240 notes to chapter 6
- “The linguistic mishmash of ‘Speke Parrot’—English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, gib-
berish, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, what not—finds a prosody not ill-fitted for it.
The varieties of the Skeltonic itself are far from accidental, and very well worth study.”
Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, 244. - Bridges, from the preface to New Verse written in 1921, xx.
- Newbolt, The Teaching of English in England, 9, 10.
- Bridges New Verse written in 1921, 4.
- This metaphor of man’s spirit like a caged bird calls to mind Hopkins’s “The
Caged Skylark,” which was published in 1918. Other parallels between Bridges’s and
Hopkins’s poems (six, to be exact) have been noted, but not this one. Hopkins writes:
“As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage / Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-
house, mean house, dwells.” - From E. P. Coleridge’s translation, The Plays of Euripides, volume 1. ”Would to
Heaven that the good ship Argo ne’er had sped its course to the Colchian land” (33). - Gerard Manley Hopkins makes this leap between disremember and dismember
in “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves,” “qúite / Disremembering, dísmémbering / áll now” (ll.
7–8, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins). - Ode XVI, The Works of Horace, 129.
- For a fantastic discussion of alliteration, see Harmon, “English Versification:
Fifteen Hundred Years of Continuity and Change.” - Cf. Jackson and Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” 521–30; Cavitch, “Stephen Crane’s Re-
frain,” 33–54; Jackson, “The Story of ‘Boon’ or The Poetess,” 241–68; Michael Cohen,
“Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” 1–29;
Rudy, “Manifest Prosody”; Blair, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart. - In The Realms of Verse, Matthew Reynolds brilliantly shows the political impli-
cations and investments of nineteenth-century poets Tennyson, the Brownings, and
Clough, and argues that “stylistic preference and political opinion belong together in
a continuum of thought and feeling” (274), and he reads political implications in the
exploitation of conflicts between “the law of the verse and the freedom of the lan-
guage.” In Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry, Matthew Campbell performs close
readings of nineteenth-century poems to show the ways that the concept of “will” is
allegorized as “freedom” through the formal quality of rhythm, so that the struggle
between what is “free” and “bound” in formal poems is a way to read the struggle of
individual agency. Both of these books are crucial in showing the broader historical
contexts with which Victorian poets engaged with and manipulated poetic form, but
neither questions the stability of metrical form itself, relying on accepted notions of
iambs, trochees, and “meter” and “rhythm” in general so as to put forth arguments
about expressive freedom and external stricture. Though I believe that this reading is
necessary and important, my hope is to show that there are other ways to read metrical
form, in addition to these evocative readings, that allow for even more insecurity and
negotiation between poet and form, poem and reader, aesthetics and politics.