ABSTRACT
Edgar Allan Poe challenges traditional theories of scansion, George E. B. Saintsbury wrote: "The Rationale of Verse", though there are faults in it, due to ignorance or carelessness in terminology, to haste, and to imperfect reading, is one of the best things ever written on English prosody, and quite astonishingly original. The nicety of Lord Byron's ear has led him into a succession of feet which, with two trivial exceptions as regards melody, are absolutely accurate, a very rare occurrence this in dactylic or anapaestic rhythms. The rhythmical must agree with the reading flow. By dexterity we may pronounce 'such' in the true time, but the attempt to remedy the rhythmical deficiency of the and by drawing it out, merely aggravates the offence against natural enunciation by directing attention to the offence. The 'flowers ever,' on the contrary, is as common in the dactylic rhythm as is the bastard trochee in the trochaic, or the bastard iambus in the iambic.
