Note 100 — Chapter III · SCALIGER, CASTELVETRO, AND THE LATER ITALIAN CRITICS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The decision of this is all the more remarkable that Scaliger does not, as unwary moderns might expect, make verse the form of Poetry, but the matter. Feet, rhythm, metre, these are the things that Poetry works in, her stuff, her raw material. The skill of the poet in its various applications is the form. A very little thought will show this to be the most decisive negation possible of the Wordsworthian heresy—anticipated by many sixteenth-century writers, from Italy to England, and though not exactly authorised, countenanced by the ancients, from Aristotle downwards—that verse is not essential in any way.