This chapter discusses the sonnet as a context for Hopkins’s poetry. It traces the history of the form and observes the nature of its popularity in the nineteenth century, noting the influence particularly of Milton and Wordsworth. Ideas about the generative potential of restricted poetic forms shape Hopkins’s experimentation with the sonnet. The chapter closes by asserting that while Hopkins’s innovative approach to the sonnet is clear, he found richest expression not so much by explicit departures from received poetic forms as he did within and through those forms.

‘Style’ is a comparatively rare instance of Pater’s direct theorising; even by the standards of his other overtly theoretical interventions, the essay stands out for the breadth and importance of its subject and its capstone prominence within Appreciations, one of the two most influential volumes of literary criticism the nineteenth century produced. Scholars have often turned to ‘Style’ as if it were the author’s manifesto or summa on the subject, yet the essay tends to disappoint precisely on these terms. If ‘Style’ is the key to Pater’s aesthetic principles, most readers have found the lock jammed; or worse, they have concluded that the essay betrays the essential nature of his aestheticist vision. By contrast, this chapter argues that, while elusive, ‘Style’ is in fact a lucid and authentic intervention that at once tacitly responds to several of the most influential writers and critics of Pater’s generation (Wilde, Arnold, Saintsbury, Newman), while clarifying – rather than contradicting – his own convictions on the relationship between literary beauty or ‘perfection’, and the idea of transcendent ‘truth’.

Michael D. Hurley’s chapter considers the many applications of the concept of style and pursues its historical fortunes across a range of writers. Although style has been variously configured and refigured, what is apparent is that the ideal of clarity, so frequently promoted by style guides and other textbooks, is not the only objective of style, especially not in literary fiction and non-fiction.

Gerard Manley Hopkins observed that the ‘artificial part of poetry, perhaps we shall be right to say all artifice, reduces itself to the principle of parallelism’. His phrase catches well the sense in which words are heightened into poetry by organising language into expressive patterns (parallelisms): sounds into rhyme schemes, rhythms into metre, lines into stanzas; and so on. This chapter identifies, and attempts briefly to characterise, these common poetic building blocks that combine to create the different poetic genres considered in the book’s subsequent chapters.

It must be emphasised from the outset that even where they draw on longstanding and widely used conventions, the descriptive categories required for such a taxonomy are on inspection nothing like as sturdy as the ‘building blocks’ metaphor implies. The very term for the study of verse form itself is a point of contention (although this book treats ‘versification’ and ‘prosody’ as synonyms, there are arguments for distinguishing between them), and a similar contrariety, inconsistency and confusion over terms – the implications of which extend far beyond mere semantics – seemingly attends every poetic feature and effect. ‘I have read or invented twenty definitions of Rhythm and have adopted none of them’, complained Paul Valéry: ‘If I merely stop to ask what a Consonant is, I begin to wonder’. Such vacillation and vertigo is understandable, even inevitable. More than this, it is welcome. Analysis of verse form invites ‘wonder’ in both senses of the word, and persistent uncertainty over even the most basic elements may helpfully disturb critical complacency into aesthetic appreciation for what may be felt beyond what can be classified. The definitions that follow are, then, all working definitions as opposed to definitive categorisations; the approach of this chapter and the book is avowedly pragmatic: ‘to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits’.

Overview

Epic poetry has always laid claim to being the most magisterial and inclusive of poetic genres. It combines the primitive and the sophisticated, spanning both oral and written modes of composition. If it seems most at home in cultures that value the heroic (ancient Greece, classical Rome, Renaissance England), its persistence as a form argues for an abiding cultural concern with heroism, however much it consorts with ironic dust, to adapt a line from Donald Davie.

Epic’s claim to inclusiveness derives initially from the weight and scope of epic subject matter, traditionally communicated through a narrative that starts in medias res (literally, ‘in the middle of things’). The Iliad opens in the final year of the Greek siege of Troy, the Aeneid with a storm at sea threatening the lives of Aeneas and his men, fleeing from Troy. The convention of starting in medias res tells us much about epic, especially that it involves a turbulent sense of struggle and outcome, of causes and consequences, of murky doubt and attempted prophetic clarity. Epic form provides a means through which massive countervailing forces can find expression. Central to its generic identity is the sense of task. The leading figures must fulfil their destiny; the poet must write his or her poem.

Overview

‘A narrative poem’, the Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics asserts, getting to the heart of the matter, ‘is one that tells a story’. Yet even a short lyric such as Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (1800) depends for its effect on the suggestion of a story, albeit one told in a highly elliptical form. In this case the story element is pointed up by the link and contrast between the poem’s two stanzas, one set in the past when ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (1), the second in the present when it turns out to be the troublingly connected case that ‘No motion has she now, no force’ (5). Does Lucy’s lack of motion serve as a reproach to the speaker for his former insensibility, or did that earlier ‘slumber’ serve as a displaced intimation of her current state? Lyric poetry usually contains a narrative element, while narrative frequently contains passages that have lyrical possibilities.

Overlap is inevitable since poetic compositions refuse to obey pre-existing theoretical or taxonomic imperatives, even if it is important not to blur real distinctions, as Chapter 7 has argued. Narrative poetry has its own evident traits, on which this chapter will focus. Indeed, the recognition of generic overlap is less a warning than an invitation to re-consider; it is sometimes the case that, in narrative, the reader senses a ghostly alternative in which narrative serves as the medium for impulses which might otherwise have sought lyrical expression. When Byron depicts Lara, for example, as a figure for whom ‘troubled manhood followed baffled youth’ (Lara [1814], 18.36), he plays, and his readership knows he is playing, with this idea that narrative is a medium through which the poet dramatises a version of himself.

The earliest surviving elegies of ancient Greece engaged miscellaneous topics: the term elegy denoted a specific verse form rather than specific subject matter; elegion referred to a poem in couplets composed of a hexameter followed by a pentameter. There is a suggestion of sadness and lament in the term elegos (Latin elegi), however, so it may be that the oldest elegies were originally connected with grief, and that the mournful elegos was discontinued by the lyric poets ‘under some kind of pressure from the religious reforms of the sixth century’, such that it survived ‘only as a literary term’. In any event, Latin adaptations of the elegiac form continued the miscellaneous approach of the Greek exemplars, albeit with an increasing focus on the amatory complaint. Early English versions of ‘elegy’ admitted an equal variety of themes. It was not until around the sixteenth century that the English elegy took on its modern meaning, as being identified with mortal loss and consolation.

The reasons for this identification of elegy with loss and mourning are many and varied. Most important, though, was the Reformation. The Catholic tradition of praying for the repose of the soul offered a ritual for expressing grief, whereas the Protestant doctrine that replaced it held that nothing mourners might do could influence the fate of the deceased; and so, the elaborate practice of the Catholic Requiem Mass disappeared, chantries were closed, and the focus of funeral observances consequently shifted towards the secular. Dennis Kay describes how, just as the sonnet is an ‘aggregative form’ – in which practitioners ‘defined their individuality against their predecessors’ and ‘consciousness of tradition, repetition, translation, and imitation was inseparable from innovation and invention’ – the post-Reformation elegist faced ‘in an especially well-defined way the problem of fitting words to the special requirements of an occasion and of arguing for uniqueness both for the subject and for the elegy’. Hence the habitual elegiac protestations of sincerity, inexpressibility and individuality.

Established in thirteenth-century Sicily, the sonnet is the most enduring, the most widely used and the most immediately recognisable of all ‘closed’ poetic forms. The early Italian sonneteers – Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Dante and, of course, Petrarch – determined its verse structure: fourteen lines, rhymed abba; abba; cde; cde (the last six lines may alternatively be rhymed cdc; dcd, or any similar combination of two or three non-consecutive but interlocking rhymes). These sonnets typically progress in two parts: a thought or problem is proposed in the first part and addressed, contradicted or otherwise resolved in the second. The ‘turn’ towards resolution, known as the volta, occurs at the point where the rhyme scheme changes; the poem’s argument hinges, in other words, between the first eight lines (the ‘octave’) and its final six (the ‘sestet’).

Subsequent evolution of this ‘Italian’ form has tended to be described with irrational nostalgia. The ‘law’ of the sonnet’s structure is said to have ‘written itself explicitly and finally’; its ‘standards’ are thought ‘irremovable’. Such purism is prosodically naive. However well the ‘Italian’ metre and rhyme patterns suited the Italian tongue, different languages afford different formal possibilities. When the sonnet was first adopted into England in the early sixteenth century, the Italian hendecasyllabic metre had first to be adapted: it was naturalised into the English iambic pentameter (similarly, when the sonnet was translated into French at the same time it was naturalised into alexandrines). That metrical mutation goes unremarked upon because it is generally thought unremarkable; comment and disapproval is reserved for the way English poets refashioned the Italian rhyme scheme, by increasing the number of end rhymes from four or five to seven. But in the case of its rhyme as in its metre, the literary structure of the English sonnet expresses something about the linguistic structure of the English language. Because there are more rhyming possibilities in Italian than in English, and Italian rhymes may also be employed less intrusively (in that they are all feminine), English poets wishing to enjoy the same flexibility in their sonneteering reduced the burden of rhymes they were required to repeat.

All monologues are dramatic. A single person speaking is always addressing that speech to someone, even if only to himself or herself. As a poetic genre, however, the dramatic monologue entails something more than the mere ‘drama’ of articulation and audience. Verse monologues appear as far back as Anglo-Saxon poetry, as seen in, for instance, The Seafarer, The Wanderer and The Wife’s Lament. But whereas such poems offer the poet’s voice, dramatic monologues – which did not emerge as a distinct genre until the late nineteenth century – offer a poetic persona, a fictional voice.

The distinction between a monologue that is dramatic and the genre known as the ‘dramatic monologue’ may therefore be simply stated. Yet readers are rarely willing to concede such a neat categorisation. As was discussed in the chapter on elegy, artifice does not exclude the possibility of authenticity; confection and confession may blur. In the Victorian period, when the dramatic monologue was first popularised and arguably enjoyed its highest achievement, fictional characters were frequently believed to express the beliefs and desires of their creators. It is tempting to imagine that modern readers are beyond this kind of apparently naive confusion. But the confusion today is, if anything, even greater. Whereas Victorian readers might take (or mistake?) the poem for the poet, modern critics tend towards the opposite error: all confessional verse is treated as if it were fiction. One reason for this is that the novel has become the main form of literary consumption; as such, Jonathan Culler observes, narrative is treated not as one possible literary form but as the very condition of experience. Reacting against the notion of lyric as expression of intense personal revelation, criticism and pedagogy has ‘adopted the model of the dramatic monologue as the way to align poetry with the novel: the lyric is conceived as a fictional imitation of the act of the speaker, and to interpret the lyric is to work out what sort of person is speaking, in what circumstances and with what attitude or, ideally, drama of attitudes’.

Overview

This chapter explores the use of poetry in drama, and will focus mainly but not solely on Shakespearean and Renaissance drama, giving particular attention to the use of blank verse as a medium for soliloquy, on subsequent developments in Romantic poetry where the extended exploration of thought in long speeches leads to the emergence of the ‘dramatic poem’ (the subtitle of Byron’s Manfred) and on later attempts, notably that of Yeats, to revive the form of verse drama. The possibility of definitional overlap between this chapter and those on lyric and dramatic monologue is evident; indeed, it is embraced, in the spirit of this book’s understanding of the fluidity of generic categories. All three forms seek to express a speaker’s thought and feelings, with greater or lesser degrees of detachment.

‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense’; ‘But do not let us quarrel any more, / No, my Lucrezia’; ‘O world, thy slippery turns!’ The three openings come from a lyric, a dramatic monologue, a soliloquy. All three speak from the subject position of the ‘I’; Keats calls up a complex emotional state of ‘drowsy numbness’ that involves, as the cunningly positioned verb ‘pains’ brings out, a state of intensified awareness that borders on suffering; Robert Browning uses a measured pentameter that sidles into the soul of his ‘Faultless Painter’ (see the poem’s subtitle) to evoke Andrea del Sarto’s internalised sense of failure and self-thwarted constraint; Shakespeare gives Coriolanus a generalised idiom appropriate to a man whose moments of greatest understanding (as at the climax when he holds his mother’s hands and is persuaded by her not to burn Rome) seem to take place in silence. Each genre is in living contact with the others.