Alcaic Metre in the English Imagination

John Talbot is Associate Professor of English Literature at Brigham Young University, USA. He publishes widely on classical and English literary relations, poetic form and literary translation. He is the author of The Well-Tempered Tantrum (2004), Rough Translation (2012) and contributed to the multi-volume Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. With Victoria Moul, he is co-editor of C. H. Sisson Reconsidered.

• AcknowledgementsPreface1 Coming Late to Latin: Wilfred Owen, John Hollander2 ‘A Marvel of Metrical Disruptions’: The Alcaic Strophe Itself3 ‘Blossom Again on a Colder Isle’: Mary Sidney, Alfred Tennyson4 ‘The Same, But Not the Same’: Tennyson’s In Memoriam Stanza5 ‘The Ear Grows Dissatisfied’: Robert Bridges, W. H. AudenAfterword: From Inheritance to Quarry: The Alcaic in PostmodernityNotesIndex Bibliography

This book offers an original study of the reception/appropriation of the so-called Alcaic strophe in English-language poetry, and through deft close readings of several poems from the early modern period up to today rightly demonstrates that a neglect or ignorance of the use of classical metrics comes at the cost of a “dimension of poetic expressiveness”.