Excerpt from Irradiations Sand and Spray The system which demands that the end of every line of poetry must rhyme with the end of some one preceding Or following it, has not even the merit of high antiquity or of civilized adherence. In its essence it is barbarous; it def rives from the stamping of feet, clapping of hands, pound/ ing of drums, or like devices of savage peoples to mark the rhythms in their dances and songs. And its introduction into European poetry, as a rule to be invariably followed, dates precisely from the time of the break/up of the Latin civilization, and the approach of what the historians know as the Dark Ages. Since it has come into common use among European peoples, every poet of eminence has tried to avoid its fatiguing monotony, by constructing new stanza/ forms. Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser, all these wexre inf novators or developers of what may be known as formal metre. But let us not forget that the greatest of all, Shake/ speare, used rhyme in his plays, only as additional decora. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.