The English Prosody; With Rules Deduced from the Genius of Our Language, and the Examples of the Poets Book

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1847 Original Publisher: Crocker Subjects: Poetics Literary Criticism / General Literary Criticism / Poetry Poetry / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER V. DIVERSIFICATIONS AND FIGURES. Section I. -- Preliminary Remarks. In the preceding chapters, the elementary parts, the component parts, and mechanical structure of verse, have been treated of ; and the finishing stroke now remains. By reading our English verse we plainly see, that among the different kinds, or different orders, each kind is interspersed, occasionally, and diversified with other kinds of feet than those of which the verse is composed. That is, iambic verse, so called, is not wholly iambic ; but is occasionally interspersed with trochees, spondees, amphibrachs, and others. The other orders of verse are also diversified in like manner. Those diversifications are objected to by some prosodians, as a fault, who say, the more uniform the measures of verse, or more purely of one kind of feet, the more harmonious. By others they are tolerated, and held up as models for imitation. No rules have, in this case, been given ; and none are observed by many of our poets, but to follow the dictates of genius, or dictates of fancy. And such is the liberty and licence assumed, that each poet is seen to write according to the dictates of his own fancy, or own judgment; and each critic assumes the right of judging, of censuring or commending, according to the dictates of his own judgment or fancy. Here then is the point in question; and thisX may be the solution of the problem : the poet should be allowed full scope to his genius, as far as he g...Read More