The Augustan Reprint Society

EDWARD BYSSHE

The Art of English Poetry

(1708)

With an Introduction by A. Dwight Culler

Publication Number 40

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1953

GENERAL EDITORS

H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, Duke University
Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan
John Butt, King's College, University of Durham
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Earnest Mossner, University of Texas
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

The Art of English Poetry (1702) may be roughly described as an English version of the Gradus ad Parnassum. At least that is the tradition to which it belongs. Its immediate predecessor was the pleasant English Parnassus: Or, a Helpe to English Poesie (1657) compiled by a Middlesex schoolmaster named Joshua Poole, and this work was avowedly modeled on Ravisius Textor's Epitheta and the Thesaurus Poeticus of Joannes Buchler. But whereas the English Parnassus was designed for the schoolroom, the Art of English Poetry was designed for the world of polite letters, and so may be called the first example in English of the handbook for the serious poet.

In its original form the work was an octavo of nearly four hundred pages divided into three parts: "Rules For making English Verse," a rhyming dictionary, and a poetical commonplace book containing all the "Most Natural, Agreeable, and Noble Thoughts" of the English poets digested alphabetically by their subject. Only the first part is reproduced here, but it seems desirable to say something about the book as a whole.[1]

It is one of those works which is scorned by all, and used by all who scorn it. In the sixty years after its publication it went through nine editions, and though Charles Gildon thought it "a book too scandalously mean to name," he was constrained to admit that it had "spread, by many editions, thro' all England" and had "carried off so many Impressions, as have made it with the ignorant, the Standard of Writing."[2] Not only with the ignorant. Pope knew and used the work, and likewise Richardson, Fielding, Isaac Watts, Johnson, Goldsmith, Walpole, Blake, Sir Walter Scott, Bulwer-Lytton, and many others. Indeed, it would be safe to say that there was hardly a literary man in the eighteenth century who was not familiar with it. If he used a rhyming dictionary, he used that in Bysshe, at least until 1775, when it was superseded by John Walker's Dictionary of the English Language. And if he used a poetical commonplace book, he used either Bysshe or one of the five other works which were produced in imitation of Bysshe. "Quoi qu'ils en disent," said the Abbé du Bos of a similar work in French, "ils ont tous ce livre dans leur arrière cabinet."

The Art of English Poetry is dominated in every part by the concept of the heroic poem. The rhyming dictionary, which was enlarged and improved from that in Poole, contains only those words which "both for their Sense and Sound are judg'd most proper for the Rhymes of Heroick Poetry;"[3] and the quotations in the commonplace book are drawn chiefly from the heroic poem and the heroic drama. In the last revised edition (1718) the most frequently quoted authors were Lee (104 passages), Rowe (116), Milton (117), Shakespeare (118), Blackmore (125), Otway (127), Butler (140), Cowley (143), Pope (155), and Dryden (1,201). Dryden, therefore, was the great exemplar of the heroic poet, and his Aeneid, which was cited 493 times, was the great exemplar of the heroic poem. Its meter, the heroic couplet, was for Bysshe the only serious poetic instrument, all longer lines being used merely to vary and decorate it and the shorter ones being fit only for masks and operas and Pindaric odes. As for stanzas, the rhyme royal was not "follow'd" anymore, Spenser's choice was "unlucky," and in general, as Cowley had said, "no kind of Staff is proper for a Heroic Poem; as being all too lirical...."[4]

The "Rules For making English Verse," which is the most important part of Bysshe's work, is the first attempt to treat English prosody in a systematic and comprehensive way. As the title indicates, it is prescriptive in tone, and it is strictly syllabic in what it prescribes. The English verse line, according to Bysshe, consists of a specified number of syllables, usually ten, but permissably from four to twelve with double rhyme adding an uncounted syllable. A verse with an extra or a missing syllable (as compared with the pattern established by the rest of the poem) is either a faulty verse or, more properly, just a verse of a different kind. There are no feet in English poetry. Nevertheless, accent, which Bysshe apparently considered a variation in pitch rather than in duration or loudness, is recognized, and its role is clearly prescribed. It falls on the even syllables in verses whose total number is even and on the odd syllables in verses whose odd number is not due to double rhyme. This, of course, means duple time only, and Bysshe recognizes no other. When he quotes Congreve's verse, "Apart let me view then each Heavenly fair," he feels that the measure is somehow disagreeable, but he does not notice that the accents fall other than he had prescribed, and he apparently thinks that the line is distinguished from heroic verse only in having eleven syllables instead of ten. This is highly important because it shows that although