Romantic meter and form therefore have produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts – the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts: all are necessary to each other Accentual inventions Despite the epic poet’s “dictation” from an invisible muse, Blake expresses both a novelistic sense of poetic form and a claim to a total art Here one of the most important influences on the major Romantic poets is Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) Born five years before Blake and seven before Burns, he was the author of a number of works he acknowledged, as well as of his fakemedieval “Rowley” poems The latter, composed between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, when he died a suicide, were attributed to imaginary others Chatterton was a poet of astonishing inventiveness – not only in his creation of his medieval Bristol world, but as well in his facility with meter The Rowley poems show him at work in a wide range of forms, including the traditional, and quite convincing, ballad structure of his “Bristowe Tragedie.” An avid reader of Spenser, he also invented a number of stanza forms that can be seen as modifications of Spenserian stanza When Horace Walpole recognized the anachronism of a “medieval” Spenserian form, Chatterton boldly claimed that the form in fact had been “in use 300 years before.” The most common of the Rowley stanzas, however, is a ten-line group ababbcbcdd As in his “English Metamorphosis” by “T.[homas] Rowleie,” Chatterton sometimes extends a last line of pentameter to hexameter, but more often his work is all in pentameter Chatterton’s influence upon Wordsworth is striking: the form of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” is borrowed directly from Chatterton’s “An Excelente Balade of Charitie (As Written by the Good Priest Thomas Rowley, 1464)”: six lines of iambic pentameter with a seventh hexameter line, rhyming ababbcc – in other words, rhyme royal with a Spenserian alexandrine.36 And although the comparison is less exact, there is a striking resemblance between the stanzas of varied lines in Chatterton’s “Songe to Ælla, Lord of the Castle of Bristol in Days of yore,” including the eight-line stanza: When Dacia’s sons, whose hairs of blood-red hue, Like kingcups bursting with the morning dew, Arranged in drear array, Upon the lethal day, Spread far and wide on Watchet’s shore; 67 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008