘wretched
wight’, as in he Faerie Queene I. 29) and increased humanising (the lady’s ‘wild
wild eyes’ (31) change to ‘wild sad eyes’). For collation, see Jack Stillinger, ed. he
Poems of John Keats (London: Heinemann, 1978) and for discussion, see Jerome
J. McGann, ‘Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism’, Modern Lan-
guage Notes 94 (1979): (But see footnote 2 on introduction section), 988–1032.
5 T. S. Eliot, ‘Introduction’, in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, ed. T. S. Eliot (London:
Faber and Faber, 1941) p. 6.
6 Isobel Murray, ed. Oscar Wilde: he Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000) pp. 548–66.
7 Eavan Boland and Mark Strand, Making of a Poem, p. 77.
8 H. Porter Abbot, he Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 3.
9 All quotations from Chaucer are from F. N. Robinson, ed. he Works of Geofrey
Chaucer, 2nd edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957).
10 Robert R. Edwards, ‘Narrative’, in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) pp. 312–31(p. 320).
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., pp. 320–1.
13 J. A. Burrow, ed. Geofrey Chaucer: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1969) p. 66.
14 Helen Cooper, he Canterbury Tales, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996), p. 273.
15 Ibid., p. 264.
16 Ibid., p. 269.
17 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to he heory of Narrative (Toronto: Univer-
sity of Toronto Press, 1997).
18 Norton Anthology, p. 238n.

19 Alexander Pope, he Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen,
1963). All references to Pope are from this volume.
20 Quoted from he Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 237.
21 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn. (London: Hogarth, 1984), pp.
72–3.
22 Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 222n.
23 William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2010) p. 61.
24 See Jonathan Wordsworth, he Music of Humanity (London: Nelson, 1969).
25 William Wordsworth, ‘Letter to Samuel Rogers, 29 September 1808’ in he Let-
ters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: he Middle Years. Part 1: 1806–1811, ed.
Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) pp. 267–9 (p. 268).
26 From George Crabbe. he Complete Poetical Works, vol. 1, ed. Norma Dalrymple-
Champreys and Arthur Pollard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).
27 Matthew Arnold, he Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London:
Longman, 1979) pp. 302–331.
28 See Julian Barnes, he Guardian, 19 April 2009.
29 Quoted from Andrew Motion, Selected Poems 1976–1997 (London: Faber, 1998).
30 Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber, 2002) pp. 26–7.

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Cambridge Books Online

Poetic Form: An Introduction

Michael D. Hurley, Michael O'Neill

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511982224

Online ISBN: 9780511982224

Hardback ISBN: 9780521772945

Paperback ISBN: 9780521774994

Notes pp. 213-236

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511982224.011

Cambridge University Press

15 Biographia Literaria, II. 14

Chapter 1 The Elements of Poetic Form

1 Notebook entry from 19 November 1958 in he Nightisherman: Selected Letters of

13 he New Princeton Encyclopedia, p. 769.

Wright’s more thoroughgoing account of how metre may be used to expressive

3 Scott Brewster, Lyric (New Critical Idiom) (London: Routledge, 2009) p. 2.

Chapter 3 The Sonnet

1 T. W. H. Crosland, he English Sonnet (1917); this quotation is taken from the

1 Margaret Alexiou, he Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge

39 A History of English Prosody (London: Macmillan, 1906–10), 3. 334.

24 Robert Graves, ‘Introduction’ he Anger of Achilles: Homer’s Iliad, trans. R. Graves

Shakespeare Survey 50 (1998): p. 5. For comments on the inal soliloquy in Dr Faustus

Chapter 7 Dramatic Monologue

Swinburne’s own exploration of necrophilia in ‘he Leper’ (1866) is by degrees

Chapter 8 Ballad and Narrative

1 “Narrative poetry,” In he Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics ed. Alex

18 Norton Anthology, p. 238n.

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