XIII. The Early Nineteenth Century and the Romantic Revival
In no department of poetic practice does the great Romantic revival, after forerunnings in Chatterton and Blake, show itself, in the latest years of the eighteenth century, and the earliest of the nineteenth, more perceptibly than in that of prosody. Only one of its masters—Wordsworth—slights this revival in theory, while he is not of the first mark in practice. But Coleridge, in The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, restores and perfects equivalence on a doubtful principle, but with consummate practical effect. Southey, less effective practically, is both sounder and more original in theory; Scott takes up Coleridge's example in all his verse-romances, and completely vindicates the freedom of lyric; Byron, affecting admiration of the couplet, achieves his own best work in Coleridge-Scott octosyllables, in Spenserians, in octaves, and in lyric; Shelley pushes the various and unfettered lyrical movement to its almost inconceivable farthest; and Keats revives (after Leigh Hunt) the enjambed couplet in decasyllable, recovers an octosyllabic form unknown since Gower and only partially utilised by him, writes exquisite Spenserians and beautiful octaves, comes perhaps nearest Milton in blank verse and nearest Dryden in the other kind of couplet, and achieves forms of ode, classical and Romantic, of astonishing flexibility and charm. By and in these, and in many minors from Moore downwards, the freedom of prosody, and the great instrument of that freedom, the equivalenced foot, are championed and practised with almost all the variety possible.