I used to have this book--in the 1901 edition. After the looting of the museum in Baghdad, which probably included the original cuneiform, i searched "The Epic of Izdubar". It was only then that i discovered it was only an older, bad transliteration--of "Gilgamesh".

Forgot to mention the conlang Vorlin, for which i wrote several poems & even some palindromes--in what must be described now as "Middle" Vorlin. Vorlin's goal is to be concise (one or two syllable words) & easy to learn; it is also surprisingly sophisticated.

"XV

"Tell brave deeds of war."

Then they recounted tales, --
"There were stern stands
And bitter runs for glory."

Ah, I think there were braver deeds. "

--Stephen Crane

H'm, look what i found: "SPASMODIC POETICS: A 150-YEAR RETROSPECT
A special session for the 2003 MLA conference in San Diego.
Recent work in historical genre theory and the development of "Cultural
Neoformalism" make the so-called "Spasmodic" poets an appealing subject
for new scholarship. This session commemorates the 150-year anniversary of
Sydney Dobell's _Balder_ in order to encourage new discussion of the
spasmodic movement, a phenomenon that has received insufficient critical
attention despite its substantial impact on Victorian poetics. Any aspect
of the movement is welcome, including but not limited to the work of
Dobell, Alexander Smith, Philip Bailey, Elizabeth Barrett and/or Robert
Browning, Tennyson's "Maud," or _Wuthering Heights_, the so-called
"spasmodic" novel." --I've been interested in the Spasmodics ever since i found a 120-year-old copy of Philip James Bailey's Festus in my college library, & read (most of) it. Years later, i'd been having a recurring dream of a multi-storey bookstore, when i first ventured into one, now closed, in downtown Ft Worth. As i climbed the stairs there, i realized i'd been dreaming about this place, though i'd never before set foot in it. In the uppermost room i found not one but two copies of Festus. (I still haven't finished it--.) He has some great aphorisms sprinkled throughout, but you have to plow through acres of twaddle about angels & poetry & God & Love ktp to find them. Another Spasmodic, "Owen Meredith" (Bulwer Lytton's son), is well represented on the second hand market by his book-length poem Lucile*. (I found a webpage that attempts to catalog all the editions this book ran through...) It has its moments (i've already quoted from it, i think). And i recently acquired another of his book-length poems, Glenaveril...I'm still looking for a book of Dobell. Here's a good overview of the school. Their main characteristics were verbose subjectivity & exaggerated metaphor. I prefer to think of them as proto-Flarfists.

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*footnote. I cannot resist repeating this anecdote, which i found while trying to google a decent bio of O.Meredith, poetaster & sometime Viceroy of India: "There
is a legend that every lot or library of books that has
turned up in the last eighty years was sure to have a
copy of LUCILE in it. The book is, indeed, a drug on the
market, and a story is told of how a prominent bookseller
of fifty years ago did what he could do to relegate it to
a comparatively decent obscurity. The bookseller, who
made a trip to England every year, would gather all the
copies of LUCILE from his own lots and those of other
dealers before a voyage. When he was far out on the
Atlantic he would ceremoniously dump them overboard with
an oath and add, "Here are so many copies of LUCILE that
will never enter a book store again." "

PS my edition of Lucile appears to be H M Caldwell's "Exquisite" of 1896