Carillons (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Carillons

Fifty years ago, our young poets, obeying an impulse which was oddly simultaneous, set themselves to the cultivation of what were called the forms, that is to say precise patterns of verse, of ancient and mainly French invention, in which certain rules of recurrence of rhyme and exact number and distri bution of lines had to be rigorously followed. Swinburne wrote sestinas Austin Dobson and Andrew Lang wrote ballades; Henley and R. L. Stevenson wrote Villanelles and rondeaux; I was proud of contributing the earliest chant royal. Our elders observed the movement with indulgent curiosity. Leslie Stephen commissioned me to contribute to the Comkill Magazine a detailed account of the regulations and the modern instances this appeared in 1874, and was referred to as a vade mecum for versemen. Finally, the late Mr. Gleeson White gathered our slender harvest in a sheaf of Ballades and Rondeaux, which extended to all the exotic forms, and may still be referred to with pleasure. Then the interest in these delicate forms of versification flagged, and they almost ceased to be employed for serious poetry, though they have never lost credit with the satirist and the humorous troubadour.

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