Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
18 - Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2011
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Old English poetry
- 2 The Gawain-poet and medieval romance
- 3 Late fourteenth-century poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Langland and their legacy)
- 4 Langland: Piers Plowman
- 5 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales
- 6 Late medieval literature in Scotland: Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
- 7 Sixteenth-century poetry: Skelton, Wyatt and Surrey
- 8 Spenser
- 9 Sidney, Shakespeare and the Elizabethan sonnet and lyric
- 10 The narrative poetry of Marlowe and Shakespeare
- 11 Seventeenth-century poetry 1: poetry in the age of Donne and Jonson
- 12 Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell
- 13 Milton’s shorter poems
- 14 Milton: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
- 15 Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries
- 16 Dryden: major poems
- 17 Swift
- 18 Poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century: Pope, Johnson and the couplet
- 19 Eighteenth-century women poets
- 20 Longer eighteenth-century poems (Akenside, Thomson, Young, Cowper and others)
- 21 Lyric poetry: 1740–1790
- 22 Romantic poetry: an overview
- 23 Blake’s poetry and prophecies
- 24 Wordsworth and Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads and other poems
- 25 Wordsworth’s The Prelude and The Excursion
- 26 Second-generation Romantic poetry 1: Hunt, Byron, Moore
- 27 Byron’s Don Juan
- 28 Second-generation Romantic poetry 2: Shelley and Keats
- 29 Third-generation Romantic poetry: Beddoes, Clare, Darley, Hemans, Landon
- 30 Women poets of the Romantic period (Barbauld to Landon)
- 31 Victorian poetry: an overview
- 32 Tennyson
- 33 Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning
- 34 Emily Brontë, Arnold, Clough
- 35 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Swinburne
- 36 Christina Rossetti and Hopkins
- 37 Later Victorian voices 1: James Thomson, Symons, Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Housman
- 38 Later Victorian voices 2: Davidson, Kipling, ‘Michael Field’ (Bradley and Cooper), Lee-Hamilton, Kendall, Webster
- 39 Modernist and modern poetry: an overview
- 40 Hardy and Mew
- 41 Yeats
- 42 Imagism
- 43 T. S. Eliot
- 44 Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and Edward Thomas
- 45 Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender: the thirties poetry
- 46 Dylan Thomas and poetry of the 1940s
- 47 Larkin and the Movement
- 48 Three twentieth-century women poets: Riding, Smith, Plath
- 49 Hughes and Heaney
- 50 Hill
- 51 Mahon, Longley, Muldoon, McGuckian, Carson, Boland and other Irish poets
- 52 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 1: the radical tradition
- 53 Contemporary poetries in English, c.1980 to the present 2
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
When Voltaire asked Pope why Milton had not written in rhyme, Pope replied, ‘Because he could not’. The arrogance seems striking, but Dryden, who, like Pope himself, revered Paradise Lost, also thought Milton ‘plainly’ wrote it in blank verse because ‘Rhyme was not his Talent’. The official French assumption that the twelve-syllable alexandrine couplet was the appropriate measure for serious poems was mirrored by the status, for Dryden’s or Pope’s generation, of its English cultural analogue, the pentameter couplet. Pope ‘translated’ or ‘versify’d’ Chaucer or Donne, almost in the spirit in which Voltaire translated Shakespeare and Milton into rhymed alexandrines. Samuel Wesley wrote in 1700 that Chaucer’s ‘lines’ were ‘rough and unequal’ for ‘our Augustan days’. Pope believed that he was bringing to these unpolished English writers (who themselves wrote in couplets) some of the structural symmetry and ‘correctness’ which he considered the achievement of a politer age, and to which Milton sourly attributed a possibly Frenchified trendiness. There were no French poets among those Milton praised for ‘Heroic Verse without Rime’, who included ‘some both Italian and Spanish Poets of prime note’, along with classical masters.
Both the alexandrine and the English heroic couplet are medieval forms, the former named after the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre (which it predates) and the latter much used by Chaucer. They were, however, seen as having been through an analogous process of refinement (which Boileau described as ‘Just Weight and Measure’, easy grace of diction, clarity, order and no enjambment), as the poetic currency of a ‘polite’ culture.
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- The Cambridge History of English Poetry , pp. 333 - 357Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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