Hudibrastic

(3) The long Hudibrastic poem Alma, or, The Progress of the Mind, written in dialogic form during Priors confinement in 1715-16 and published in 1719, sheds light on a vein of humorous scepticism that descends from Montaigne to Pope and Hume.

* Hudibrastic rhymes, especially as practised by Byron:

Cunningham all but own the couplet form for contemporary poetry, and Cassity is an outright virtuoso, writing not only heroic couplets, but the tetrameter and dimeter variety, and employing, as Tuma has noted, a rich variety of sonic devices including polysyllabic and hudibrastic rhymes.(3) Cassity studied with the formalist poet Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and it shows in his love of poetic forms that, "In their small way speak to the strong appeal / Of classic values: skill, proportion, fact" (3), but he has described himself as among the wildest of Winters's former students, something of a stray, a maverick.

Yet while the form may be Hudibrastic, the content of the `strange desire' exhibited here (and elsewhere) is reminiscent of the Audenesque: the `sovereign touch / Curing the intolerable neural itch, / The exhaustion of weaning and the liar's quinsy' (The English Auden, p.

Fielding's spirit in the poem 'To a Friend' draws mainly from the Juvenalian, though one hears echoes of the Hudibrastic and the Horatian.

The mere physical act of writing, irrespective of the dubious quality of his Hudibrastic couplets, gives him indescribable satisfaction inasmuch as it instills in him existential certainty.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with accessibility, nothing outmoded about Hudibrastic couplets such as those Auden employs in "New Year Letter" - it is arrogant, elitist nonsense to think so.

As a record of the Citizen's ancestral tradition, this list demonstrates that he is as hubristic and humorous as he is a hudibrastic figure.

Those unaware of Samuel Bulter's work would doubtless have difficulty when Seelye writes of a "Hudibrastic caricature of punctilious piety" (16).