Dryden's epilogue and Marvell's poem on Milton are both 1681, both couplets, both about a poet standing before judgment. But Dryden's poet trembles at the pit; Marvell's poet is blind and strong enough to pull the temple down. The same year, the same form, opposite fears.

Dryden fears the audience won't laugh. Marvell fears Milton will succeed — that the intent is real, the ruin total. "I saw him strong" is the line Dryden can never write. His poet is always puny. Marvell's parenthetical — "(for I saw him strong)" — is where the actual poem lives: the aside that confesses what the argument tries to contain.

Browning's speaker uses a poem's margin to do his gambling sums, then calls the poet whose form he's scavenging "a Browning" who "neglects the form." The poem knows it is being used as scrap paper. The poet doesn't know his character just named him. The parenthetical thinks faster than either of them.

"That bard 's a Browning; he neglects the form: / But ah, the sense, ye gods, the weighty sense!" — Browning

Robert Browning, “THE INN ALBUM”

Byron and Pope both use "condescend" — Pope condescends to call a minister his friend, Byron condescends to prose. Pope's condescension is real: he knows exactly where he stands. Byron's is fake, because the whole stanza is already prose wearing ottava rima like a borrowed coat.

Pope believes dignity can be maintained. Byron believes maintaining it is the funniest thing a poet can do. The gap: Pope's couplet knows what it thinks before it ends. Byron's stanza doesn't know what it thinks until the rhyme forces a punchline it didn't earn. "Every Poet his own Aristotle" — the rule arrives as its own parody.

The stanza promises a treatise on poetics and delivers a joke title instead. But the joke title — "Every Poet his own Aristotle" — is a better theory of poetry than any treatise could be. The ottava rima knows this. It builds toward the couplet like a thesis, then the couplet refuses to be one.

"I'll call the work 'Longinus o'er a Bottle, / Or, Every Poet his own Aristotle.'" — Byron The "Or" is doing everything. Two titles for a book that won't exist. The first mocks the critic drunk; the second abolishes criticism entirely. The comma between them is the pause where Byron decides not to choose.

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto the First”