Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Travelled - Unlocking The Poet Within

which proves that the entire set of line-ends returns to the original position and order after a full cycle of six iterations, or in other words a seventh stanza would be identical (in respect of line-ends) to the first.

Acknowledgements

My thanks, as always, go to JO CROCKER for running my life with such efficiency, understanding and good humour while I have been engaged upon this book. My publisher SUE FREESTONE has shown her usual blend of patience, kindness, enthusiasm and accommodation, as have ANTHONY GOFF and LORRAINE HAMILTON, my literary and dramatic agents. Thanks to JO LAURIE for her game guinea-piggery in reading early sections on metre and trying out some of the exercises, and to my father for his baffling but beautiful sestina algorithm. Especial gratitude must go to IAN PATTERSON, poet, Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, for casting his learned and benevolent eye over the manuscript–all errors are mine, not his. I thank him also for allowing me to include his excellent centos and sestina. My thanks to his predecessors at Queens’, Professors A. C. SPEARING and IAN WRIGHT, and to PETER HOLLAND of Trinity Hall, who between them did their doomed best to make a scholar of me during my time there. Aside from my mother, the person who most awoke me to poetry was RORY STUART, a remarkable teacher who has now retired to Italy. I send him my eternal thanks. If every schoolchild had been lucky enough to have a teacher like him, the world would be a better and happier place.

The author and publisher acknowledge use of lines from the following works:

Simon Armitage, ‘Poem’, Kid , Faber, 1999 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron, II’, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, ‘Meiosis’, ‘Precious Five’, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, ‘Miss Gee’, ‘Lullaby’, Collected Poems , ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber 1976, rev. 1991

Carolyn Beard Whitlow, ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’, Wild Meat , Lost Roads Publishers, USA, 1986

John Betjeman, ‘Death in Leamington’, Collected Poems , John Murray, 2003

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Sestina’, Complete Poems , ed. Tom Paulin, Chatto & Windus, 2004

Jorge Luis Borges, Haikus and Tanaka from Obras Completas (4 vols), Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, 2005

Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse , ed. Kingsley Amis, OUP, 1978

Anne Carson, ‘Eros The Bittersweet’, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998

G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Ballade of Suicide’, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton , Dodd Mead, 1980

Wendy Cope, ‘Valentine’, Serious Concerns , Faber, 1992

–––‘Engineer’s Corner’, Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis , Faber, 1986

Frances Cornford, ‘Fat Lady Seen From A Train’, Collected Poems , Enitharmon Press, 1996

Cummings, E. E., ‘1 (a’, ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’, Selected Poems , Liveright Books, 1994

Elizabeth Daryush, ‘Still Life’, Collected Poems , Carcanet, 1972

Hilda Doolittle, ‘Sea Poppies’, Selected Poems , Carcanet, 1997

Norman Douglas, ‘Wagtail’ and Anacreontics from Norman Douglas: A Portrait , Edizioni La Conchiglia, Capri, Italy, 2004 Marriott Edgar, The Lion and Albert , Methuen, 1978

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’, Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot , Faber, 1969

Robert Frost, ‘Spring Pools’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Mending Wall’, The Poetry of Robert

Frost , Vintage, 2001

Thomas Hardy, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)’, ‘The Lacking Sense’, Collected Poems , Wordsworth Editions, 1994

Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry Picking’, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–96 , Faber, 1998

Michael Heller, ‘She’, Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems , Salt Publishing, 2003

A. E. Housman, ‘The Colour of his Hair’, Collected Poems , ed. J. Sparrow, Penguin, 1995

Ted Hughes, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, ‘Thistle’, ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’, ‘Eagle’, Collected Poems , ed. Paul Keegan, Faber, 2003

Donald Justice, ‘The Tourist from Syracuse’, Collected Poems , Knopf, USA, 2004

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’, ‘If’, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling , Wordsworth Editions, 1994

Carolyn Kizer, ‘Parents’ Pantoum’, Copper Canyon Press, USA, 1996

Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Toads’, ‘For Sidney Bechet’, ‘The Trees’, Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite, Faber, 2003

Derek Mahon, ‘Antarctica’, Collected Poems , Gallery Press, 1999

Marianne Moore, ‘The Fish’, The Poems of Marianne Moore , ed. Grace Schulman, Penguin, 2005

Ogden Nash, ‘The Sniffle’, Best of Ogden Nash , ed. Smith and Eberstadt, Methuen, 1985

Dorothy Parker, ‘Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That)’, ‘Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals’, The Collected Dorothy Parker , Penguin, 2001

Ian Patterson, ‘Sestina’, Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969–2002 , Salt Publishing, 2003

–––‘Shakespeare Cento’ and ‘A. E. Housman Cento’ are previously unpublished and are reproduced with the author’s permission

Ezra Pound, ‘In A Station of the Metro’, ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo Saxon’, ABC of Reading , Norton, 1960

–––‘Apparuit’, Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound , Faber, 2001

Robert Service, ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’, The Best of Robert Service , A. & C. Black, 1995 (first English edition edited by Ernest Benn, 1978) ©1960 Germaine Service

Wallace Stevens, ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, The Complete Poems , Vintage, 1990

Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, ‘In My Craft and Sullen Art’, Collected Poems , Everyman Edition, Phoenix, 2000

R. S. Thomas, ‘The Welsh Hill Country’, Everyman Selected Poems of R. S. Thomas , ed. Anthony Thwaite, J. M. Dent, 1996

W. B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, ‘The Choice’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘When You Are Old’, The Poems , ed. Richard Finneran, Macmillan, 1983

Benjamin Zephaniah, ‘Talking Turkey’, Talking Turkeys , Puffin Books, 1995

Further Reading

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 1993 edition, Preminger and Brogan, is, in my view, the standard work and final authority on all matters prosodic and poetical. Timothy Steel, Professor of English at Cal State, Los Angeles is one of the best living writers on metrics and I would recommend his two sprightly but deeply scholarly books Missing Measures and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing . Vladimir Nabokov’s Notes on Prosody bears all the hallmarks of astuteness, clarity and cogent idiosyncrasy you would expect of the great man–it is essentially an examination of tetrameter (iambic octosyllabics properly), with especial reference to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and you may find one gin is not enough…

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland contains excellent examples of many of the forms I have examined. I would also recommend John Lennard’s student-orientated The Poetry Handbook, a Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism .