ABSTRACT
Lewis's poetry did achieve disembodied existence apart from the overarching narrative of The Monk. His 'Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogine' originally appeared interpolated in The Monk but became popular and noteworthy in its own right, frequently extracted, and parodied. 'Alonzo the Brave' is a watershed text for Gothic prosody because the formal innovation and metrical experimentation of the most famous Gothic poems, namely Coleridge's 'Christabel' and Poe's 'The Raven' are directly related to the success of the 'Alonzo meter'. As with Lewis's 'Alonzo meter', the invention and interpolation of weird form in an overarching Gothic narrative is related to a general concern of Gothic verse with innovation and originality. Weird form, then, has to be strange and formally, stylistically contrapuntal to whatever its context is as dreaming is to waking. On some level, therefore, writers of Gothic fiction such as Radcliffe or Lewis understood that the interpolation of lyric forms within their prose narratives would achieve this kind of effect.
