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

8 Hight is an archaic word for ‘called’, as in ‘named’: ‘a poet hight Thomas Hood’.

9Anthony Burgess wrote a novel Abba Abba which imagines a meeting between Keats and the Italian sonneteer Belli: the title is a pun on the Petrarchan rhyme-scheme and the Hebrew for ‘father’. Not sure where the Swedish popsters got their name.

10 Sir William ‘Topaz’ McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma, a title conferred by King Thibaw of Burma and the Andaman Islands in 1894

11Despite Tennyson writing a poem about their charge too: ‘The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!’ Don’t milk it Alfie, love…

12Having said which I have invented a poetic method that utilises the provokingly silly incompetence of Voice Recognition Software, allowing its mistakes to furnish interesting poetic ideas. It gave me ‘power monkey’ for ‘poet manqué’ recently. Such aleatory assistance can be suggestive.

1Although, to be fair, he did repent and write: ‘the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.’

2Incidentally, on the off-chance that you have submitted a poem for any competition that I have judged, or plan to in the future, please don’t think that I will condemn a poem to the bin because it is in free verse or raise one to the top of the pile because it is formal. A good free verse poem is better than a bad sonnet and vice versa .

3Actually, I have to confess I quite like ‘afterloved’…

4You may think ‘forbade to wade’ is a clumsy internal rhyme–actually ‘forbade’ was (and still should be, I reckon) pronounced ‘for-bad’.

5Mind you, at the time of going to print the website advertising these glories had not been updated since 2004. I do hope the competition hasn’t been stopped.

6Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds produced their album Murder Ballads in 1996.

7Written at the time of the trial but published posthumously. Another wonderful Housman tirade against sexual intolerance is to be found in ‘The Laws of God, the Laws of Man’.

8A dithyramb is a kind of wild choral hymn (usually to Dionysus, the Greek God of wine–Bacchus to the Romans). It now often refers to any rather overblown, uncontrolled verse style.

9Someone told me they saw a grave to one John Longbottom, who died at the age of ten. His gravestone read ars longa, vita brevis : a rude epitaph for a churchyard, but witty. Works especially well if you remember that in Latin the ‘s’ is always unvoiced …

10I don’t want you to go thinking that this is the usual kind of conversation I have, least of all my friends.

11Not triplets , which are three-line groups that rhyme with each other aaa , bbb etc.

12In its strictest form, the word Sestina should also appear in the envoi . Crazy, huh?

13Anthony Holden, in The Wit in the Dungeon , his masterly biography of Leigh Hunt, has this to say about the incident: ‘Whether or not Carlyle’s crusty old wife actually had given Hunt a kiss, let alone leapt from her chair to do so, we will never know; no such unlikely moment is documented in any of the relevant parties’ letters or journals.’

14See if you can get hold of ‘A Platonic Blow’ for example.

15I mean exotic in its original sense of ‘from far away’ not in the travel brochure sense.

16 Cracked them! Coconuts, you see. And china plates. Cracked them! Ho, ho. No but really, ho ho .

17A manila envelope rhyme?

18Jewish readers may wonder why Milton is writing about the tefillin : ‘phylacteries’ here actually refer to religious trinkets used by Presbyterians, whose intolerance the sonnet attacks. Presbyterians , as you may know although Milton probably did not, is an anagram of Britney Spears .

19The full manifesto can be read at: http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/concretepoet.htm

20Save the rich-rhyme sylva of course…

1After all, a large bowl of strawberry trifle or a buzzing electric dildo would make most people look twice…

2Though also a great danger that such demotic diction dates even more rapidly than old-fashioned ‘poetical’ language.

Table of Contents

Foreword

How to Read this Book. Three Golden Rules

1 Metre

I How We Speak. Meet Metre. The Great Iamb. The Iambic Pentameter. Poetry Exercises 1 & 2

II End-stopping, Enjambment and Caesura. Poetry Exercise 3 . Weak Endings, Trochaic and Pyrhhic Substitutions. Substitutions. Poetry Exercise 4

III More Metres: Four Beats to the Line. Mixed Feet. Poetry Exercise 5

IV Ternary Feet: The Dactyl, The Molossus and Tribrach, The Amphibrach, The Amphimacer, Quaternary Feet. Poetry Exercise 6

V Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. Poetry Exercise 7 . Sprung Rhythm.

VI Syllabic Verse. Poetry Exercises 8 & 9 : Coleridge’s ‘ Lesson for a Boy ’.

T ABLE OF M ETRIC F EET

2 Rhyme

I The Basic Categories of Rhyme. Partial Rhymes. Feminine and Triple Rhymes. Rich Rhyme.

II Rhyming Arrangements.

III Good and Bad Rhyme? A Thought Experiment. Rhyming Practice and Rhyming Dictionaries. Poetry Exercise 10

R HYME C ATEGORIES

3 Form

I The Stanza. What is Form and Why Bother with It?

II Stanzaic Variations. Open Forms: Terza Rima, The Quatrain, The Rubai, Rhyme Royal, Ottava Rima, Spenserian Stanza. Adopting and Adapting. Poetry Exercise 11

III The Ballad. Poetry Exercise 12

IV Heroic Verse. Poetry Exercise 13

V The Ode: Sapphic, Pindaric, Horatian, The Lyric Ode, Anacreontics.

VI Closed Forms: The Villanelle. Poetry Exercise 14 . The Sestina. Poetry Exercise 15 . The Pantoum, The Ballade.

VII More Closed Forms: Rondeau, Rondeau Redoublé, Rondel, Roundel, Rondelet, Roundelay, Triolet, Kyrielle. Poetry Exercise 16

VIII Comic Verse: Cento, The Clerihew. The Limerick. Reflections on Comic and Impolite Verse. Light Verse. Parody. Poetry Exercise 17

IX Exotic Forms: Haiku, Senryu, Tanka. Ghazal. Luc Bat. Tanaga. Poetry Exercise 18

X The Sonnet: Petrarchan and Shakespearean. Curtal and caudate sonnets. Sonnet Variations and Romantic Duels. Poetry Exercise 19

XI Shaped Verse. Pattern Poems. Silly, Silly Forms. Acrostics. Poetry Exercise 20

4 Diction and Poetics Today

I The Whale. The Cat and the Act. Madeline. Diction. Being Alert to Language.

II Poetic Vices. Ten Habits of Successful Poets that They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Poetry School, or Chicken Verse for the Soul Is from Mars but You Are What You Read in Just Seven Days or Your Money Back. Getting Noticed. Poetry Today. Goodbye.

I NCOMPLETE G LOSSARY OF P OETIC T ERMS

A PPENDIX –Arnaud’s Algorithm

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F URTHER R EADING