The Star in the West

34 THE STAR IN THE WEST music there can be no poetry , at best but a kind of poetic prose as found in the Prophetic Books of Blake , and in the works of Walt Whitman . Yet in Blake , I think , we do find many consistent irregularities , which have been entirely misunderstood by many of his editors and critics . However , it was not till Swinburne loomed athwart the conscious regularity of the Tenny sonian era , a poetic pre - Raphaelite , that , strictly speaking , a conscious and musical irregularity became admissible , wedging its way in , and splitting up the metrical structure of perfect scansion . In “ Atalanta in Calydon we find a further break ing away from the dramatic formalities inaugurated during the post - restoration era : Swinburne seeking a more perfect model in the old Tragedies of Greece . This had already been partially carried out by Keats , who definitely broke away from the Miltonic style of Wordsworth and Coleridge , and was more than half completed by his contemporary , Shelley . But it was not till Swinburne himself seized the finely - strung lyre of the unconsciously irregular author of “ Prome theus ,” and attuned it to the rustle of Blake's angel winged voice , that it can be said that a certain system of irregularities in metre became admissible in the formal court of poetry . As the Rossetti brotherhood of painters returned to the stiff and simple elegance as displayed in the “ Primavera ” of Botticelli , so did Swinburne go back to the simple beauty of Greek tragedy as depicted in second is good , as it is musical : the extra half - step in the word “ difficult ” carrying with it a difficulty , and thus emphasizing the meaning ; whilst in the third , there is neither scansion nor music .