ABSTRACT
In her book tracing the autonomization and fragmentation of language in the latter half of the nineteenth century, under the influence of the new linguistic science, comparative philology, Linda Dowling notes the resurgence, in the 1890s, of calls for the presence of voice in verse: For the reaction against Paters linguistically problematic 'dead language coincided in the 1890s with a 'renaissance of romance', with a neo-Wordsworthian demand for a model of literary language once again based upon the voice, the speaking voice now recognized in all its linguistic legitimacy. This chapter discusses that for the poets of the '90s, the three-line stanza was a world filled with all kinds of ghosts, where terza rima might intrude on tercet, where tercet might rub shoulders with triplet, where triplet might reverberate with the refrainic insistence of the villanelle.
