This chapter examines the language of Lucilius’ hexametrical satires, discussing aspects of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and versification. The varied typology of Lucilius’ supposedly early lexicon (obsolete words; words tied to genre, whether high-style or comic; evidence of seemingly spoken usage in various registers) demonstrates that whatever characteristics of earlier diction Lucilius retains are largely motivated by literary purposes, and often innovated upon. Morphological and syntactical features which Classical Latin will discard are also few and coexisting with diachronic or diastratic variants. Pronounced alliteration, synonymic pairs, and persistent reduction of final -s place firmly Lucilius in pre-neoteric poetic diction - but this too is stylised, marked language. The answer to the question ‘How early Latin is Lucilius?’ is, not very much, if we are looking for evidence of a superseded variety of Latin rather than deliberate literary choices for the sake of register, style or genre.

Writing to Lord Holland in 1812, Byron anxiously petitioned the peer for help in completion of a couplet: ‘I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another.—I always scrawl in this way, and smoother as much as I can but never sufficiently, & latterly I can weave a nine line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning’ (BLJ, II. 210). Byron’s implausible boast about the velocity of his Spenserian scribbles is in part an attempt to re-establish his poetic credentials with a socially superior friend, yet it remains an odd pretension to assert. Not because of the improbability that he could write nine rhymed lines that incorporated a terminating couplet of sorts faster than a single pair, but because by the date of this letter he had already proven his skill in the couplet form in no fewer than three satires – English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Hints from Horace (wr. 1811) and The Curse of Minerva (also wr. 1811) – and would soon compose his second blockbuster Eastern narrative, The Corsair (1814) in the same form. For the purposes of this chapter, what’s most intriguing about Byron’s brag is not that he is dismissive of a form he returned to throughout his life, but that the forms that most preoccupied him during his early career were avowedly English.

In 1912 Ezra Pound set himself in opposition to one particular sonic form: ‘the sequence of a metronome.’ With its symmetrical ticking or beating, the metronome became for Pound and some of his contemporaries an apt figure for a metrical tradition, often equated with an outmoded Victorian versification based on a regular succession of beats. In fact, the figure of metronome had been structuring debates about the appropriate sonic form of poetry for roughly a century before Pound issued his pronouncement about it. From the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Johann Maelzel’s musical chronometer began to offer a standard of temporal measurement for musical and vocal compositions, the metronome and practices attuned to its ticking featured regularly in elocutionary and prosodic literature. From the first tick of Maelzel’s machine to the modernism of Pound, a dispute about the practice of reading and reciting verse, as well as composing in it, found an apt correlate in the figure of the metronome. This chapter suggests that Pound’s anti-metronome modernism belongs to an evolving debate about a culture of sing-song and deliberately repetitive prosody.