lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYof metaphysical lyric was the nineteenth. Neverhas there been put into poetry, lyrical or rhapsodical,such a wealth of passionate thinking about life andnature and love (Browning, Patmore, Rossetti, Morris,Swinburne, Yeats), and liberty, and justice, and thepast, and the future—yes, and about art and poetrythemselves—as in this period when poetry kept, to itshonour, in such close touch with the movement ofscience and philosophy and religious feeling and socialupheavals, whether in sympathy with them, or inreaction against them and in passionate protest againsttheir apparent implications. And not less remarkablethan the variety and wealth of thought and feeling wasthe development of the form in which these foundexpression. Blake unconsciously, and Coleridge moreunderstandingly, had emancipated English metre fromthe bondage of the iambic rhythm which is not itsnatural rhythm. " English unforced metre," says thatsound critic Mr Kellet, "naturally runs in trips andso-called anapaests; the regular succession of iambicsand trochees is only attained by some degree, more orless pronounced, of violence." Or one may say withProfessor Legouis that English lyrical verse alwaystends to reassert the old English principle of stressrather than the regular syllabism which we borrowedfrom the French. Of lyrical measures thus emancipatedColeridge and Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburnedeveloped probably every possible variety andsubtlety, so that questors for something new haveperforce turned in the direction either of vets libreor the cultivation of syllabic quantity. But into thequestions raised by more modern poetry, Georgian orother, it would be dangerous, and at the close of avolume impossible adequately to enter. " There is no158