Alcaic Metre in the English Imagination

"This book traces a neglected strand of English literary history and criticism: how a remarkable ancient Greek and Latin poetic form - the stanza known as the Alcaic strophe - found its way into English poetry, and continues shaping it today. English poets have always admired the extraordinary beauty and intricacy of the Alcaic stanza - Tennyson called it 'the grandest of all measures'. But their imaginative receptions of the form in English have been largely ignored. The relative fame and prestige of another Greek lyric form - the Sapphic stanza - has obscured the role the Alcaic has played in English poetry. This book brings the Alcaic stanza out of Sappho's shadow. John Talbot alters our view of literary history, exposing surprising connections between writers across five centuries, including Mary Sidney Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Blake, Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Bridges, Wilfred Owen, and W. H. Auden. It gives special attention to a remarkable proliferation of Alcaics in English during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and what that reveals about the place of the classics in contemporary culture. It also casts light on the English poetic imagination, showing how the rhythmic variety and complexity of the Alcaic stanza inspired modern poets to push the limits of English prosody by inventing completely new English metrical structures."--