"Every great poet makes accepted metre a quite new metre, imparts to it a totally new movement, impresses his own individuality upon it."
And again:—
"All verse is rhythmic; but in the graver and more subtle forms the rhythm is veiled and claustral; it not only avoids obtruding itself, but seeks to withdraw itself from notice."
And again:—
"Metrically Poe is the lineal projector of Swinburne, and hence of modern metre at large—an influence most disastrous and decadent, like nearly all his influence on letters."[33]
His own choice among his metrical exercises was "The Making of Viola," of which a critic has said (the Nation, November 23, 1907) "that the words seem never to alight, they so bound and rebound, and are so agile with life."
In an early Merry England article he writes of Crashaw:—
"His employment (in the 'Hymn to St. Teresa' and its companion 'The Bleeding Heart') of those mixed four-foot Iambics and Trochaics so often favoured by modern poets, marks an era in the metre. Coleridge (in the Biographia Literaria) adopts an excellent expression to distinguish measures which follow the changes of the sense from those which are regulated by a pendulum-like beat or tune—however new the tune—overpowering all intrinsic variety. The former he styles numerous versification. Crashaw is beautifully numerous, attaining the most delicate music by veering pause and modulation—
Miser of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage.We have said advisedly that the 'St. Teresa' marks an era in metre. For Coleridge was largely indebted to it and acknowledged his debt."