FOOTNOTES TO THE PREFACE
Life, Vol. I. p. 192.
Southey requested a Frenchman ambitious of translating his Roderick, to do so in prose, not because he preferred that method in general, but because he believed that “poetry of the higher order is as impossible in French, as it is in Chinese!”—Life, Vol. IV. p. 100.
Life, Vol. III. p. 44.
Southey—Preface to A Vision of Judgment.
As for Klopstock’s Odes, written mostly in classical metres, Zelter, the Berlin musician, said significantly that, when reading them, he felt as if he were eating stones!—See Briefwechsel mit Goethe.
Τὸ μὲν γὰρ πρῶτον τετραμετρῳ εχρῶντο διὰ τὸ σατυρικὴν καὶ ὀρχηστκωτέραν (ἐ)ιναι τὴν ποίησιν.
Poet. 4.
As in the conclusion of the Agamemnon, when the passion of the interested parties has wrought itself up to a climax. So in the passionate dialogue between Eteocles and Polynices, in Eurip. Phœnis. 591. The use of the Trochees in these passages is thus precisely the same as that of the Anapæsts in the finale of the Prometheus. In the Persians, they serve to give an increased dignity to the person of Atossa, and the Shade of the royal Darius.
“Take our blank verse for all in all, in all its gradations from the elaborate rhythm of Milton, down to its lowest structure in the early dramatists, and I believe that there is no measure comparable to it, either in our own or in any other language, for might and majesty, flexibility and compass.”—Southey, Preface to the Vision of Judgment. What Bulwer says to the contrary (Athens and the Athenians, vol. II. p. 43), was crudely thought, or idly spoken, and unworthy of so great a genius.
Eumenides, § 16.
See Aristides and the musical writers; also Dionysius. Consider, also, what a solemnity Plutarch attributes to the ἐμβατηριος παιων of the Spartans (Lycurg. 22), which, of course, was either Dactylic or Anapæstic verse. Altogether, there can be no greater mistake than to imagine that our Dactylic and Anapæstic verse are the æsthetical equivalents of the ancient measures from which their names are borrowed. They are, in many parts of my translation, rather the equivalent of Dochmiac verse; and this, in obedience to the uniform practice of our highest poets, in passages of high passion and excitement.
Mitchell (Aristoph. Ran. v. 1083) has remarked, with justice, that Æschylus is particularly fond of this verse. I was prevented from using it so often as might have been desirable in the choric odes, from having made it the representative of the Anapæsts.
On the Dochmiacs, Ionic a minori, and other rhythmical details, the reader will find occasional observations in the Notes; and those who are curious in those matters will find my views on some points more fully stated in Classical Museum, No. III. p. 338; No. XIII. p. 319, and No. XXII. p. 432. The Dochmiac verse was, in fact, equivalent to a bar of 9/8 in modern music.—See Apel’s Metrik.
The corrupt state of the Æschylean text is no doubt to be attributed mainly to the rhetorical taste which, in the ages of the decadence, prevailed so long at Rome, Athens, Alexandria, and Byzantium, and which naturally directed the attention of transcribers to the text of Euripides, the great master of tongue-fence and the model-poet of the schools.—See Quinctil. X. 1.