1. Pindar’s Odes to the victors of the Olympic games were widely regarded in antiquity and afterwards as the model for an enraptured style of lyric poetry; for the history of the use and abuse of the term ‘Pindaric’ as a licence for ‘metrical irrationality’ see H. T. Kirby-Smith, The Origins of Free Verse (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 99.
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poetical Works, ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 48–9.
3. Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996 [1980]), p. 26.
4. The closing lines of ‘Moina’ (F. Sayers, Dramatic Sketches of the Ancient Northern Mythology [London: J. Johnson, 1790], p. 82).
5. From Gray’s ‘Metrum’ (Thomas Gray, The Works of Thomas Gray, ed. John Mitford [London: William Pickering, 1843], 5:233–4).