ERNEST BERNHARDT-KABISCH

 

 

"When Klopstock England Defied":

Coleridge, Southy, and the German/English Hexameter

 

THE HEYDAY of the modern attempt to naturalize the classical and German hexameter in English poetry occurred in the mid- and late-Victorian period, most famously with works like Longfellow’s Evelina and The Courtship of Miles Standish, Clough’s Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich and Amours de Voyage, and Kingsley’s Andromeda, besides numerous translations in the meter, whether from Greek, Latin, or German, and a sizable body of prosodic theory from the likes of Edwin Guest, William Whewell, and Matthew Arnold. The roots of that brief but vigorous flowering are to be found in the Romanticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, specifically in the experiments of Coleridge, Southey, and William Taylor of Norwich, and the sudden intense interest in German letters manifested in the periodical and translation literature of the day.

Thanks, mainly, to the path-breaking example of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s monumental biblical epic, The Messiah, hexameter writing, and the endeavor to create a modern, accentual rather than quantitative, variant of Homer’s and Virgil’s meter, occupied a prominent place in German poetic practice and theory, including, besides Klopstock, such stellar or near-stellar names as Wieland, Herder, Goethe, Stolberg, Voss, Schiller, Hölderlin, and A. W. Schlegel. Their example, in turn, prompted a renewal of British interest, dormant since the failed attempts during the Renaissance, in the hexameter. Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s meeting with Klopstock in Hamburg in 1798 triggered Coleridge’s turn to the form, as reflected in his epistle to Wordsworth from Ratzeburg and his adaptation of Stolberg’s "Hymn to the Earth," besides other, shorter pieces. Meanwhile William Taylor was embarking on his lifelong championship of German literature, and of the hexameter in particular, which in turn fueled Southey’s enthusiasm for the meter. The results were Coleridge’s and Southey’s abortive collaboration on a hexameter epic about the prophet Mohammed and Southey’s late, ill-starred, but prosodically important Vision of Judgment.

For a good hundred years, the meter held a narrow but continuous and growing stake in English poetry. Though the Romantic/Victorian hexameter did not long survive the turn of the century, it was not merely a dead-end. Once poets and critics realized the futility of trying to duplicate the quantitative metric of classical antiquity–an endeavor already doomed in Elizabethan times–and accepted the accentual prosody of Klopstock and the majority of German hexametrists, the hexameter, in the hands of a practitioner like Clough, played a significant role in the liberation of English verse, not only from the tyranny of the heroic couplet, but also from the succeeding dominance of blank verse, and helped to usher in the modern shift "from syllabism to accentualism" (Paul Fussell), from Waller to Whitman and beyond.