Perhaps it is to two accidents, the
accident by which blank verse as the medium of the actor had to be
retained easily in the memory, and the accident of Milton's blindness,
that must be laid the credit of more than a little of the richness of
rhythm of this, the chief and greatest instrument of English verse.
The imitation of Italian and French forms which Wyatt and Surrey began,
was continued by a host of younger amateurs of poetry. Laborious
research has indeed found a Continental original for almost every great
poem of the time, and for very many forgotten ones as well. It is easy
for the student engaged in this kind of literary exploration to
exaggerate the importance of what he finds, and of late years criticism,
written mainly by these explorers, has tended to assume that since it
can be found that Sidney, and Daniel, and Watson, and all the other
writers of mythological poetry and sonnet sequences took their ideas and
their phrases from foreign poetry, their work is therefore to be classed
merely as imitative literary exercise, that it is frigid, that it
contains or conveys no real feeling, and that except in the secondary
and derived sense, it is not really lyrical at all. Petrarch, they will
tell you, may have felt deeply and sincerely about Laura, but when
Sidney uses Petrarch's imagery and even translates his words in order to
express his feelings for Stella, he is only a plagiarist and not a
lover, and the passion for Lady Rich which is supposed to have inspired
his sonnets, nothing more than a not too seriously intended trick to add
the excitement of a transcript of real emotion to what was really an
academic exercise.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47