An anecdote to start with: over 35 years ago, F.T. P rince—then my Head of Department at the University of Southampton—made a remark that I found puzzling. It was not long after the publication of his Afterword on Rupert Brooke, which I had read and greatly enjoyed. I made some comment on the unusual choice of syllabic verse for the poem, and he replied to the effect that after having written a certain number of lines in this form, one stopped having to count syllables when composing. One knew instinctively, he said, when the end of the 12-syllable line had arrived. This statement contradicted all I had learned about the nature of English rhythm, but I filed it away mentally to pursue at another time. I am glad of the opportunity to do so now.

I

What are the origins of Prince's use of syllabic verse in two works, Afterword on Rupert Brooke and his poem on Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper, ‘A Last Attachment’? There is ample evidence, from his critical writing as well as from his poetry, of his deep and continuing interest in the development of new poetic forms and techniques. His 1964 British Academy Warton Lecture on English Poetry was titled ‘The Study of Form and the Renewal of Poetry’; in it he spoke of ‘an originality that comes from the conscious exploitation of incongruity within a tradition of established forms’. Two years later at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, he gave a lecture (which I attended, as a student in the English Department) titled ‘Modern Poetry in England’, during which he commented:

The importance to Prince of the formal perfection of the poem emerges, too, in the autobiographical note accompanying the publication in 1976 in New Coin Poetry of an early draft of his long poem Chaka: his poetic creed while writing this first draft of the poem in the mid-1930s is summed up in the statement, ‘Like Mallarmé and Valéry I believed that a poem should be a verbal object, a self-contained structure from which the scaffolding had been removed’.