Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/185

 of English style, in prose indirectly as directly in poetry, that stage of ossification was arrested by Tennyson. He is the great Master of the Epithet in our language. He revived old words like 'marish,' he invented new ones like 'Æonian.' He seems to have taken infinite care over the filing of his phrases. A careful study of the variae lectiones of his successive editions is a liberal education in poetic form, and there was probably much greater modification before anything of his appeared in print at all. The earlier edition of the celebrated Charge of the Light Brigade is of great interest in this connection.

It is for this reason that the poet with whom he is to be affiliated in the history of English poetry, regarded simply as an art, is, of all poets in the world, Pope. It was Pope's aim, he himself avowed, to make English poetry correct in form. It was Tennyson's function to bring back to English verse that care for form which had disappeared from it when he began to write. During his formative period, the titular head of English poetry was Robert Southey, who published amorphous masses which he called poems, while Wordsworth was acting up to a theory of poetry which implied that form was of no consequence. Tennyson rescued English poetry from these tendencies. No wonder that his influence has been the