continuously since then. "Poe has proved himself," says Gosse, "to be the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse music does not show traces of Poe's influence." Saintsbury calls him "the greatest master of original prosodic effects that the United States has produced," No extraneous element was added, however, rhythmic repetition being only a continuation and multiplication of the central principle of verse in all languages. Poe did not manufacture a new artifice; he discovered and released an old resource.
where did he get the suggestion for this kind of repetition? Not from Coleridge, not from any author or authors, but more probably from the ballad. The ballad is the product of communal composition and its distinctive formal characteristic is repetition. No other type of literature, ancient or modern, approaches the old English and Scottish folk-song in the consistent and effective use of repetition not only as a bindemittell within the stanza but as a pontoon from stanza to stanza. Poe's best known poems, Goethe's Erlkönig, Bürger's Lenore, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and Longfellow's Wreck of the Hesperus belong together. The same kind of repetition is employed in each, the same tone gives unity to each, the same air of mystery broods about each, and the same effect, though not to the same degree, is produced by each. They are all ballads and they all hark back to the ballad revival signalized by the appearance, in 1775, of Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. But more of the three hundred and five English and Scottish ballads have been found surviving by oral
