Shakespeare is to be read for the poetry of his lines and picturesque word-grouping if for nothing else. For that matter, the songs of all the Elizabethan dramatists are worthy of study and restudy. They have a lilt and a lightness which make them live even now when so many literary fashions have passed away.
The old English ballads, to be found in Percy’s Reliques, Allingham’s Ballad Book and most collections of English Literature, are a help toward understanding the construction of a spirited narrative poem. Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” shows how effectively this sort of treatment can be applied to a modern theme.
Robert Herrick is worth while for the grace and delicacy of his poems; with him might be classed the better efforts of Lovelace and Sir John Suckling.
Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is perhaps the best example we have of continuous blank verse. It should be read but not imitated, at least not imitated too much. It is hard to distinguish good blank verse from bad and it is so easy to write the bad.
Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast” deserves a perpetual bookmark for the remarkable success with which the trend of emotion is interpreted by the rhythm. “The Bells,” by Edgar Allan Poe, is another example of this treatment and is held by some critics to be equally good.
Pope’s verse and that of his age generally is too cleverly artificial to be of much use to a modern, though his mastery of the epigrammatic couplet might be profitably noted.
As an exemplification of finished workmanship Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” stands alone.
Robert Burns, for the swing of his songs and the flavor of his words, should be read continually. Much of his Scotch vocabulary might be used, judiciously, in English verse.
In the “Eve of St. Agnes,” Keats has revealed possibilities in the Spenserian stanza of which Spenser himself was not aware, and the “Ode to a Nightingale” and the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” have a classic beauty which can be recognized though not successfully copied.
Of the more modern poets Browning’s strange, uncouth phrasing is full of power; Tennyson’s mastery is shown in his exquisite choice of words, and Swinburne’s meters and rhymes are worth close application.