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His intimate familiarity with the Greek and Latin poets helped him to attain metrical effects rare in English because they were due mainly to quantity, to the contrast of syllables not only stressed but actually long or short in duration of utterance. If his metrical daring does not always justify itself, and it might be possible to pick out a very few instances where this must be admitted, this may be due to his absorption of the Italian poets, which tempted him to give an Italianate accent to an English word, an accent which the English reader recognizes only by an effort.

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After Milton blank verse went under a cloud. Dryden and Pope preferred the heroic couplet and polished it to suit their several needs. It is true that Dryden could write bold blank verse; but he rarely chose to do so. Addison's blank verse serves to show how completely the poets had forgotten the lessons of Shakspere and Milton; it is not only uninspired and monotonous, but it returns to the earlier and easier structure, wherein the line coincides with the sentence, or at least with a clause of the sentence, and whereby the several lines may be said to have each an almost independent existence. The influence of the riming heroic couplet, metrically identical and yet wholly different in spirit and in opportunity, weighed down blank verse and kept it from soaring aloft. In time, Thomson and Cowper recovered much of its freedom; and they opened the doors for Coleridge and Wordsworth. In his turn, Keats recaptured a portion of the Miltonic melody, not the majesty of his mighty predecessor, but something of the music. And here in America Bryant — not a great poet, not foremost even among our own

bards found in blank verse a meter which exactly suited his large stateliness. Here is the opening passage of the austere and lofty "Thanatopsis":

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language. For his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings.

Brian Hooker has justly called attention to "the subtile grading of the stresses, the vigorous contrast of scansion and phrase-rhythm, and the tireless variety of the pauses"; and then he asked us to consider also "how all this opposition is held under just sufficient control, so that the equilibrium of the normal scansion, continually and seductively threatened, is never for one moment overthrown." And it must be remembered to Bryant's credit that although this was written after Wordsworth and Keats had reinvigorated blank verse, it was composed before Tennyson and Browning.

Tennyson early made himself a master of blank verse. In his hands it has melodious flexibility, varied cadences, richness of alliteration and of colliteration, and deliberate sweetness of tone. The workmanship is exquisite, but a little cloying and a little self-conscious. The beauty of Tennyson's blank verse strikes us as

studied rather than spontaneous. The effects he aimed at he attained; but we often are aware of the effort. His style is sweetly lyric rather than boldly epic or pregnantly dramatic. His blank verse lacks largeness of sweep and inevitability of phrase. It is graceful, charming, idyllic; it suggests a Tanagra figurine rather than the Hermes of Praxiteles.

Browning's blank verse is less artificial, indeed it rarely calls attention to itself, rushing forward as though it was the poet's natural expression. It is devoid of all marquetry of beautiful sounds; it may even be termed harsh or at least rugged; and in its frankly dramatic march it is tense and masculine. Here are a few lines from "An Epistle, containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish":

The very God! think, Abib: dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.

CHAPTER XII

POETIC LICENSE

This poetical license is a shrewd fellow, and covereth many faults in a verse; it maketh words longer, shorter, of more syllables, of fewer, newer, older, truer, falser; and to conclude it turneth all things at pleasure. GEORGE GASCOIGNE: Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse. (1575.)

THERE is advantage always in beginning any discussion with a sharp definition of the thing to be discussed. Here, then, is a pertinent characterization of license which we find in the latest edition of Webster's Dictionary: "That deviation from strict fact, form, or rule in which an artist or writer indulges, assuming that it will be permitted for the sake of the advantage or effect gained." And this warrants us in declaring that a poetic license is a departure from strict form, which the verse-writer permits himself in the belief that it will be pardoned for the sake of some effect he may thereby gain or of some advantage he could not otherwise attain. In other words, poetic license may be described as a privilege claimed by the poet of sacrificing something that seems to him relatively unimportant to secure something else that he holds of superior value. He may feel, for example, that he cannot express himself fully, unless he is permitted, once in a way, to depart from the strict rules of grammar or rhetoric, to employ an arbitrary contraction, a forced accent or a disconcerting inversion of the natural order of words, or to avail himself of a

so-called allowable rime, which is of a truth no rime

at all.

When the case is thus stated, the question as to the permissibility of any poetic license is easy to answer. In the specific instance, was the poet right in his feeling as to the importance of the two things one of which he sacrificed to the other? And was he justified in his belief that he could attain his advantage and gain his effect in no other way than by departing from the letter of the law? If his decision was sound, then will he be forgiven his violation of form, even though we cannot help being more or less conscious of his departure from the normal use of language. Every single instance of poetic license must needs be examined by itself; and the poet can claim no general permit to do as he pleases. His poem is always intended to be said or sung; its appeal is ever to the ears of those to whom it is addressed; it arouses in us a certain expectancy both of content and of form, and if for any reason, good or bad, the poet chooses to disappoint that expectancy, he can do so only at his peril, at the risk of breaking the circuit which must bind together the listener and the singer.

If the verse-writer has seen fit to disappoint the expectancy he has created in the ears of his hearers, by an awkward inversion, by an unwonted contraction, by the use of a so-called "allowable " rime, by an ungrammatical employment of words, or by any other license, his sole excuse must be that this was necessary or at least profitable in that special instance, since only by the aid of that license could he attain the effect he was seeking at the moment. This is akin to what the lawyers call a plea of confession and avoid

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