Description

George Saintsbury's Historical Manual of English Prosody offers a clear, chronologically shaped account of English meter, rhyme, and stanza from Old English alliterative verse through Chaucer, the Renaissance, blank verse and the heroic couplet, to Romantic and Victorian experiment. He parses feet, cadence, caesura, and enjambment with copious examples, classifying stanzaic architectures—Spenserian, Pindaric, ode, ballad—while defending an accentual-syllabic foundation and treating vers libre skeptically within a long historical continuum. An erudite Victorian-Edwardian critic, Saintsbury combined classical training with decades as Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh. His vast histories of criticism and prosody, his admiration for Dryden, Pope, Spenser, and Tennyson, and his journalist's habit of quoting generously all inform this manual's method: concrete exemplification, comparative reach, and a cautious resistance to metrically radical theories. Students of poetry, practicing poets, and editors alike will value this as a portable companion to scansion and poetic history. Read alongside his larger History of English Prosody, the manual remains an indispensable, argumentative, and invigorating guide to how English verse works and why tradition matters.

Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable—distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.