Historical Manual of English Prosody - George Saintsbury

Blank verse

Blank verse—than which, in its perfection, there is no more powerful guard and corrective as regards the possible errors of the stopped couplet—was not put in operation, except by Milton at the very beginning of the period, so early as these. In fact, as has been said, it was the degradation of blank verse, almost as much as anything else which encouraged the growth of this form of rhyme. Nor was the all-powerful influence of Milton himself at once felt, except by a very few persons;[100] while, when it began to be felt, it was not fully understood. Attempts, however, were by degrees made in it;[101] and, some sixty years after the appearance of Paradise Lost, the beginning of Thomson's Seasons brought to bear a new, popular, and powerful agency. Although Thomson may have been under the elision and "apostrophation" delusions of his time, he did not attempt to avoid what his younger contemporary, Shenstone, called "virtual" trisyllabic feet. One of his best lines, for instance—

The yellow wall-|flŏwĕr, stāin|ed with iron-brown,

contains such a foot naturally, though you may slur and "apostrophate" it into "flow'r"; and there are endless others, ready to suggest themselves to a nice ear, whenever you come across such words as "pastoral" and "impetuous" in—

But an even more valuable effect of blank-verse practice was the inevitable reappearance of the verse-paragraph, with its necessary constituents the verse-sentences and verse-clauses, which need not—and, if a good effect is to be produced, must not—be made of successive batches of complete lines, still less of batches of equal size. In forging the verse-paragraph, variation of pause, overrunning of sense as regards line-ends, strong breaks in the actual lines (a thing almost abused by Thomson himself, and quite so by his followers, but in itself a caustic to one of the evils of couplet verse), are necessary implements and materials. Accordingly the staunchest devotees of the couplet, such as Johnson, always dislike blank verse; and when, later, a poet like Cowper takes it up, his action is similarly connected with dislike to the "mechanic warbling" of the Popian style. In his hands, especially in the late and splendid example of "Yardley Oak," almost the full Miltonic variety is recovered. But always, and throughout its practice during the eighteenth century, it acts as a foil, a relief and a refuge to and from the limitations and restrictions of the couplet itself.

and lyric.

Lastly, a similar enfranchising influence was exercised by lyric; but to a comparatively limited extent. The genius of the latest seventeenth century and of almost the whole eighteenth, except in a few poets (mostly to be kept as exceptions, with Gray and Collins, who were of them, to the next chapter), was by no means lyrical. The healthiest influence of it was supplied by anapæstic forms, especially in light verse. "Pindarics" were at first much used, but were too often of a most prosaic character. "Romance-six" was affected to an almost surprising degree, but for the most part in a rather Sir Thopas-like form, exact and sing-song. This was also the fault of most of the common measure or ballad-quatrain, such as the well-known examples of Percy and Goldsmith; though the Reliques of the former gave better models (somewhat tampered with by the editor) forty years before 1800; and the miscellaneous collections of Durfey and Philips had to some extent done so nearly as much earlier still. The Evangelical revival, by infusing more passion and reality into hymns, had a good effect; and when we come to Cowper, this influenced his profane as well as his sacred poetry. Nor should we omit to mention—as a really powerful counter-agent to the couplet, with its monotonous regularity, unqualified rhyme, and so on—the irregularly rhythmed prose of Macpherson's Ossian, which appeared about the same time as the Reliques, and attracted much attention.

Merit of eighteenth-century "regularity."