Writing under the influence: Milton and Wordsworth, mind and metre

Abstract

This article suggests, in the spirit of Hayes (1983), that poetic influence can in part be expressible through a series of constraints as these are manifest in metrical filters, devices which essentially define which cadences are metrical for one poet, yet unmetrical for another. Synchronically, metrical filters help to account for the differences between the pentametric lines of Shakespeare, say, and those of Marlowe or John Donne. Diachronically, however, the employment of metrical templates yields challenging insights into how one poet, or group of poets, inherits, and seems to absorb, the metrical cadences of one or more strong precursors. In this instance, the focus of attention is on the literary relationship between Milton and Wordsworth, and the article shows, using a survey from Wordsworth’s mature work, that Wordsworth indeed seems to have inherited Milton’s characteristic intra-linear metrical structures, and employed them in his verse. Misreading, or ‘creative misprision’, may be, as Bloom (1973) suggests, the thematic hallmark of poetic influence, but here, metrically speaking, imitation is clearly the sincerest form of debt.