Abstract
While Behn's versatility as a writer who excelled in all three primary genres of drama, narrative and lyric poetry is now widely acknowledged, current scholarship reverses the preference of her contemporaries and focuses chiefly on her work for the theatre and her prose fiction. Even when it attends to her poetry, it usually overlooks the very quality that makes it verse: her prosody. This essay draws attention to the subtle and complex texture of Behn's verse, and to how metrical analysis can illuminate her practice as a Restoration poet. Following a brief survey of the whole range of poems in Janet Todd's edition of Behn's work, and an explanation of the significance of various verse forms in the Restoration, the essay considers a range of metrical forms and devices in detail through close attention to poems including “The Disappointment” and “To the fair Clarinda”, as well as others that are much less well known. It not only demonstrates Behn's expertise in all the main forms and genres current at the period, including narrative as well as lyric verse, but also her creative inventiveness with different kinds of variation in metre, stanza and line length, poetic syntax and rhyme scheme.
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