English Verse Forms
English Verse Forms
This article is an overview of the development of English verse from its beginnings to the end of the twentieth century. It discusses the origins and structure of the major traditional forms of ballads, blank verse, sonnets, odes, elegies and modern free-verse. Examples referred to are taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry 4th Edition (1996)
Apart from certain Nursery rhymes whose origins are obscure the earliest known poems in English are religious ones of which Caedmon’s Hymn from around 600AD, said by the Venerable Bede (673-735) to have been written by an illiterate herdsman, is an example. It is in Old English as are the more secular The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament although they have Christian connotations. These were found in a collection which was copied in 975AD and given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric (d1072). The manuscript of the epic poem of Beowulf, the earliest known European poem in the vernacular, is also dated from the tenth century although the epic is thought to have been composed between 700AD and 750AD. All these show that early English verse was meant to be sung or at least told orally to an illiterate audience.
Chaucer (c1340-1400) is the first known to have written his verse to be read rather than recited, coinciding as it did with the invention of printing it was available to a more literate society. However, although he is spoken of as the father of English literature and wrote in Old English, he lived in a multilingual society where French was more often spoken and better understood by the literate classes and was seen as the cultural language, using French forms and styles still in use today. Although English was beginning to be seen and used as a language in its own right for parliamentary or legal business, English culture was virtually non-existent and there was a paucity of any native literary tradition. Chaucer therefore adapted French precedents and ever since his time English poetry has often fed from continental sources.
.
The rhythms and patterns that structure English verse are based on a pattern of sound in which the poet sets the stress on a syllable in those words he wishes to give prominence in the line. Unlike many other languages in English the syllable stress can depend on the context of the word. For example, “This is an unbound book becomes this book is unbound”. “A king may subject a subject to torture, or in the present present him with a present”. Which syllable is stressed can also vary from age to age. This needs to be born in mind when analysing English verse especially that written by poets from a previous time. Old English verse was based on accentual metre where a line of verse had only four stressed syllables in each line but could have any number of unstressed syllables and links were made by alliteration.
The usual form of English verse, which began to develop from the sixteenth century, is in accentual-syllabic metre in which both the stressed and unstressed syllables are counted. This combined unit of stress is known as a foot. The commonest unit or foot in English verse is the combination of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, di dah, and is called the iambic foot. This is the unit of most English verse and is found in Chaucer, in the old ballads, in blank verse, in heroic couplets and in sonnets as well as other verse. If the iambic foot is reversed or inverted to give an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, dah, di it is called the trochaic foot. This is usually used to add variety or emphasis to iambic verse as in Milton’s (1608-1674) L’ Allegro lines 25-29 and rarely for a whole poem although Longfellow’s( 1807-1882) Hiawatha and Browning’s(1812-1889)Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister are exceptions. The poets are using the falling rhythm to colour the content. There are two other important variations. The dactylic foot has three syllables, one stressed, followed by two unstressed ones, dah di di. The anapaest also has three syllables but with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, di di dah. The less important spondee foot is two stressed syllables, dah dah, while a pyrrhic foot is two unstressed syllables, di di. The last cannot be used on its own but always in combination with another foot or as the first half of an anapaest.
English verse consists of so many feet per line to give a metre. There can be a single foot in a verse line, which is called monometer, two feet in a verse line is dimeter, three is trimeter, four is tetrameter, five is pentameter, six is hexameter, seven is heptameter, eight is octometer. Longer lines than this are unusual but there can be as many as fourteen feet in some modern free verse.
A poet has several ways of structuring English verse. As well as the use of punctuation, of full stops, commas, colons, and a caesura pause within a line, a poet can use the break at the end of the line to organise the verse. Where there is a full stop at the end of a line, the sense is complete and it is said to be end stopped. It brings to an end that section of the verse and when reading aloud the voice would indicate that by a drop in intonation. When there is no punctuation at the end of a line it is said to be enjambed, the sense continues into the next line, or into the next stanza, and the voice would indicate this by keeping a rising tone and using what is known as a suspensory pause.
A longer pause can be structured by the use of stanzas, the term given to a verse paragraph which comes from the Italian for “a room or stopping place”. Strictly the resting place is the space between the stanzas, which gives longer time for thought or a change of approach to the topic than by end stopping of a line. In English verse the length of a stanza can vary from a couplet of two lines to fourteen lines in a sonnet and poets sometimes use two or three different stanza forms in one poem. A quatrain, or four-line stanza, rhymed or unrhymed, is the most common English form. But other lengths appear. There is the three-line stanza, or terza rima after Dante (1265-1321), when a tercet has one unrhymed line or a triplet has all the three lines rhyming. The rhyme scheme can often dictate the length of the stanza. The seven-line rhyme royal was first used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseide and is in iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc. The Spenserian nine line stanza has eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by a single iambic hexameter (known as an Alexandrine) rhyming ababbcbcc as in Spenser’s(c1552-1599) Faerie Queen. Blank verse is not divided into stanzas but it is based on unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, although certain feet may be in another metre.
Some poets have experimented with shape poems that try to illustrate the content visually in the shape of the poem’s stanza on the page. Herbert’s(1593-1633)The Altar or his Easter Wings and Hollander’s (1929- ) The Swan are examples.
The chosen rhyme scheme can both structure the verse and interlock with the meaning of the content of a poem. Rhyme is usually seen in the final syllables of line endings, when it is the penultimate syllables that rhyme it is known as a feminine rhyme, this often occurs with words ending in “ing.” There can also be internal rhymes, words within a line rhyming with other words in that line or another line, and assonance where the vowels are the same but the final consonant is changed. Occasionally there is eye rhyme or printer’s rhyme where the words look the same but are pronounced differently, although in the poet’s day this might have been a full rhyme.
The simplest form of structure is the ballad, which can be found in at least two forms. The first is the traditional folk ballad in which traces of the oral tradition are still found, which has come down by word of mouth, and is often anonymous, for example, Sir Patrick Spens and Barbara Allen. These are in Common metre where there are eight iambic feet in the first line, six in the second, eight in the third line, and six in the fourth to give a stanza of four lines, a quatrain. The second line usually rhymes with the fourth line. It is noteworthy that some verse may be called a ballad without being in Common metre like Lord Randall. The second form is the literary style, when certain later poets deliberately choose to use Common metre to enhance their theme when they have something to say that seems to fit the simplicity of the style, for example, Hardy’s(1840-1928) The Darkling Thrush. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Coleridge (1772-1834) uses Common metre but makes many variations, adding a line to a stanza to make a five line pentain, using triple rhyme, internal rhymes and assonance. He also uses many examples of the poet’s other tool, rhetorical tropes and schemas. A trope here means a semantic change or transfer of a word’s meaning as in metaphor, allegory, hyperbole etc. A schema or figure is concerned with the shape and structure of the language, the place of words in a syntactical pattern. For example, anaphora repeats a word at the beginning of a sequence of clauses or sentences, epistrophe repeats a word to end a sequence. These are derived from classical usage and their use was learnt in school.
Education across Europe until the end of the nineteenth century was based on learning, translating and understanding the Latin authors, and to a lesser extent those in Greek. Latin was therefore considered the pinnacle of correct language usage.This type of education, in which certain formalities were inculcated, made for a cultural and social background in which all educated people understood and would appreciate the many schemas and figures of rhetoric which poets of the past were educated in using, although few are known today. The trends from abroad that set English verse on its way began with attempts to adapt classical metre into English. Spenser called Chaucer the English Virgil and he shows in The Shepherd’s Calendar, how far classical influences and figures of speech coloured his own work although he deliberately uses expressions as well which he suggests are obsolete ones from earlier English.
Seventeenth century poets in particular tried to adapt into English the standard classical structure of certain poems like the ode and the elegy that they knew from Latin authors. The ode is a dignified, long poem written to celebrate or praise something or someone in elevated language. There were four main classical forms deriving from Pindar, Horace, Sappho and Alcaeus. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) used the structure of a Pindaric ode in his To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Carey and Sir Henry Morison This has three stanzas of the specified form, a strophe and antistrophe metrically identical with each other plus an epode metrically and formally distinct from them. Jonson called these the turn, the counter turn and the stand but their function was the same. His Ode to Himself is in the looser style of an Horatian ode as are Marvell’s (1621-1678) Upon Cromwells’ Return from Ireland and Keats’(1795-1821) To Autumn. Isaac Watts (1674-1748) attempted an English Sapphic ode, The Day of Judgement, in largely dactylic metre which gives a very uneven rhythm and is not often used. In Intimations of Immortality Wordsworth (1770-1850) developed what became accepted as the English ode form made up of various combinations of iambic lines of varying length.
The elegy is also a formal long poem but more intimate than the ode and with less restrictive structures, it is often in memory of someone dead or is at least in a reflective mood. Gray’s (1716-1771) Elegy in a Country Churchyard gives its name to the elegiac metre of iambic pentameter in quatrains with alternate rhymes, there is little enjambment and the regularity of beat gives it a plodding feel. Other poets use more varied metres. Milton’s Lycidas consists of eleven stanzas of differing lengths and rhyme patterns. Tennyson’s(1809-1892) In Memorium is in quatrains but in tetrameters with an arching rhyme, abba, which both closes the thought and looks back as one does in memory of someone who has died. It is called the Tennysonian stanza. Shelley (1792-1822) uses the Spenserian stanza in his elegy on the death of Keats, Adonais.
Other influences came from the formal Italian rules, as seen in the structure of Dante's works, and from the more flowing French ballade styles. A particularly important transition was by Wyatt (1503-1542) who adapted the sonnet form from Petrarch (1304-1374) in the early sixteenth century. This formal structure of fourteen lines in pentameter stayed basically the same as the source, differing only in the rhyme schemes adopted by certain poets which affects the way in which the argument is carried forward. For sonnets usually present an argument. In the petrarchan form the fourteen lines divide into an octave, rhyming abbaabba, followed by a sestet, rhyming cdecde or similar. This allows for a statement or observation to be followed by a counter statement or an expansion of the theme. Keats’ (1795-1821) On first Looking Into Chapman’s Homer follows this pattern. Spenser (1552-1599) uses an interlocking rhyme scheme of ababbcbccdcdee in his sonnet sequence Amoretti. Whereas the Shakespearean(1564-1616) sonnet has three quatrains and a concluding couplet, in a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg, which allows for an argument to be developed and then concluded. Milton, Donne (1572-1631)and later Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-1861) were the primary users of the sonnet form rarely used by twentieth century poets although Hopkins (1844-1889) called several of his poems curtal sonnets as they were shorter than the norm.
Like Hopkins other poets in the twentieth century, have used the formal “rules” to create their own accent. For example, T.S Eliot (1888-1965) uses older styles in new ways. In The Wasteland he alludes to, or quotes from, Dante, Spenser, Marvell, Shakespeare and Milton amongst other previous authors. Others who have broken or adapted those “rules” to provide their own individual voice include Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) who uses para-rhyme in Strange Meeting and Ted Hughes (1930-1998) who uses unrhymed free verse in Walt, both poems exploring men at war.
Free verse is verse which makes little use of the traditional structures and can occasionally seem to stray into prose but which has an underlying poetic rhythm and often uses internal or para-rhymes. After the Funeral by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) is an example which, like most free verse, may need reciting aloud to be fully appreciated as poetry.
Not that free verse is the only style enhanced by recitation. Most verse repays silent study but full understanding comes more easily when it is read aloud. Paradise Lost with its unusual syntax is particularly difficult to grasp but when Milton’s epic poem is read aloud the linked meanings underlying the references and the phraseology are understood more easily. For English verse depends so much on oral patterns that reciting it to oneself or to others is still usually the best way to find the rhythms of the stress patterns, hear the echoes of the rhymes and thus perceive both the obvious meaning and its context of underlying allusions. English Verse came from an oral tradition and still depends upon the aural rather than the visual image for full appreciation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Grierson H.J.C., and J.C. Smith A Critical History of English Poetry (1983 ); Lennard J. The Poetry Handbook: a Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (1996) Ferguson M., Salter M. J., Stallworthy J., The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fourth Edition (1996)
This article is an overview of the development of English verse from its beginnings to the end of the twentieth century. It discusses the origins and structure of the major traditional forms of ballads, blank verse, sonnets, odes, elegies and modern free-verse. Examples referred to are taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry 4th Edition (1996)
Apart from certain Nursery rhymes whose origins are obscure the earliest known poems in English are religious ones of which Caedmon’s Hymn from around 600AD, said by the Venerable Bede (673-735) to have been written by an illiterate herdsman, is an example. It is in Old English as are the more secular The Seafarer and The Wife’s Lament although they have Christian connotations. These were found in a collection which was copied in 975AD and given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric (d1072). The manuscript of the epic poem of Beowulf, the earliest known European poem in the vernacular, is also dated from the tenth century although the epic is thought to have been composed between 700AD and 750AD. All these show that early English verse was meant to be sung or at least told orally to an illiterate audience.
Chaucer (c1340-1400) is the first known to have written his verse to be read rather than recited, coinciding as it did with the invention of printing it was available to a more literate society. However, although he is spoken of as the father of English literature and wrote in Old English, he lived in a multilingual society where French was more often spoken and better understood by the literate classes and was seen as the cultural language, using French forms and styles still in use today. Although English was beginning to be seen and used as a language in its own right for parliamentary or legal business, English culture was virtually non-existent and there was a paucity of any native literary tradition. Chaucer therefore adapted French precedents and ever since his time English poetry has often fed from continental sources.
.
The rhythms and patterns that structure English verse are based on a pattern of sound in which the poet sets the stress on a syllable in those words he wishes to give prominence in the line. Unlike many other languages in English the syllable stress can depend on the context of the word. For example, “This is an unbound book becomes this book is unbound”. “A king may subject a subject to torture, or in the present present him with a present”. Which syllable is stressed can also vary from age to age. This needs to be born in mind when analysing English verse especially that written by poets from a previous time. Old English verse was based on accentual metre where a line of verse had only four stressed syllables in each line but could have any number of unstressed syllables and links were made by alliteration.
The usual form of English verse, which began to develop from the sixteenth century, is in accentual-syllabic metre in which both the stressed and unstressed syllables are counted. This combined unit of stress is known as a foot. The commonest unit or foot in English verse is the combination of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable, di dah, and is called the iambic foot. This is the unit of most English verse and is found in Chaucer, in the old ballads, in blank verse, in heroic couplets and in sonnets as well as other verse. If the iambic foot is reversed or inverted to give an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, dah, di it is called the trochaic foot. This is usually used to add variety or emphasis to iambic verse as in Milton’s (1608-1674) L’ Allegro lines 25-29 and rarely for a whole poem although Longfellow’s( 1807-1882) Hiawatha and Browning’s(1812-1889)Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister are exceptions. The poets are using the falling rhythm to colour the content. There are two other important variations. The dactylic foot has three syllables, one stressed, followed by two unstressed ones, dah di di. The anapaest also has three syllables but with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, di di dah. The less important spondee foot is two stressed syllables, dah dah, while a pyrrhic foot is two unstressed syllables, di di. The last cannot be used on its own but always in combination with another foot or as the first half of an anapaest.
English verse consists of so many feet per line to give a metre. There can be a single foot in a verse line, which is called monometer, two feet in a verse line is dimeter, three is trimeter, four is tetrameter, five is pentameter, six is hexameter, seven is heptameter, eight is octometer. Longer lines than this are unusual but there can be as many as fourteen feet in some modern free verse.
A poet has several ways of structuring English verse. As well as the use of punctuation, of full stops, commas, colons, and a caesura pause within a line, a poet can use the break at the end of the line to organise the verse. Where there is a full stop at the end of a line, the sense is complete and it is said to be end stopped. It brings to an end that section of the verse and when reading aloud the voice would indicate that by a drop in intonation. When there is no punctuation at the end of a line it is said to be enjambed, the sense continues into the next line, or into the next stanza, and the voice would indicate this by keeping a rising tone and using what is known as a suspensory pause.
A longer pause can be structured by the use of stanzas, the term given to a verse paragraph which comes from the Italian for “a room or stopping place”. Strictly the resting place is the space between the stanzas, which gives longer time for thought or a change of approach to the topic than by end stopping of a line. In English verse the length of a stanza can vary from a couplet of two lines to fourteen lines in a sonnet and poets sometimes use two or three different stanza forms in one poem. A quatrain, or four-line stanza, rhymed or unrhymed, is the most common English form. But other lengths appear. There is the three-line stanza, or terza rima after Dante (1265-1321), when a tercet has one unrhymed line or a triplet has all the three lines rhyming. The rhyme scheme can often dictate the length of the stanza. The seven-line rhyme royal was first used by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseide and is in iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc. The Spenserian nine line stanza has eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by a single iambic hexameter (known as an Alexandrine) rhyming ababbcbcc as in Spenser’s(c1552-1599) Faerie Queen. Blank verse is not divided into stanzas but it is based on unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, although certain feet may be in another metre.
Some poets have experimented with shape poems that try to illustrate the content visually in the shape of the poem’s stanza on the page. Herbert’s(1593-1633)The Altar or his Easter Wings and Hollander’s (1929- ) The Swan are examples.
The chosen rhyme scheme can both structure the verse and interlock with the meaning of the content of a poem. Rhyme is usually seen in the final syllables of line endings, when it is the penultimate syllables that rhyme it is known as a feminine rhyme, this often occurs with words ending in “ing.” There can also be internal rhymes, words within a line rhyming with other words in that line or another line, and assonance where the vowels are the same but the final consonant is changed. Occasionally there is eye rhyme or printer’s rhyme where the words look the same but are pronounced differently, although in the poet’s day this might have been a full rhyme.
The simplest form of structure is the ballad, which can be found in at least two forms. The first is the traditional folk ballad in which traces of the oral tradition are still found, which has come down by word of mouth, and is often anonymous, for example, Sir Patrick Spens and Barbara Allen. These are in Common metre where there are eight iambic feet in the first line, six in the second, eight in the third line, and six in the fourth to give a stanza of four lines, a quatrain. The second line usually rhymes with the fourth line. It is noteworthy that some verse may be called a ballad without being in Common metre like Lord Randall. The second form is the literary style, when certain later poets deliberately choose to use Common metre to enhance their theme when they have something to say that seems to fit the simplicity of the style, for example, Hardy’s(1840-1928) The Darkling Thrush. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Coleridge (1772-1834) uses Common metre but makes many variations, adding a line to a stanza to make a five line pentain, using triple rhyme, internal rhymes and assonance. He also uses many examples of the poet’s other tool, rhetorical tropes and schemas. A trope here means a semantic change or transfer of a word’s meaning as in metaphor, allegory, hyperbole etc. A schema or figure is concerned with the shape and structure of the language, the place of words in a syntactical pattern. For example, anaphora repeats a word at the beginning of a sequence of clauses or sentences, epistrophe repeats a word to end a sequence. These are derived from classical usage and their use was learnt in school.
Education across Europe until the end of the nineteenth century was based on learning, translating and understanding the Latin authors, and to a lesser extent those in Greek. Latin was therefore considered the pinnacle of correct language usage.This type of education, in which certain formalities were inculcated, made for a cultural and social background in which all educated people understood and would appreciate the many schemas and figures of rhetoric which poets of the past were educated in using, although few are known today. The trends from abroad that set English verse on its way began with attempts to adapt classical metre into English. Spenser called Chaucer the English Virgil and he shows in The Shepherd’s Calendar, how far classical influences and figures of speech coloured his own work although he deliberately uses expressions as well which he suggests are obsolete ones from earlier English.
Seventeenth century poets in particular tried to adapt into English the standard classical structure of certain poems like the ode and the elegy that they knew from Latin authors. The ode is a dignified, long poem written to celebrate or praise something or someone in elevated language. There were four main classical forms deriving from Pindar, Horace, Sappho and Alcaeus. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) used the structure of a Pindaric ode in his To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Carey and Sir Henry Morison This has three stanzas of the specified form, a strophe and antistrophe metrically identical with each other plus an epode metrically and formally distinct from them. Jonson called these the turn, the counter turn and the stand but their function was the same. His Ode to Himself is in the looser style of an Horatian ode as are Marvell’s (1621-1678) Upon Cromwells’ Return from Ireland and Keats’(1795-1821) To Autumn. Isaac Watts (1674-1748) attempted an English Sapphic ode, The Day of Judgement, in largely dactylic metre which gives a very uneven rhythm and is not often used. In Intimations of Immortality Wordsworth (1770-1850) developed what became accepted as the English ode form made up of various combinations of iambic lines of varying length.
The elegy is also a formal long poem but more intimate than the ode and with less restrictive structures, it is often in memory of someone dead or is at least in a reflective mood. Gray’s (1716-1771) Elegy in a Country Churchyard gives its name to the elegiac metre of iambic pentameter in quatrains with alternate rhymes, there is little enjambment and the regularity of beat gives it a plodding feel. Other poets use more varied metres. Milton’s Lycidas consists of eleven stanzas of differing lengths and rhyme patterns. Tennyson’s(1809-1892) In Memorium is in quatrains but in tetrameters with an arching rhyme, abba, which both closes the thought and looks back as one does in memory of someone who has died. It is called the Tennysonian stanza. Shelley (1792-1822) uses the Spenserian stanza in his elegy on the death of Keats, Adonais.
Other influences came from the formal Italian rules, as seen in the structure of Dante's works, and from the more flowing French ballade styles. A particularly important transition was by Wyatt (1503-1542) who adapted the sonnet form from Petrarch (1304-1374) in the early sixteenth century. This formal structure of fourteen lines in pentameter stayed basically the same as the source, differing only in the rhyme schemes adopted by certain poets which affects the way in which the argument is carried forward. For sonnets usually present an argument. In the petrarchan form the fourteen lines divide into an octave, rhyming abbaabba, followed by a sestet, rhyming cdecde or similar. This allows for a statement or observation to be followed by a counter statement or an expansion of the theme. Keats’ (1795-1821) On first Looking Into Chapman’s Homer follows this pattern. Spenser (1552-1599) uses an interlocking rhyme scheme of ababbcbccdcdee in his sonnet sequence Amoretti. Whereas the Shakespearean(1564-1616) sonnet has three quatrains and a concluding couplet, in a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg, which allows for an argument to be developed and then concluded. Milton, Donne (1572-1631)and later Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barret Browning (1806-1861) were the primary users of the sonnet form rarely used by twentieth century poets although Hopkins (1844-1889) called several of his poems curtal sonnets as they were shorter than the norm.
Like Hopkins other poets in the twentieth century, have used the formal “rules” to create their own accent. For example, T.S Eliot (1888-1965) uses older styles in new ways. In The Wasteland he alludes to, or quotes from, Dante, Spenser, Marvell, Shakespeare and Milton amongst other previous authors. Others who have broken or adapted those “rules” to provide their own individual voice include Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) who uses para-rhyme in Strange Meeting and Ted Hughes (1930-1998) who uses unrhymed free verse in Walt, both poems exploring men at war.
Free verse is verse which makes little use of the traditional structures and can occasionally seem to stray into prose but which has an underlying poetic rhythm and often uses internal or para-rhymes. After the Funeral by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) is an example which, like most free verse, may need reciting aloud to be fully appreciated as poetry.
Not that free verse is the only style enhanced by recitation. Most verse repays silent study but full understanding comes more easily when it is read aloud. Paradise Lost with its unusual syntax is particularly difficult to grasp but when Milton’s epic poem is read aloud the linked meanings underlying the references and the phraseology are understood more easily. For English verse depends so much on oral patterns that reciting it to oneself or to others is still usually the best way to find the rhythms of the stress patterns, hear the echoes of the rhymes and thus perceive both the obvious meaning and its context of underlying allusions. English Verse came from an oral tradition and still depends upon the aural rather than the visual image for full appreciation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Grierson H.J.C., and J.C. Smith A Critical History of English Poetry (1983 ); Lennard J. The Poetry Handbook: a Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism (1996) Ferguson M., Salter M. J., Stallworthy J., The Norton Anthology of Poetry Fourth Edition (1996)
Comments
Post a Comment
Please Do not Enter Any Spam Link in The Comment Box