tions, and ‘imitative’ stress-metres with or without the Anglo-Saxon alliterative system.

Of these, blank verse is the least likely to be successful, although at a first glance it might seem to be the obvious choice, and although it has been among the earliest ( J.J. Conybeare’s specimen extracts, 1816) and the most recent (Mary E. Waterhouse, 1949) metrical mediums employed. The latter translator argues in her Preface that Old English metric is ‘too unfamiliar to be acceptable to those who are not students’ and that blank verse is a natural alternative, ‘taking it as the modern heroic line and therefore the equivalent of the older one’. If this was the case, the translator’s task would be light! But unfortunately it is not true. There is no ‘modern heroic line’ because there is no tradition of modern heroic poetry; and blank verse is no longer a living medium for extended writing. Tennyson, Browning, and Hardy are the last important masters of it. Perhaps The Ring and the Book was the death-flurry of this 400-year-old leviathan; certainly there was not much left to be done with blank verse after Browning (not even by Doughty!), and in Browning the seeds of the subsequent disruption of the metre, to be nurtured in our century by his admirer Ezra Pound, are clearly visible. In The Dynasts (our most recent ‘heroic’ poem – 1908) Hardy did not risk a continuous use of blank verse, but interspersed it with prose and with lyric metres. And Robert Bridges, in many ways a conservative and traditional poet, showed that he was sensitive to the needs of the age (even if unsuccessful in this experiment) when in 1929 he produced The Testament of Beauty in a non-syllabic loosely 6-stress line, deliberately avoiding what would earlier have been the almost automatic choice of blank verse for a lengthy and serious work. When we come to poets who are more specifically ‘modern’ than Hardy or Bridges, the breakaway from blank verse is of course complete and unmistakable: in all the most influential poems – of Pound, Yeats, Eliot, Auden – we do not find it. This means that the adoption of blank verse in translation has the effect of a metrical archaizing, and is merely another barrier between reader and original. In addition, it involves even the wariest of translators in verbal stylizations after the manner of its great users – Milton chiefly, but also Shakespeare and Wordsworth – and these are fatal to the pre-syllabic moods and effects of the Anglo-Saxon. When an attempt is made to escape from the existing (Miltonic) heroic associations of blank verse by using it xvii