ABSTRACT
In early 1814, writing from his prison, Hunt announced that The Story of Rimini would be ‘a piece of some length, with which he is varying less agreeable studies, and in which he would attempt to reduce to practice his own ideas of what is natural in style, and of the various and legitimate harmony of the English heroic’. Hunt’s polemical preface to The Story of Rimini attacks ‘Pope and the French school of versification’ for mistaking ‘mere smoothness for harmony’ and for the ‘marked and uniform regularity’ of their verse. Instead, Hunt uses a looser and less frequently end-stopped couplet with metrical breaks scattered throughout the line rather than gathering in caesuras, and varies his metrical frame with occasional alexandrines and triplets. In his Autobiography, Hunt calls The Story of Rimini an exercise in 'the tender and the pathetic’.
