Yet, of course, Johnson knew the addition of pleasure which comes from verse—the pleasure of melody and pattern. Coleridge, in his Table Talk, offers what he calls ‘my homely definitions of prose and poetry.’ Prose, he says, is ‘words in their best order;’ poetry is ‘the best words in the best order.’ But this seems not to be sufficient. The best words may be set in the best order even by a prose writer. Poetry aims rather at increasing, by metrical devices, the number of best places for the best words in the best order. Of these devices rhyme is perhaps the chief. Johnson held rhyme to be almost essential to poetry; disallowing, as he did, inversions of order and novelties of diction, he believed that blank verse was without the necessary means of poetic emphasis. Blank verse, written in the quiet fashion that he liked, seemed to him to be merely prose, cut into lengths, and oscillating to a hardly recognizable tune.
His view of this matter is expounded in the essay on Milton; ‘Poetry may subsist without rhyme; but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared, but where the subject is well able to support itself.’ His criticism of Somervile’s Rural Sports adds clearness to the explanation: ‘If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose; and familiar images in laboured language have nothing to recommend them but absurd novelty, which, wanting the attractions of Nature, cannot please long.’
There are three of the English poets whose blank verse Johnson commends; they are Milton, Thomson, and Young. The reasons that he gives for allowing these exceptions prove that he had pondered the question with an open mind, and was not the victim of a mere
