Metre and Form

Abstract

The poetry of the Romantic period exhibits wide variations in the handling of metres and forms. The major poetic forms which were inherited from the seventeenth century and earlier in the eighteenth included blank verse, the heroic couplet, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and a number of lyric forms; there was an instinctive awareness, also, of the importance of decorum, of the importance of metre and the appropriate diction and register. The Romantic poets inherited these conventions, but adapted them to their own purposes, and modified them where necessary.