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Several contradictory theories have been proposed in an attempt to elucidate the reasons that lead Clément Marot and his followers to introduce the sonnet in France with a rhyme scheme different from those adopted by the Italian sonnet. After submitting these hypotheses to examination, we will offer a new explanation, complementary to those exposed by Jasinski and Vianey: the sonnet marotique is due to an effort to respect the ancestral rules of versification typical of French poetry. Hence, Marot and the other creators of the early French sonnets arranged the rhyme of the tercets according to the usual schemes of the six-line stanza

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, \"English meter\" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline.The Rise and Fall of Metertells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

InLast Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. InThe Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; inAriel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and inDay by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. InGeography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, inA Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.

Poet Charles Wright has garnered nearly every big-deal literary award - the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, and the Griffin Poetry Prize among them. An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms comes out in September.

Joel Brouwer reviews \"Sestets,\" a collection of poetry by Charles Wright.