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Thomas Warton published in 1753 his Observations on the Faerie Queene. Beattie's Minstrel, Thomson's Castle of Indolence, and William Shenstone's Schoolmistress were all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shenstone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by imitating Spenser's archaisms, and Thomson reproduced in many passages the copious harmony and luxuriant imagery of the Faerie Queene.
Unless we make a partial exception of the "Castle of Indolence," we do not remember a single instance of the reproduction of the exact rhythm of the Spenserian stanza, especially of the concluding line. The precise Miltonic movement in blank verse has never, to our knowledge, been caught by any later poet. It is Mr.
By all accounts she was of great beauty and numerous accomplishments. She wrote many poems: her best, and best known, is Psyche, or the Legend of Love, an adaptation of the story of Cupid and Psyche from the Golden Ass of Apuleius. The metre she employed in this piece was the Spenserian stanza, which she handled with great power, freedom, and melody.
In order to understand Shelley's allusion, I looked up the Quarterly Review from April 1817 to April 1821, and have ascertained as follows, The Quarterly of April 1817 contains a notice of Paris in 1815, a Poem. The author's name is not given, nor do I know it. The poem, numbering about a thousand lines, is in the Spenserian stanza, varied by the heroic metre, and perhaps by some other rhythms.
I should not like to see Whitman's Spirit that formed this Scene turned into a Spenserian stanza. I cannot forget that David Mallet tried to smoothen Hamlet's soliloquy by jamming it into the heroic couplet. Mr. Watson thinks that the great John Donne is dead. On the contrary, he is audibly alive; and the only time he really approached dissolution was when Pope "versified" him.
The verse is mainly octosyllabic, sometimes blank, but the rough accentual 'rime' is also used. Decasyllabics are rare. There is also some prose in the comic part sustained by Autolicus and Conto and the aged clown Jarbus, as well as a certain amount of Spenserian archaism, and a good deal of dialect.
Translator, s. of a clergyman at Boston, Lincolnshire, where he was b., ed., at Rugby and Magdalen and Univ. Coll., Oxf., and began the study of law, but soon relinquished it, and devoting himself to scholarship, became Prof. of Latin at Oxf. He also translated the Satires and Epistles of Horace in Pope's couplets, and completed Worsley's Iliad in Spenserian stanza.
THE SONG WRITERS. In strong contrast with the above are two distinct groups, the Song Writers and the Spenserian poets. The close of the reign of Elizabeth was marked by an outburst of English songs, as remarkable in its sudden development as the rise of the drama.
The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Shelley's own.
We can trace the descent of the Chaucerian face and genius in Shakspeare and Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and Wordsworth. In our day, Mr. Browning takes after Chaucer, Mr. Tennyson takes after Spenser. Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer's characteristic is intensity, Spenser's remoteness, Milton's sublimity, and Shakspeare's everything.
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