The Art of English Poetry (1708)

by active 1702-1712 Edward Bysshe

INTRODUCTION

The Art of English Poetry (1702) may be roughly described as an English version of the Gradus ad Parnassum. At least that is the tradition to which it belongs. Its immediate predecessor was the pleasant English Parnassus: Or, a Helpe to English Poesie (1657) compiled by a Middlesex schoolmaster named Joshua Poole, and this work was avowedly modeled on Ravisius Textor's Epitheta and the Thesaurus Poeticus of Joannes Buchler. But whereas the English Parnassus was designed for the schoolroom, the Art of English Poetry was designed for the world of polite letters, and so may be called the first example in English of the handbook for the serious poet.

In its original form the work was an octavo of nearly four hundred pages divided into three parts: "Rules For making English Verse," a rhyming dictionary, and a poetical commonplace book containing all the "Most Natural, Agreeable, and Noble Thoughts" of the English poets digested alphabetically by their subject. Only the first part is reproduced here, but it seems desirable to say something about the book as a whole.[1]

It is one of those works which is scorned by all, and used by all who scorn it. In the sixty years after its publication it went through nine editions, and though Charles Gildon thought it "a book too scandalously mean to name," he was constrained to admit that it had "spread, by many editions, thro' all England" and had "carried off so many Impressions, as have made it with the ignorant, the Standard of Writing."[2] Not only with the ignorant. Pope knew and used the work, and likewise Richardson, Fielding, Isaac Watts, Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Blake, Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, and many others. Indeed, it would be safe to say that there was hardly a literary man in the eighteenth century who was not familiar with it. If he used a rhyming dictionary, he used that in Bysshe, at least until 1775, when it was superseded by John Walker's Dictionary of the English Language. And if he used a poetical commonplace book, he used either Bysshe or one of the five other works which were produced in imitation of Bysshe. "Quoi qu'ils en disent," said the Abbé du Bos of a similar work in French, "ils ont tous ce livre dans leur arrière cabinet."

The Art of English Poetry is dominated in every part by the concept of the heroic poem. The rhyming dictionary, which was enlarged and improved from that in Poole, contains only those words which "both for their Sense and Sound are judg'd most proper for the Rhymes of Heroick Poetry;"[3] and the quotations in the commonplace book are drawn chiefly from the heroic poem and the heroic drama. In the last revised edition (1718) the most frequently quoted authors were Lee (104 passages), Rowe (116), Milton (117), Shakespeare (118), Blackmore (125), Otway (127), Butler (140), Cowley (143), Pope (155), and Dryden (1,201). Dryden, therefore, was the great exemplar of the heroic poet, and his Aeneid, which was cited 493 times, was the great exemplar of the heroic poem. Its meter, the heroic couplet, was for Bysshe the only serious poetic instrument, all longer lines being used merely to vary and decorate it and the shorter ones being fit only for masks and operas and Pindaric odes. As for stanzas, the rhyme royal was not "follow'd" anymore, Spenser's choice was "unlucky," and in general, as Cowley had said, "no kind of Staff is proper for a Heroic Poem; as being all too lirical...."[4]

The "Rules For making English Verse," which is the most important part of Bysshe's work, is the first attempt to treat English prosody in a systematic and comprehensive way. As the title indicates, it is prescriptive in tone, and it is strictly syllabic in what it prescribes. The English verse line, according to Bysshe, consists of a specified number of syllables, usually ten, but permissably from four to twelve with double rhyme adding an uncounted syllable. A verse with an extra or a missing syllable (as compared with the pattern established by the rest of the poem) is either a faulty verse or, more properly, just a verse of a different kind. There are no feet in English poetry. Nevertheless, accent, which Bysshe apparently considered a variation in pitch rather than in duration or loudness, is recognized, and its role is clearly prescribed. It falls on the even syllables in verses whose total number is even and on the odd syllables in verses whose odd number is not due to double rhyme. This, of course, means duple time only, and Bysshe recognizes no other. When he quotes Congreve's verse, "Apart let me view then each Heavenly fair," he feels that the measure is somehow disagreeable, but he does not notice that the accents fall other than he had prescribed, and he apparently thinks that the line is distinguished from heroic verse only in having eleven syllables instead of ten. This is highly important because it shows that although the nomina basis of his prosody is both accentual and syllabic, the latter element is really its defining principle.

In a syllabic prosody it is clearly necessary to determine the number of syllables in a word whenever that is doubtful and also, if convenient, to provide ways of regulating that number by syncope and elision. A large part of Bysshe's treatise, therefore, is concerned with this task, and in order to understand this part it is necessary to realize that the shortened forms which he recommends (am'rous, ta'en, and the like) were not originally "poetic" in character. By his day some very few had become slightly archaic and hence were usually restricted to poetry; others existed side by side, in both prose and poetic speech, with the longer forms which at last superseded them; but the great majority represent the regular colloquial idiom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Bysshe wanted them used in poetry because he wanted the language of poetry to conform to that of cultivated conversation and prose and because he did not want the heroic line weakened by allowing for syllables that were not there, or were there only to the eye.

Bysshe says that he extracted his rules from the practice of the best poets, but this is not true. He extracted them almost entirely from the Quatre Traitez de Poësies, Latine, Françoise, Italienne, et Espagnole (1663) by Claude Lancelot, one of the Port Royal educators. From the Italian, Spanish, and possibly the Latin sections of this work Bysshe took his rules on the position of the caesura and a few other hints; but from the French section, the "Breve Instruction sur les Regles de la Poësie Françoise," he took almost his entire prosodical system. Indeed, his "Rules" are simply a translation and adaptation of the "Breve Instruction" with English examples replacing the French. The opening sentence, for example, which contains the very heart of his doctrine, reads: "The Structure of our Verses, whether Blank, or in Rhyme, consists in a certain Number of Syllables; not in Feet compos'd of long and short Syllables, as the Verses of the Greeks and Romans." And the source: "La structure ne consiste qu'en vn certain nombre de syllabes, & non pas en pieds composez de syllabes longues & breves, comme les vers des Grecs & des Romains."[5]

Needless to say, this description is accurate when applied to French verse, but it is not accurate when applied to English. The rhythm of English verse consists in the regular recurrence of a unit whose exact nature is variously conceived but which is easily identified by the accent which signalizes it. In French, however, stress in connected speech is too weak and uncertain to be made the basis of a satisfactory rhythm and is replaced in this function by the verse unit itself. These units are made equal by their having an equal number of syllables, and their recurrence is signalized by the final pause, by rhyme, and by the accentuation of the rhymed syllable. In each language there are, of course, other subsidiary rhythms, but the basic rhythm is founded upon the verse unit in French and upon a unit within the verse in English. Clearly, a prosody which applied to one system could not apply to the other, and to suppose that it did was Bysshe's sole but disastrous mistake. He was not the first to make it. What prosody there had been before him had hesitated uncertainly among three systems, the quantitative, the accentual, and the syllabic, but Bysshe, by formulating for the first time a complete and explicit prosodia, confirmed it in the one it was already favoring, the syllabic system of the French. Through him the mistake became irreparable for over a hundred years, and thus his "Rules" have an importance which is far beyond their merit. Critically, they are nothing; but historically, they dominated the popular prosodic thought of the eighteenth century.

Their supremacy was finally ended in 1816 by the preface to Christabel. There Coleridge wrote that the meter of the poem was not, properly speaking, irregular, though it might seem so from its being founded on "a new principle: namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables."[6] Scholars have wondered what was "new" about this, and the answer is that it was not new in English poetry, but in English prosodical criticism it was new, for it was a departure from Bysshe.