This introductory chapter treats the early history of Rome’s literature, who was interested in the topic and when, and also how they approached the subject. It notes that from the start Roman literature was deeply imitative of Greek, and that the other peoples of the Italian peninsula also played important roles in the creation of a native literature. Indeed, many of the original writers of Rome were non-Romans. Covers the epics of Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius.

This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

The didactic poems of Niketas of Herakleia chiefly concern grammar and are written in various metres, all of them accentual, even including hymnographic metres. Rather than being mere reformulations of existing grammatical knowledge, the poems urge us to consider questions related to contemporary teaching practices. How does verse help to transmit knowledge, and which roles do accentual rhythm and musical heirmos play in this process? Issues of performance, audience and patronage are of undeniable importance for this question. The poems reflect a lively (sometimes unruly) classroom situation and an equally lively competition between teachers in Constantinople. Especially Niketas’ remarks on schedography reflect this competitive teaching field. Thus, the poems of this versatile author may explain why grammar became in the twelfth century an object to be reflected upon, reformulated, debated and even aestheticized. The chapter also situates Niketas in the literary tradition of didactic poetry. How does he, as a poet, at the same time represent himself as an able teacher and expert? And how does he combine poetic form and avowedly dry subject matter?

The subject of this chapter is rímur (rhymes), long narrative poems intended to be delivered orally, which were the most important secular poetic genre in Iceland from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the genre, beginning with a brief introduction to the rímur and the terminology used to describe them, before focusing in detail on their metrical form and linguistic features. It then discusses the relationship of the rímur with their different kinds of source material, since almost all are based on pre-existing narratives, particularly the riddarasögur and fornaldarsögur. It surveys what is known of the poems’ authorship, performance and dating, as well as describing the manuscripts in which they are preserved. Finally, it outlines the critical and editorial history of the rímur, arguing that their unusual linguistic and metrical features, their long-lasting popularity and the significance of their interactions with other genres of Old Norse-Icelandic literature means they deserve more scholarly attention than they have typically received.

This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

This chapter argues that in much poetry in English of the First World War, form is most effectively exploited in the interplay between visual and auditory images that are mimetic of the immediate sensory experience of battle and the linguistic devices which channel mimesis into argument and organise the impossibly chaotic. It looks at the soundscapes and silences of poems, the detached and the visceral.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

The debate about prosody in English, focused in particular upon the decorum of rhyme and the role of quantitative metrics, is a well-known feature of late Elizabethan literary criticism. But the intense interest in metrical matters at this period sits within, and emerges from, a geographically wider and chronologically precedent Latin phenomenon which has not been described. Vernacular poets engaged deeply with metrical questions because the contemporary use of Latin metre underwent very rapid change in the second half of the sixteenth century.Although it has passed almost unnoticed by scholarship, metrical creativity is one of the most astonishing features of the Latin poetry of this period. We cannot begin to appreciate the literary excitement caused by this poetry – and by its vernacular imitations, such as the remarkable metrical display of the Sidney psalter and Herbert's "Temple" – without understanding something of the music of Latin metre, and of the pace of Latin metrical innovation. This chapter offers a ‘big picture’ overview of Latin metrical innovation and experiment, as it reached and was received and taught in England, in the latter half of the sixteenth century

Major developments in poetic genre happened in Late Antiquity: some genres such as biblical epic first occurred in that period, and the generic openness of other late antique poems seems to question the notion of genre as such. In this chapter I argue that the classical system of poetic genre imploded in Late Antiquity and transformed into a more flexible and open system in which classical understandings of genre coexisted with both generic innovations and a reduced importance of genre itself. After imploding, late antique poetic genre continued to use traditional genre markers such as appropriate subject matter, generic models, and metre, but it also introduced generic innovations in the form of generically unique works, genre mixing, and new genres while at the same time playing down the significance of genre as a category. This transformation of poetic genre took place in both halves of the Roman Empire, as evidence from Greek and Latin poetry will show. As a consequence, both Greek and Latin poets used genre more flexibly and relied less on it to communicate with their audiences.

Discussion of Cicero’s quotation of lyrics from Roman tragedy - particularly Accius’ Philocteta and Ennius’ Andromacha - in the Tusculan Disputations as part of philosophical argument against the vocalization of pain. Discussion of Cicero’s understanding of the musicality, melody, and pitch of Roman tragic song, and the use of song as part of philosophical argumentation.

This part of the book demonstrates the many ways in which we can come to understand and enjoy a poem. It takes the reader through a series of shorter sections, each of them showing how by asking a particular question of a poem – about its verbal effects, about its form, about its emotional impact, about its subject matter – we can start to develop an understanding of it. The sections offer accessible introductions to technical matters such as rhyme and metre, but they also show how questions of technique in poetry are inseparable from the questions of what a poem has to say and to show us. Examples from a broad range of poetry written in English are used to illustrate the different approaches.

Chapter 9 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho sets out the evidence for Sappho’s use of metre, showing its position within the tradition of Greek poetic metre as a whole, as well as the sparse evidence that survives for her music.

Joseph Fort ponders a specific case of late eighteenth-century musical embodiment, one that has its origins in social and popular dance: a minuet by Joseph Haydn (Minuet in D major, Hob. IX/11, no. 1), emblematic not of contemporary concert-hall music, but of the music performed in front of a living – and physically mobile – audience at the charity ball held at the Hofburg Redoutensäle in Vienna, 25 November 1792. Reconstructing both the music and the dancing, Fort offers a revealing account of the Vienna dance scene, as well as the minuet’s position within it. More than this, though, he presents a close reading of the interrelations between music and dance from a specifically somatic perspective – one that is deeply intuitive, subjective and sensorial. Realizing his innovative approach alongside similar scholarly attempts at ‘live’ musical embodiment (particularly the work of Elisabeth Le Guin), Fort offers an analysis of the movement that reveals insights into not only the musical score, but also the intrinsically musical and gestural experience of dancing to it.

Nineteenth-century Irish poetry, particularly ballad poetry, was often performed indoors and out as recitation or song. Audiences and readers varied and publications ranged from cheap broadsheets to expensive journals, edited collections or slim volumes published by Irish, English or Scottish publishers. Following the example of Moore’s popular Irish Melodies, theme, rhythm and verse-form, celebratory or nostalgic, could be shaped by older poems in Irish or by traditional tunes, many of them collected and published, and adapted to express differing personal, political and religious sentiments. Poets responsive to classical models, European Romanticism and English poets such as Tennyson could incorporate ballad forms and traditional and popular themes into a more ambitious poetics, aiming at a wider audience. Young Ireland balladists and generous-spirited journal and anthology editors, Catholic and Protestant, sensitive to sectarian and poetic diversity and different audiences, attempted to bring their readers together in a shared national culture.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.

This chapter deals with the formal aspects of Chaucer’s verse craft. It discusses Chaucer’s mastery of rhyme and rhythm, and illustrates some of the stanza forms (rhyme royal, ballade, rondeau) that Chaucer deployed. It describes the metrical system behind both his octosyllabic lines and his pentameter lines, including the treatment of final e. Deviations from metrical norms, such as headless lines and enjambment, are discussed, but I argue that even perfectly regular iambic tetrameter and pentameter lines show variation, based on the degree to which linguistic stress approximates or modulates away from the metrical template. Particular attention is paid to Chaucer’s own comments about rhyme and the syllable count.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.