ABSTRACT
When Oscar Wilde called Meredith a prose Browning he was no doubt thinking of the novels, but his remark can. be applied with equal justice to the poetry. For there is an undeniably prosaic quality about much of Meredith's large output of verse; it seems to have no inner compulsion or buoyancy, and above all it is unnatural. Anybody who sets himself the task of reading the collected poems is bound to come away from them recognizing that Meredith too often forced himself into the role of poet, that only a very small amount of his poetry repays close attention, and that even his best poems are not entirely free from his characteristic vices. In an age of careful craftsmen Meredith stands out as extraordinarily slipshod, not so much by design as through indifference. It took considerable art to be as cavalier as Browning often chose to be; but where Browning is deliberately outrageous, Meredith is merely inept. Browning's experiments with metre have about them an air of swaggering abundance, but Meredith's are at best resolute (the galliambic measure he tries out in 'Phaeton' provides a good example of stiff determination). And his ear for rhythm is mostly dull and liable to be appalling. Indeed, more often than not he sticks doggedly to metre in a way that works well enough for the ballads, but which becomes obtrusively mechanical in the meditative poems. As for his handling of rhyme, he seems to have been deaf to or unaware of his customary badness. Characteristically he makes use of intricate stanzaic and rhyming schemes, with the result that he has to fracture syntax in order to manipulate the rhyme words into position (much of Meredith's reputation for being a 'difficult' poet comes from his inability to handle rhyme
without overtaxing his hold on sense). The failure cannot be attributed to the impetuosity of youth or the fatigue of old age; at any point in his writing career, you can find verse made horridly turgid by his effort to manufacture such rhymes as cloud/endowed, burned/discerned, renewed/food, saith/death, fore/roar, hurled/ world. And the inadequacy of these rhymes is made more marked by the distortions of syntax, intricacy of stanza-form in which they so frequently occur, and remorseless end-stopping of lines. In addition, Meredith's defective ear shows in cacophonous phrasing typified by the first line of 'Meditation under Stars': 'What links are ours with orbs that are.' Such flaws occur too often for us to disregard them. It is not that Meredith sometimes writes carelessly, but that he rarely writes well.
