This chapter discusses the accretion of an extraordinary amount of criticism and commentary on Whitman over the past 150 years. It studies one as-yet underexplored area of his writing: his old-age poetry. This poetry was added to Leaves of Grass in Whitman’s last years in what he called “annexes.” Whitman’s experimental inclinations remained intense in these often-overlooked poems, as he invented new techniques involving open enjambment, transegmental drift, and pronoun disappearance, creating a poetry unlike most of his earlier work: shorter, less accepting of death, and yet still affirmative of many of the basic ideas he had developed from the 1855 Leaves on. These late poems introduced some formal qualities that we now associate much more with modernist and postmodern poets, and they also can be read as some of the most honest and powerful confrontations with old age and a decaying body that any poet has produced.

This chapter deals with the formal aspects of Chaucer’s verse craft. It discusses Chaucer’s mastery of rhyme and rhythm, and illustrates some of the stanza forms (rhyme royal, ballade, rondeau) that Chaucer deployed. It describes the metrical system behind both his octosyllabic lines and his pentameter lines, including the treatment of final e. Deviations from metrical norms, such as headless lines and enjambment, are discussed, but I argue that even perfectly regular iambic tetrameter and pentameter lines show variation, based on the degree to which linguistic stress approximates or modulates away from the metrical template. Particular attention is paid to Chaucer’s own comments about rhyme and the syllable count.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.