Interrupted Symmetries: Terza Rima, Heroic Verse, First Lines, and the Styles of Epic. [From: Mediaevalia, Vol. 12, 1989 (for 1986)]. …

pp. 271-303. From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - With author's dedication to Meyer Reinhold. - A very good and clean copy. - From the text: Hearing the noble voice, Alfred Lord Tennyson called Vergilian hexameter the “stateliest measure / Ever moulded by the lips of man.” His was a fervent response to voices of poets properly described as altissimi (Tennyson would hardly have denied Homer). No wonder. The authority of that majestic instrument and of the voices which sang in it, and the plain impossibility of remaking that measure in modern song afflicted almost all the great poets. Dante conceived his opus magnum in the “illustrious vernacular” (see De vulgari eloquentia), but also wrote — and paid tranquil homage to — Latin. In the next generation, Petrarch composed his opus parvum, the Rime (or Rerum vulgarium fragmenta— shards of things in the vulgar tongue) in a vernacular he thought unillustrious, limited in scope and wanting dignity, and he attempted to scale the true heights of language in his epic Africa.