In this thesis I present forty-seven thematically interwoven original poems with my own explanatory introduction. In the introduction I attempt to illuminate the poems’ concerns and techniques by relating them to the concerns, resources, and theories of both traditional and contemporary English-speaking poets. The poems represent a combination of Romantic personal and social interest with Renaissance technical and aesthetic interest. My form, free verse constructed on linguistic principles, I have chosen because of the flexibility it provides for creating decorative and natural patterns. I find its rhythms quite similar to those of many passages in Shakespeare's later plays and to those of the emotion-filled early poems of Matthew Arnold. ...