The Bridling of Pegasus

Music, clarity and imagination provide Alfred Austin with his standards for judging poetry. Published in 1910, The Bridling of Pegasus gathers prose papers written over the preceding thirty years. Austin argues that poetic language should be melodious and intelligible, and that imagination transforms the actual world into an ideal one. The title draws on the golden bridle given to Bellerophon to guide Pegasus, making discipline a partner to inspiration.

The essays compare Milton with Dante and Byron with Wordsworth, defend Tennyson, and consider the connection between literature and politics. In the passage on Byron, Austin praises narrative movement, invention and incident while weighing the poet's limits in depicting character. His firm judgments give readers a view of literary criticism built around stated principles. For anyone interested in how poems are assessed, the collection offers arguments to examine alongside the works it discusses.