Edward Bysshe

The Art of English Poetry Edward Bysshe

In its original form the work was an octavo of nearly four hundred pages divided into three parts: "Rules For making English Verse," a rhyming dictionary, and a poetical commonplace book containing all the "Most Natural, Agreeable, and Noble Thoughts" of the English poets digested alphabetically by their subject. Only the first part is reproduced here, but it seems desirable to say something about the book as a whole.[1] It is one of those works which is scorned by all, and used by all who scorn it. In the sixty years after its publication it went through nine editions, and though Charles Gildon thought it "a book too scandalously mean to name," he was constrained to admit that it had "spread, by many editions, thro' all England" and had "carried off so many Impressions, as have made it with the ignorant, the Standard of Writing.