Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was a craze for metrical experiments which introduced or reintroduced several old French and Italian forms t…

It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In othe…

There is always a nasty surprise in store for the imperial mind. It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other. Th…

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Rhyme, the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits, True conceit, Spoiling senses of their treasure, Cozening judgement with a measure, But false weig…

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets…