Lord Byron - om rimmandets konst

Från Byrons fotnoter till Don Juan:

"I doubt if 'Laureate' and Iscariot' be good rhymes, but must say, as Ben Jonson did to Sylvester, who challanged him to rhyme with
-- 'I, John Sylvester, lay with your sister.'
Jonson answered -- 'I, Ben Jonson, lay with your wife.'
Sylvester answered -- 'That is not rhyme.'
-- 'No,' said Ben Jonson; 'but it is true."

Byrons recension av "The Prelude"

Ur "Dedication", Don Juan (1819)

IV
And Wordsworth, in a rather long Excursion
(I think the quarto holds five hundred pages),
Has given a sample from the vasty version
Of his new system to perplex the sages;
'T is poetry -- at least by his assertion,
And may appear so when the dog-star rages --
And he who understands it would be able
To add a story to the Tower of Babel.

V
You -- Gentlemen!* by dint of long seclusion
From better company, have kept your own
At Keswick, and, through still continued fusion
Of one another's minds, at last have grown
To deem as a most logical conclusion,
That Poesy has wreaths for you alone:
There is a narrowness in such a notion,
Which makes me wish you'd change your lakes for ocean.

-- Lord Byron

*) Coleridge och Wordsworth.