The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume VIII. The Age of Dryden.
§ 1. The Spenserian Era of English Versification
I
Spenser died in the penultimate year of the sixteenth century, Dryden in the last year of the seventeenth, and the period between the two deaths witnessed large and definite prosodic progress: not always in the limited and flattering acceptation of the word, but always progress in the true historical sense. Many of the examples and evidences of this—the dramatic blank verse of Sbakespeare and his elder and younger craft-fellows; the remarkable array of later Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline lyric; the practical creation of nondramatic blank verse by Milton; the rival forms of stopped and overflowing couplet—have been separately considered under the heads of the greater and lesser poets who exemplified them. These particular considerations will only be summarised here to the extent necessary for a general view of the whole tendencies and results of the prosodic period. But an attempt will be made to map this out clearly; for, historically, if we consider, there is hardly a more important field of English versification in existence.