Skip to search boxSkip to navigationSkip to main content

The intaglio element in Prince's verse

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Peer-review

Open access

Abstract

There is something peculiar about the syntax of Prince’s verse. Which adjectives come close to describing the curious, entangled emotions elicited when reading the lines from Prince’s most famous poem ‘Soldiers Bathing’: ‘And my mind towards the meaning of it strives // All’s pathos now. The body than was gross […] by pain and labour grows at length / Fragile and luminous’? How would we describe the quiet, reserved restraint of ‘Guns, gallows, barracks, poles and bars; / Seem to have laboured but to fetch us love’ from ‘The Book’? In this paper I propose that Prince’s syntax in the poems of Soldiers Bathing is a product of multiple pressures mirroring those he outlines in his intriguing The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse. It is just such pressures, I suggest, that enable him to carve out and maintain the co-presence of both conceptual and affective contradictions – entangled and uncertain ideas – which are the primary subject of these poems and which give his verse its peculiar quality.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding Chapter Peer-review

Original language

English

Publication milestones

  • Published - 31/12/2016

Publication status

Published - 31/12/2016

Place of publication

Liverpool

Publisher

Liverpool University Press, United Kingdom

ISBN (Print)

9781781383339

ISBN (Electronic)

9781781383773

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/623324

Host publication title

Reading F. T. Prince

Access to documents