Southey, Robert (1774-1843).—A very deft and learned practitioner of many kinds of verse, his tendency to experiment leading him into rhymelessness (Thalaba) and hexameters (The Vision of Judgment); but quite sound on general principles, and the first of his school and time to champion the use of trisyllabic feet in principle, and to appeal to old practice in their favour.
Spenser, Edmund (1552?-1599).—The second founder of English prosody in his whole work; the restorer of regular form not destitute of music; the preserver of equivalence in octosyllabic couplet; and the inventor of the great Spenserian stanza, the greatest in every sense of all assemblages of lines, possessing individual beauty and capable of indefinite repetition.
Surrey, Earl of, the courtesy title of Henry Howard (1517-1547).—Our second English sonneteer, our second author of reformed literary lyric after the fifteenth-century break-down, and our first clearly intentional writer of blank verse.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909).—Of all English poets the one who has applied the widest scholarship and study, assisted by great original prosodic gift, to the varying and accomplishing of English metre. Impeccable in all kinds; in lyric nearly supreme. To some extent early, and, still more, later, experimented in very long lines, never unharmonious, but sometimes rather compounds than genuine integers. Achieved many triumphs with special metres, especially by the shortening of the last line of the Praed-stanza into the form of "Dolores," which greatly raises its passion and power.
Tennyson, Alfred (1809-1892).—A poet who very nearly, if not quite, deserves the position accorded here to Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Coming sufficiently late after the great Romantic poets of the earlier school to generalise their results, he started with an apparent freedom (perfectly orderly, in fact) which puzzled even Coleridge. Very soon, too, he produced a practically new form of blank verse, in which the qualities of the Miltonic and Shakespearian kinds were blended, and a fresh metrical touch given. All poets since—sometimes while denying or belittling him—have felt his prosodic influence; and it is still, even after Mr. Swinburne's fifty years of extended practice of it, the pattern of modern English prosody.
Thomson, James (1700-1748).—The first really important practitioner of blank verse after Milton, and a real, though rather mannerised, master of it. Displayed an equally real, and more surprising, though much more unequal, command of the Spenserian in The Castle of Indolence.
Tusser, Thomas (1524?-1580).—A very minor poet—in fact, little more than a doggerelist; but important because, at the very time when men like Gascoigne were doubting whether English had any foot but the iambic, he produced lolloping but perfectly metrical continuous anapæsts, and mixed measures of various kinds.
Waller, Edmund (1606-1687).—A good mixed prosodist of the Caroline period, whose chief traditional importance is in connection with the popularising of the stopped couplet. His actual precedence in this is rather doubtful; but his influence was early acknowledged, and therefore is an indisputable fact. He was also early as a literary user of anapæstic measures, and tried various experiments.