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What is remarkable about the Earl of Surrey's blank verse is that it has no clear origin except within one personality and one life-story. Whatever conceptions and techniques Surrey developed from specific literary sources, whether Geoffrey Chaucer, the French, the Italians, or Gawain Douglas, finally and mysteriously the blank verse originated out of a single person — Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Before Surrey, in English, as an astute editor of Thomas Wyatt has observed, there had been ‘nothing quite like it’. Blank verse with its flexibility, its ‘readiness’, in T. S. Eliot's term, surprised everyone. It had not evolved with time but was suddenly, ‘immediately’, invented — by a young man, not always mature, at a specific time and place terrible in their dislocations.

This chapter looks at Wordsworth's repetitions. It considers ‘The Thorn’ and examines Wordsworth on metre, and the metrical patterns in ‘Ode to Duty’. Next the chapter looks at Coleridge on the Immortality Ode and ‘flux and reflux’. It moves on to Wordsworth on ‘purpose’, and the manifestation of this in his blank verse, especially The Prelude. It examines line-end repetition in blank verse, from Milton and Cowper to Wordsworth. The chapter then considers the influence on Coleridge's conversation poems; patterns and meaning of repetition in Home at Grasmere; and the ideas of flux, reflux, and repose as figured in the poem's verse. It describes image of the stream in Wordsworth's blank verse, and its relation to movement and repetition of thought. It goes on to analyse the Immortality Ode; and rhyme, repetition, and the sounding of intention. It considers The Excursion and meaning of repetition, Milton's importance for the Immortality Ode, and the significance of Wordsworth's choice of rhymes (and words not rhymed) in the poem. Finally it looks at Wordsworth and the rhymed voice of intention.

This chapter surveys revisionist appropriations of Paradise Lost developed by Whig poets and theorists in the wake of the Battle of Blenheim (1704). Resisting the scholarly tendency to draw a great gulf between Milton and his immediate poetic successors, it argues that later writers continued to feel, as Milton felt, longing for an angel’s body. Such yearning became a feature of post-Miltonic blank verse. After first examining the Blenheim effect—Whig poets’ tendency to ascribe angelic strength to their military hero the Duke of Marlborough—the chapter considers spiritual verse that offers angelic potential to all devout souls. Here the preoccupation is less with angel warfare than with the ecstatic possibilities of angel sex. Unifying these two movements is Isaac Watts, whose hitherto underappreciated place in the history of blank verse this chapter emphasizes.

This chapter surveys all printed Portuguese translations of Paradise Lost. The translational journey begins in the late eighteenth century, at a time when epic poetry was still the literary genre that, most of all, represented and identified a nation, and blank verse had become, once more, a major means of poetic imitation and expression in Portuguese. The translational journey from neoclassical standards to Portuguese and Brazilian Romanticism through its last instantiation in 2014 courses through the various attempts at translating Paradise Lost and the influence of such attempts on the development of later literature, especially long poems. This chapter examines questions raised by Portuguese translators and their collaborators about epic poetry, blank verse, and the closely linked issues of religion, literary politics, and art.

This chapter examines a passage from “The Empirical Imagination” which marks a watershed in Wordsworth's career. This is the first time that Wordsworth turns to blank verse—his previous works mostly constituting of either couplets or stanzas. Coincidentally, it is also in these lines that we find Wordsworth first use the plain, low register of English. Poems written later by Wordsworth that were influenced by James Thomson—such as “An Evening Walk”—would also draw heavily on plain English in long passages that would focus on giving a picturesque description. This chapter thus explores the means through which Wordsworth both began to discover and make use of plain English, and what possibly prompted this mode. Furthermore, it also explores Wordsworth's theory of imagination, a theory that was brought to his attention in his earlier works such as Lyrical Ballads.

Samson Agonistes engages with two heated Long Restoration debates: the use of rhymed verse in tragedy and the status of the tragic chorus. Each might seem pedantic now or merely technical, but they were vitally important to Milton and his contemporaries. Indeed, Samson Agonistes’s chorus remains at the very heart of current (widely varied and fiercely contested) readings; our understanding of Milton’s rhyming chorus thus determines our overall understanding of this disturbing Restoration tragedy. This chapter reads Samson Agonistes’s chorus closely in order to understand the dramatic poem in contemporary terms.

A fundamental difference between the late medieval and the sixteenth-century humanist, philological translations of Virgil’s Aeneid consists of how the translator figures, or does not figure, as reader, in the newly produced text. The medieval reception of Virgil explicitly recognizes its own historicity in the process of transmission; the humanist, philological reception would efface that historicity. Comparison of four late medieval/early modern translators of Virgil substantiates this argument: Chaucer, Caxton, Douglas, and Henry Howard Earl of Surrey. Surrey’s effacement is registered in poetic form, in his innovative adoption of blank verse, and his exploitation of both syntax and perspective. Even as he effaces himself, however, the soon-to-be ruined Surrey underlines the new, imperial disciplines of poetic making.

Christopher Marlowe’s radicality has often been situated in his biography, in the rumours of his atheism, homosexuality, and renegade lifestyle. This chapter focuses instead on his edgy, recalcitrant, and defiant poetics. Surveying his major poetic works (his translations of Lucan and Ovid, his lyric poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, his epyllion Hero and Leander, and the blank verse of his plays), the chapter explores how Marlowe’s work resists teleological or end-driven modes of thought. His work does so in many ways: through lines of verse that seem to reach beyond their own end-stopped form, through a kind of anti-narrative poetic eddying that celebrates non-normative sexuality and play, and through a complex defiance of epic triumphalism.

This chapter offers a history of Dutch translations of Paradise Lost, from the early eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. The focus is on the question of how Dutch translators have grappled with two issues: the epic’s verse form, especially its lack of rhyme and syntactic idiosyncrasies; and its politico-religious dimension, its complex view of the relationship between earthly and divine authority, as well as its anti-predestinarian stance. The history of Paradise Lost in Dutch, which starts with the translation of Van Zanten in 1728, is characterized by an unresolved formal struggle with Milton’s blank verse, embraced unreservedly only in the early twentieth century, with translator Gutteling. Before 1900, the politico-religious dimension of Paradise Lost was at the fore for translators, yet this aspect of the poem has receded in prominence, with translators after 1900 presenting the poem instead as a timeless and self-contained work of literary genius.

The first chapter discusses Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson, poets and novelists whose work in the 1790s can be understood to be shaped by the competing demands of literary and commercial ambition, and political conviction. Both women were liberal in their politics, and both became part of the social circle around Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and Joseph Johnson which supported so many progressive writers in the metropolis and beyond in this period. But those who participated in the sociable exchanges of this group were by no means homogenous in their political opinions, and their views changed across time and in response to changing events and environments. The chapter focuses on the poetry that Smith and Robinson published in 1793, the year in which France was finally provoked into declaring war on Britain. It traces their reflections on and responses to the changing nature of the revolution in France, and the onset of conflict with Britain, which were complicated by their concerns for their own entangled reputations and careers as women and writers. Texts discussed include Smith’s long poem, The Emigrants (1793), Robinson’s sonnet to Smith, and her three poems, Sight, The Cavern of Woe, and Solitude (1793).

This chapter covers Landor’s career as a writer of theatrical drama, looking in detail at two of his plays: Andrea of Hungary (1839) and Count Julian (1812). Almost all Romantic and Victorian poets wrote verse-dramas in five-act, blank-verse, pastiche-Elizabethan mode. Most of these were designed to be read rather than performed, and many nineteenth-century readers not only read them but found pleasure in doing so. Few today find them so congenial. Landor generated dozens of both full-fledged verse-dramas and shorter ‘dramatic scenes’. Most of Landor’s dramatic writing is ineffective: sterile, maladroit, or actively clumsy. Nonetheless, this chapter argues that his best play—Count Julian—reaches a kind of greatness unlike anything else from its period. Although this might look perverse given the previous assertion, in fact Count Julian’s greatness as a play is connected with the same forces that vitiates Landor’s other experiments in this mode.

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Gilbert and Gubar posit Milton and Paradise Lost as a ‘bogey’ for women writers. Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (1987) suggests an alternative reception history in which Milton’s poetry provided the basis for a more inclusive literary canon. This chapter re-examines the question of the relationship between Milton’s poetry, primarily Paradise Lost, and women’s literary history through a case study of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720). Though Finch acknowledges Milton’s influence explicitly in her blank-verse pastoral ‘Fanscomb Barn’, implicit debts are present throughout Finch’s 1713 Miscellany Poems and the fair-copy manuscript compilation ‘Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia’ (1691–1701). The very different status of Milton and his verse in these two contexts illustrates the conflicted legacy of Paradise Lost for women’s literary history.