The medial break in the alexandrine, though it may do well enough in French, becomes intolerable in a language with such a tyrannous stress-accent as ours: the line struts. In a more extended analysis (pp. 231–2), he comments: He attributes the introduction of this 'terrible' meter to Thomas Wyatt (p. 224). Lewis, in his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, castigates the 'lumbering' poulter's measure (p. 109). These quatrains of eight and six syllables (or more loosely, lines of 4, 3, 4, and 3 beats) are known as common meter.Ĭ. Samuel Johnson in his Lives of The English Poets comments upon the importance of fourteeners to later English lyric forms saying "as these lines had their caesura always at the eighth syllable, it was thought in time commodious to divide them and quatrains of lines alternately consisting of eight and six syllables make the most soft and pleasing of our lyric measures".
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