The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (53 page)

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
.

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.

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

²
Unless 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
.

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

⁵
From
An Essay on Criticism
.

⁶
Caesuras 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.

⁷
Hence 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’.

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

⁹
There 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.

¹⁰
A
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

¹²
T. 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.’

¹⁴
Milton, 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.

¹⁵
Ditto: 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…

¹⁶
The 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’!

¹⁷
Many 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.

¹⁹
When 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

²¹
After 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.

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

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

²⁴
A common but metrically meaningless convention.

25 Including Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s definitive 1957 edition.

²⁶
It 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.

²⁹
But 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.

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

³²
From 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.

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

³⁴
My 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.

³⁵
Derived 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.

³⁷
A 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.

³⁸
A Filipino language.

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

⁴⁰
The 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.

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

²
Near
rhyme and
off
rhyme are terms used too.

³
Presumably 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.

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

⁶
From 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.

⁷
From the French
rime riche
.

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

⁹
Anthony 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

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

¹²
Having 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.

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

²
Incidentally, 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
.

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

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

⁵
Mind 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.

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

⁷
Written 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’.