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

W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound wrote on poetry and poetics with great brilliance and knowledge: as illustrious practising poets, their (sometimes polemical) insights naturally have great authority. The most rewarding academics on the subject in my view are Christopher Ricks, Frank Kermode and Anne Barton. I also fall terribly eagerly on Terry Eagleton and with affectionate scepticism on old Harold Bloom whenever they publish.

Poets whose work showed and has shown particular interest in formal writing include Tennyson, Swinburne, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Justice, Richard Wilbur, Wendy Cope, J. V. Cunningham and Seamus Heaney. Between them they have written in many of the forms I concentrate on in Chapter Three.

The good old Internet naturally contains all kinds of information: I would be hesitant to recommend any single site as authoritative on matters prosodic, but poemhunter.com has ‘Top 500’ lists, which indicate fluctuations in popularity as well as offering online poetry for inspection and links to nearly a thousand other poetry-based sites.

1Pitch matters , of course it does. It matters in speech and in poetry, but for the moment we will concentrate on stress

2Unless otherwise stated, I use ‘English’ here and throughout the book to refer to the English language , not the country.

3‘Convenient and innocuous nomenclatorial handles,’ as Vladimir Nabokov calls them in his Notes on Prosody .

4He sat up without another word and split the rope in two with his axe.

5From An Essay on Criticism .

6Caesuras have a more ordered and specific role to play in French verse, dramatic or otherwise. French poems, like their geometrically planned gardens, were laid out with much greater formality than ours. They are more like regular rests in musical bars. We need not worry about this formal use.

7Hence too, possibly, caesarean section, though some argue that this is named after Julius Caesar who was delivered that way. Others claim that this was why Julius was called Caesar in the first place, because he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. We needn’t worry about that, either. Incidentally, in America they are spelled ‘cesura’.

8Wordsworth, sonnet: ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.

9There are metrists who would argue that there are more caesuras than that: there may be ‘weak’ breaks in some of the other lines, but my reading stands, so there.

10A scholiast is an inkhorn or pedantic grammarian and a poetaster a tediously bad poet– not , as you might think, someone who samples the work of Edgar Allan Poe…

is a schwa , that slack ‘e’ sound, the uh in bigger or written

12T. Steele. All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing , Ohio University Press.

13‘Nature so spurs them on that people long to go on pilgrimages.’

14Milton, like many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as always to mark ‘heaven’ as the monosyllable ‘heav’n’ whenever it ended a line. Finding two hendecasyllables in a row in Paradise Lost is like looking for a condom machine in the Vatican.

15Ditto: Pope took great pride in the decasyllabic nature of his rhyming couplets. This is one of only two feminine endings in the whole (over 1,500 line) poem, the other being a rhyme of ‘silly’ with ‘Sir Billy’: it seems it was acceptable to Pope so long as the rhyming words were proper names. Maybe here he hears Cowards as Cards and Howards as Hards…

16The Prelude Wordsworth’s hero was, poetically and politically, Milton and W shows the same disdain for weak endings. I’m fairly convinced that for him ‘being’ is actually elided into the monosyllable ‘beeng’!

17Many prosodists would argue, as I have said earlier, that there is no such thing as a spondee in English verse, partly because no two contiguous syllables can be pronounced with absolute equal stress and partly because a spondee is really a description not of accent, but of vowel length , an entirely different concept, and one essentially alien to English prosody.

If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I’m afraid I shall have to kill you.

19When I wrote this, we had just lost the first Test against Australia and I was pessimistic…

20 Named from a twelfth-century French poem, Le Roman d’Alexandre

21After all, in French (as opposed to Spanish, say), a diacritical mark (a written accent) is not about syllabic emphasis: école is evenly stressed, the accent is just there to modify the vowel sound, not impart extra stress to it.

22Dickinson’s works remain untitled: the numbers refer to their order in the 1955 Harvard variorum edition.

23At first attempt I mistyped that as ‘A Robin Red breast in a Café’, ‘Makes Heaven go all daffy’, I suppose…

24A common but metrically meaningless convention.

25 Including Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s definitive 1957 edition.

26It was T. S. Eliot.

27‘But that’s just plain silly’ is amphibrachic: these feet can get into your system.

A quintain or cinquain being a five-line verse.

29But not Oxford Street, which would be more of a dactyl, this is an oddity of English utterance.

30‘The repetition of the sound of an initial consonant or consonant cluster in stressed syllables close enough to each other for the ear to be affected’ is how the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, with trademark elegance and concision.

31Pronounced scissor-gee : ‘a pair of connected or corresponding things’.

32From the C text: shorn of its yoghs and thorns, thanks to Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall’s invaluable edition, published by Edward Arnold for York Medieval Texts.

33A work-shy monk, not attached to any monastic order. Like Chaucer, Langland was very down on the species.

34My edition of Gawain was edited by Tolkien, who did much to popularise Middle English verse, through his scholarship as much as through his Middle Earth fantasies.

35Derived from the theology of Duns Scots, whom Hopkins revered.

From the French vers libre , coined in Paris in an 1886 edition of La Vogue , which included excerpts of Whitman among the Laforgue and Rimbaud.

37A reading of those poets will of course reveal much in the way of metrics, form and rhyming, but the generality of their work escaped into free verse.

38A Filipino language.

39Technically a mora -timed language: morae being phonological units of duration.

40The longest syllabic verse poem in the language, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia . I tried–for your sake, dear reader, I tried–but gave up after line 23.

1Named after Leo, the twelfth-century Canon of Saint Victor’s in Paris.

2 Near rhyme and off rhyme are terms used too.

3Presumably this is what a poetaster does: give poe-a-try…

4 Aphaeresis means the dropping of a first letter or letters of a word: in poetry it refers to ’neath, ’twas, ’mongst –that kind of thing. It’s also something to do with separating plasma from blood cells, but that needn’t worry us.

5Or ‘bachelor’ with ‘naturaler’ as Ogden Nash manages to do…

6From the Italian word meaning ‘slippery down-slope’ and used for a kind of glib Italian dactylic rhyme. There is a Sdrucciolo dei Pitti in Florence, a sloping lane leading down to the Pitti Palace. I once ate a bun there.

7From the French rime riche .