The Science Of English Verse

THE SCIENCE ENGLISH VERSE THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE BY SIDNEY LANIER So pi eye I God that non my wntc the, Ne the mysmeteie for defaute of tonge. CHAUCER Troylits and Cryseyde. If ... some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying were . . ratifyed and sette downe. WEBUE. Discourse of Eug Poetrze. A Poet, no Industrie c. xn make, if his owne Genius bee not carried unto it. . . Yet . . must the highest flying wit have a Dcdaltts to guide him. SIR PIHI. IP SIDNEY Afiol. for Poetrie. . . . Gif Natuie be nocht the cheif worker in this airt, Rculis wilbe bot a band to Nature . . . quhair as, gif Nature be cheif, and bent to it, iculis will be anc help and staff . . KING JAMES I. Reulis and Cautilis c. Poesie therefore may be an Art in our vulgai, and that verie methodicall and commendable. PUTTENH AM Artc ofEng, Poesie. Hut the best comxiiuons cannot be, avc where science and genius are. Trans, from DANTE JDe Vul. Rloq. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS 743 AND 745 BROADWAY 1880 COPYRIGHT, 1880, BY SIDNEY LANIER, PREFACE. IF Puttenham in the sixteenth century could wish to make the art of poetry vulgar for all English mens use such a desire in the nineteenth must needs become a religious aspiration. For under our new dis pensation the preacher must soon be a poet, as were the preachers before him under the old. To reach an audience of a variety so prodigious as to range from the agnostic to the devotee, no forms of less subtlety than those of tone can be effective. A certain wholly unconscious step already made in this direction by society gives a confirmation of fact to this view which perhaps no argument can strengthen I mean the now common use of music as a religious art. Music alreadyoccupies one end of the church the same inward need will call poetry to the other. How the path of spiritual development which has arrived at the former phenomenon must presently reach the latter will ap pear more clearly in the course of the demonstration to follow, which gives an account of the true relations between music and verse. It may be, indeed, that there iii iv Preface. are more persons nowadays who retain the elegant ideal of poetry which was prevalent a century ago than would willingly face an explicit statement of that ideal. But it must be said that the world, as world, has abandoned it. The tepid dilution in which Prior thought it necessary to feed to his time the marrowy English of the old Nut-Brown Maid ballad the labo rious apologies with which Bishop Percy introduced his Reliqucs to the eighteenth century, as if he had brought a corse betwixt the wind and its nobility the painful undertone which we hear in dearest Keatss preface to Endymion, as if he were not free from a sense of intrusion in challenging the worlds attention to forms of pure beauty which did not directly concern cither trade or politics the amateurish trifling which crops out in such expressions as polite literature used even by Poe in a quotation presently given, and which is still to be traced here and there in cur rent talk are things of the past That all worthy poets belong substantially to the school of David, that it is the poets business to keep the line of men touching shoulders with each other, that the poet is in charge of all learning to convert it into wisdom, and that therefore a treatise on the poets method is in its last result a sort of disciplinary preparation and wagistcr cfwralisfor the congregation as well as for the preacher of the future, these will not be regarded merely visionary propositions, and perhaps will be here Preface. v accepted at least as giving a final unity to the principles now to be set forth. The following historical details will be found to add force to these general views...