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I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought. Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter.
Johnson, is somewhat suggestive but not descriptive of the followers of Donne; the name Caroline or Cavalier poets brings to mind the careless temper of the Royalists who followed King Charles with a devotion of which he was unworthy; and the name Spenserian poets recalls the little band of dreamers who clung to Spenser's ideal, even while his romantic mediæval castle was battered down by Science at the one gate and Puritanism at the other.
An example of the formal element of change which appeared, consists in the substitution of blank verse and the Spenserian stanza for the classical couplets of the French school. In the next age, we shall find that the subject matter is no longer chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type.
I need hardly say that, if these cases had been included, my list would in every instance have swelled considerably; nor yet that I am conscious how extremely partial and accidental is the test, as to comparative number of laxities, which I have here supplied. The Spenserian metre, in which Adonais is written, was used by Shelley in only one other instance his long ideal epic The Revolt of Islam.
And Christabel, independently of its purple patches, such as the famous descant on the quarrels of friends, and the portents that mark the passage of Geraldine, gave what was far more important a new metre, destined to have no less great and much more copious influence than the Spenserian stanza itself.
Byron adopted the Spenserian measure, perhaps the most difficult of all measures, hard even to read aloud, in which blank verse seems to blend with rhyme. It might be either to the ear, though to the eye it is elaborate rhyme, such as would severely task a made poet, but which this born poet seems to have thrown off without labor.
It may be questioned whether, fine as The Revolt of Islam is, the Spenserian stanza was quite so well suited as the "Pindaric" or as blank verse, or as lyrical measures, to Shelley's genius. It is certainly far excelled both in the lyrics and in the blank verse of Prometheus Unbound, the first poem which distinctly showed that one of the greatest lyric poets of the world had been born to England.
A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity. "Paradise Lost," conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itself in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian stanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse?
Then, as to his not thieving from me or mine, I believe the fact to be as he has stated; but there are singular circumstances connected with some of his other productions, of which the account is at least curious. On leaving England I began to write a poem in the Spenserian measure.
The Spenserian stanza, which calls for one fourfold set of rhymes, one threefold, and one double, all cunningly interlaced, is as complicated a piece of rhyme-harmony as the ear of the average lover of poetry can carry. It is needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound.
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