Cleveland, John (1613-1658).—Of no great importance as a poet, but holding a certain position as a comparatively early experimenter with apparently anapæstic measures in his "Mark Antony" and other pieces.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834).—In the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, the great instaurator of equivalence and substitution; a master of many other kinds of metre; and an experimenter in classical versing.
Collins, William (1721-1759)—Famous in prosody for his attempt at odes less definitely "regular" than Gray's, but a vast improvement on the loose Pindaric which had preceded; and for a remarkable attempt at rhymeless verse in that "To Evening." In diction retained a good deal of artificiality.
Congreve, William (1670-1729).—Regularised Cowley's loose Pindaric.
Cowley, Abraham (1618-1667).—The most popular poet of the mid-seventeenth century; important to prosody for a wide, various, and easy, though never quite consummate command of lyric, as well as for a vigorous and effective couplet (with occasional Alexandrines) of a kind midway between that of the early seventeenth century and Dryden's; but chiefly for his introduction of the so-called Pindaric.
Cowper, William (1731-1800).—One of the first to protest, definitely and by name, against the "mechanic art" of Pope's couplet. He himself returned to Dryden for that metre; but practised very largely in blank verse, and wrote lyrics with great sweetness, a fairly varied command of metre, and, in "Boadicea," "The Castaway," and some of his hymns, no small intensity of tone and cry. His chief shortcoming, a preference of elision to substitution.
Donne, John (1573-1631).—Famous for the beauty of his lyrical poetry, the "metaphysical" strangeness of his sentiment and diction throughout, and the roughness of his couplets. This last made Jonson, who thought him "the first poet in the world for some things," declare that he nevertheless "deserved hanging for not keeping accent," and has induced others to suppose a (probably imaginary) revolt against Spenserian smoothness, and an attempt at a new prosody.
Drayton, Michael (1563-1631).—A very important poet prosodically, representing the later Elizabethan school as it passes into the Jacobean, and even the Caroline. Expresses and exemplifies the demand for the couplet (which he calls "gemell" or "geminel"), but is an adept in stanzas. In the Polyolbion produced the only long English poem in continuous Alexandrines before Browning's Fifine at the Fair (which is very much shorter). A very considerable sonneteer, and the deviser of varied and beautiful lyrical stanzas in short rhythms, the most famous being the "Ballad of Agincourt."
Dryden, John (1630-1700).—The establisher and master of the stopped heroic couplet with variations of triplets and Alexandrines; the last great writer of dramatic blank verse, after he had given up the couplet for that use; master also of any other metre—the stopped heroic quatrain, lyrics of various form, etc.—that he chose to try. A deliberate student of prosody, on which he had intended to leave a treatise, but did not.