"The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fry Stephen)

…IWill trace the story of Endymion.The very music of the name has gone

There are those who loathe puns, anagrams and wordplay of any description. They regard practitioners as trivial, posey, feeble, nerdy and facetious. As one such practitioner, I do understand the objections. Archness, cuteness, pedantry and showoffiness do constitute dangers. However, as a non-singing, non-games-playing, -dancing, -painting, -diving, -running, -catching, -kicking, -riding, -skating, -skiing, -sailing, -climbing, -caving, -swimming, -free-falling, -cycling, -canoeing, -jumping, -bouncing, -boxing sort of person, words are all I have. As the old cliché has it, they are my friends. I like to say them, weigh them, poke them, tease them, chant their sound, gaze at their shape and savour their juiciness, and, yes, play with them. Some words are made up of the same letters as others, some can fit inside others, some can be said the same backwards as frontwards, some rhyme outrageously, some seem unique and peculiar like yacht and quirk and frump and canoodle. I take pleasure in their oddities and pleasures and contradictions. It amuses me that a cowboy is a boy who rounds up cows, but a carboy is a flagon of acid, that conifer is an anagram of fir cone and esoteric of coteries, that gold has a hundred rhymes but silver has none.²⁰ It saddens me that the French talk of the jouissance of language, its joyousness, juiciness, ecstasy and bliss, but that we of all peoples, with English as our mother tongue, do not. Such frolicsome larkiness may put you off, but if you wish to make poems it seems to me necessary that some part of your verse, however small, will register the sensuousness, oddity and pleasure of words themselves, as words, regardless of their semantic and communicatory duties. Not all paintings draw attention to their brushwork–art can, of course, as validly make transparent its process as exhibit its presence–but each tradition has value and none represents the only true aesthetic.

In fact, I shall start the final chapter with an exploration of the idea that there are no limits to the depth of commitment to language that a poet can have. Not before you have completed…

Poetry Exercise 20

Write one PATTERN POEM in the shape of a cross, and another in the shape of a big capital ‘I’ (for ego) (obviously it should be a Roman I with serifs, otherwise it would just be a block of verse). Make the words relevant to their shape. When you have finished that, write a rhyming ACROSTIC VERSE spelling either your surname or forename.

CHAPTER FOUR

Diction and Poetics Today

I

How I learned to love poetry–two stories–diction

The Whale, the Cat and Madeline

I was fortunate in my own introduction to poetry. My mother had, and still has, a mind packed with lines of verse. She could recite, like many of her generation but with more perfect recall than most, all the usual nursery rhymes along with most of A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carroll, Struwwelpeter, Eleanor Farjeon and other hardy annuals from the garden of English verse. This standard childhood repertoire somehow slid, without me noticing and without any didactic literary purpose, into bedtime recitations, readings or merry snatches of Belloc, Chesterton, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning. Then one birthday a godfather gave me Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. This solid, Empire-made anthology (published in 1861, the same year as Mrs Beeton’s Household Management and regarded by some as its verse equivalent) had been updated by the then Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, and included works by Betjeman, Auden and Laurie Lee, but its greatest emphasis was still on the lyrical and the romantic. That year I won the first and only school prize of my life, an edition of the Collected Poems of John Keats. In this I found a line, just one line, that finished the job my mother started and made me for ever a true slave to poetry. I will come to it in a minute, but first, a story about Keats himself and then an instance of poetry in motion.

THE WHALE

When Keats was a teenager (so the story goes), he came across a line from Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Not even a line, actually: a phrase:…the sea-shouldering whale.

Some versions of the story maintain that Keats burst into tears when he read this. He had never known before what poetic language could do. He had no idea it was capable of making images spring so completely to life. In an instant he was able to see, hear and feel the roar, the plunging, the spray, the great mass and slow colossal upheaving energy of a whale, all from two words yoked together: ‘sea’ and ‘shouldering’. From that moment on Keats got poetry. He began to understand the power that words could convey and the metaphorical daring with which a poet could treat them. We might say now that it was as if he had grasped their atomic nature, how with the right manipulation, and in the right combinations, words can release unimaginable energy. If not nuclear physics, then perhaps a living magick, whose verbal incantations conjure and summon a live thing out of thin air. Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream put it this way:And, as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.

For Keats the grand plan of The Faerie Queen, its narrative, its religious, metaphysical, political and philosophical allegory and high epic seriousness dwindled to nothing in comparison with the poetic act as realised in two words. He ‘would dwell in ecstasy’ on the phrase, his friend Charles Cowden Clarke wrote later. This may sound rather extreme–there goes another typically high-strung nancy-boy poet in a loose neckcloth, swooning at a phrase–but I think the story goes to the heart of poetry’s fundamental nature. I am sure there must have been moments like this for painters struck, not by the composition and grand themes of a masterpiece, but by one brush stroke, one extraordinary solution to the problem of transmitting truth by applying pigment to canvas. Poetry is constructed by the conjoining of words, one next to the other. Not every instance of poetic language will yield so rich an epiphany as Spenser’s did for Keats–there are muddy backgrounds in poems as in paintings–and poetry can never hope to rival the essay, the novel or a philosophical treatise when it comes to imparting thought, story and abstract truths, but it can make words live in a most particular way, it can achieve things like ‘the sea-shouldering whale’. You may not think it the finest poetic phrase ever wrought, but it unlocked poetry for the young Keats. Most of us have an inexplicably best-loved film or book that opened our eyes to the power of cinema and literature, and these favourites may not necessarily be part of the canon of Great Cinema or Great Literature, they just happened to be the ones that were there when we were ready for them. First Love comes when it comes and often we are hard put to explain later just why such and such a person was the object of our ardent youthful adoration when photographs now reveal just how plain they really were.

THE CAT AND THE ACT

Let me give you another example, this time it is from a poem by Ted Hughes called ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’. Hughes tells the story, simply and directly, of how Parnell’s Irish Members of Parliament in the late nineteenth century called for a motion to abolish the cat-o’-nine-tails as a punishment in the Royal Navy:Predictably, ParliamentSquared against the motion. As soonLet the old school tie be rentOff their necks…

Absolutely. ‘Noble tradition! Trafalgar, what?’ The cat-o’-nine-tails was, the old guard in Parliament cried, ‘No shame, but a monument…’‘To discontinue it were as muchAs ship not powder and cannonballsBut brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing whichA witty profound Irishman callsFor a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watchThe gentry fingering its stained tails.Whereupon…

quietly, unopposed,The motion was passed.

There, to some extent, you have it all. Poetry (literally) in Motion. Poetry (literally again) enacted, passed into Act. Hughes calls the unnamed Irishman who cried for the cat to be brought in ‘witty and profound’ for good reason. That Irishman did in life what poems try to do in words: to make the idea fact, the abstract concrete and the general particular.

The politicians run their fingers over the stained leather, real human blood flakes off and the Idea of the cat is no longer an idea, it is now a real whip which has scourged very flesh and drawn very blood. That obscene carrier of flesh and blood passes along the benches and the motion is, of course, passed unopposed and in silence. Essays, journalism and novels can parade political, philosophical and social ideas and arguments about corporal punishment or any other damned thing, but such talk has none of the power of the real. We use prose words to describe, but poetic language attempts, like the magician or the profound Irishman, to body forth those notions into their very act, to reify them. Poetry, the art of making, pushes the Idea into becoming the Thing Itself. Witty and profound. This wit and profundity might be harnessed to release a real whale to appear before us, or to compel us to handle the stained tails of a barbaric whip. Hughes made a poem that celebrated an act that tells us what poetry does, which is why he entitled his poem not ‘Death of the Cat’ or something similar, but ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, for Owen gave us not the idea of war but the torn flesh and smashed bone of ‘limbs so dear achieved’, he gave us the fact of war. He called for photographs of the ruined minds and bodies of soldiers to be brought into our houses and passed along for inspection. The patriotic cheers stuck in our throats.

MADELINE

Madeline, ah, Madeline. I wish I could tell you that the line of verse that awoke me to the power of poetry was as perfectly contained and simple in its force as Spenser’s, or that it had all the cold rage and perfection of the Hughes description of the Irish member’s act of wit. It was a line of Keats’s, an alexandrine as it happens, not that I knew that then, of a sensuousness and melodic perfection that hit me like a first lungful of cannabis, but without the great arcs of vomit, inane giggling and clammy paranoia attendant upon ingestion of that futile and overrated narcotic. The line is from ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.

It is very possible that you will see nothing remarkable in this line at all. I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary consonantal symmetry. Moving inwards from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D-L-N-SL-P-N-L-P-L-N-D-S-L-D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable. It has none of the embarrassing obviousness of over-alliterated lines, but its music is as perfectly achieved as any line of verse I know. It was not, however, the sonorous splendours of the words that had first captivated me, but the image evoked by them. I found the line as completely visual as anything I had ever read. I suppose that subconsciously diction had been as responsible as description, which is to say the nature and physical attributions of the words chosen had made the image vivid in my mind quite as much as their literal meanings. ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it,’ the song goes. It is both of course. And what had Keats said? That a girl was asleep in the lap of…not a person, but some old legends. It had never occurred to me before that you were allowed to do this. It was like a nonsense joke or a category mistake. You can sleep in a person’s lap, but not a legend’s. Legends don’t have laps any more than whales have shoulders. Yet straight into my head came a suffused and dreamy picture of a long-haired maiden, eyes closed, with armoured knights and dragons rising up from her sleeping head. An image, I was later to discover, that greatly influenced the works of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters. Music and painting in one twelve-syllable line, but something more than either and this ‘something more than either’ is what we mean, I suppose, by poetry.

I know this is all very fey and mockable. Very sensitive cardigan-wearing reading-glasses on a thin gold chain old poof who runs an antique business and yearns for beauty. Ah, my beloved Keats, such a solace to me in this world of reality television and chicken nuggets. They don’t understand, you know. Well, perhaps. I am not sure that it is in truth any more mockable than bloodless mirror-shaded cool in black jackets or disengaged postmodern quotation marks or sneery journalism or any style of cheap social grading one wishes to indulge in. I am not going to waste time trying to claim that a line of sensuous romantic poetry is cool and hard and powerful and relevant and intellectually muscled: it is quite enough for me that it astonishes with its beauty. Christopher Ricks wrote a book called Keats and Embarrassment and while his thesis went far beyond the usual implications of the word, a sense of embarrassment will always cling to poetry that isn’t hip like Bukowski.

‘Oh, play that thing!’ says Larkin in his poem to the jazz saxophonist and clarinettist, Sidney Bechet:On me your voice falls as they say love should,Like an enormous yes.

I reckon an enormous yes beats seven kinds of crap out of an enormous no.

DICTION

How does the foregoing, illuminating as it may or may not have been, help with the writing of our poetry? I suppose I was trying with those examples to promote a high doctrine of poetic diction. I am not for a minute suggesting that some high poetic al language be reserved for poetry. The language of the everyday, the vulgar, the demotic and the technical have as much place in poetry as any other diction or discourse. I am suggesting that language be worked, as a painter works paint, as a sculptor works marble. If what you are writing has no quality that prose cannot transmit, then why should you call it a poem? We cannot all play the game of ‘it is art because I say it is, it is art because it hangs in a gallery, so there’. David Hockney once said that his working definition of a piece of art was a made object that if left in the street, leaning against a bus shelter, would cause passers-by to stop and stare. Like all brave stabs at defining the indefinable it has its limitations, I suppose–it is not, as Aristotle would say, necessary and sufficient¹–but we might agree that it is not so bad. Perhaps poetry is the same: insert some poetry inside a body of prose and surely people should notice?

The poet Robert Graves offered the Game of Telegrams as a way of defining poetry. I suppose we would make that the Game of Texting now. A telegram, sometimes called a telegraph, wire or cable, for those of you too young to remember, was a message sent via the post office (or Western Union in the States). You would pay by the word, so they tended to be shorn of ornament, detail and connective words, asyndetic if you prefer: ‘Arriving Wed pm stop leg broken stop’ that sort of thing. Much as ‘r u gng out 2nite?’ might now be sent by SMS. Graves’s theory was that poetry should be similar. If you could take a word out without losing any sense, then the poet was indulging himself unacceptably. He made great sport of Wordsworth’s ‘The Reaper’:Behold her, single in the field,Yon solitary Highland Lass!Reaping and singing by herselfStop here, or gently pass!Alone she cuts and binds the grain…

Graves pointed out (with some glee as I remember, I am afraid I don’t have a copy of his essay to hand and haven’t been able to locate it in the library) that Wordsworth tells us the same thing four times in five lines–that the girl is not sharing her society with anyone else. She is single, solitary, by herself and alone. A needlessly extravagant telegram, then. Therefore bad poetry. Well, yes. In his callous way Graves is right, of course, but only right according to the terms of his own definition. I could erect a theory that all poets whose surnames rhyme with Waves are dunderheads. Ha! Robert Graves, you are a dunderhead, I have proved it. The fact is, the Telegram Theory is nothing like good enough. We all know that repetition is a valuable and powerful rhetorical and poetical tool. What happens to ‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall’ and ‘Break, break, break’? Sometimes profusion and repetition are the very point. That is why we have words like anaphora, antimetabole, epanalepsis, epanodos, epistrophe, palilogy, polyptoton, repetend and rentrement among many other technical rhetorical words for kinds of repetition. Certainly I would agree that in most good lines of poetry the thing said could not be said any other way, but that does not necessarily mean that each word or phrase must be semantically different. One man’s pleonasm is another man’s plenty.

Commandments that categorically insist upon contemporary language and syntax are just as open to doubt as Graves’s telegram rule. Keats himself, as I have mentioned, abandoned Hyperion because he hated all the old-fashioned inversions ‘his features stern’ for ‘his stern features’, for example, or ‘For as among us mortals omens drear/Fright and perplex, so also shuddered he–’ instead of ‘For as drear omens fright and perplex us mortals, so he shuddered’ and so on. Wrenched syntax, he felt, is no better than wrenched metre, or wrenched rhyme. Of course, he is generally speaking right, as we saw all too clearly with McGonagall. But here is a line from that definitively modern poem The Waste Land:He, the young man carbuncular, arrives

Why not ‘He, the carbuncular young man, arrives’? It would actually scan better, perfect iambic pentameter with a trochaic first foot, in fact. So if Eliot has not wrenched the syntax to fit the metre, why did he write it the way he did? T. S. Eliot of all people, so old-fashioned? I could not possibly explain why the line is so musical and funny and perfect and memorable when inverted and so feeble and uninteresting when not. It just is. I feel the same about Frost’s unusual syntax in ‘Mending Wall’:Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

These are the kinds of lines non-singers like me chant to ourselves in the shower instead of belting out ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Here is Wallace Stevens in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ with a wondrous pair of double negatives:There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,Like the clashed edges of two words that kill,

…and thenA deep up-pouring from some saltier wellWithin me, bursts its watery syllable.

Poetic Diction is about two things, it seems to me: taste and concentration. The concentration of language Graves talks about in his telegram game, yes, but also the concentration of mind that never gives up on arranging and rearranging words and phrases until taste tells you that they are right. Sometimes, of course, they will come right first go but often they take work. Much as you might walk briskly to work every day to get fit instead of using a treadmill and getting nowhere, so poets can work on their poetic diction every day, not just when they are sitting down with pen in hand practising sonnets.

BEING ALERT TO LANGUAGE

Be always alert to language: it is yours as a poet in a special way. Other may let words go without plucking them out of the air for consideration and play, we do not. Every word has its own properties. There is the obvious distinction in meaning between a word’s denotation and its connotation. For example, odour, fragrance, aroma, scent, perfume, pong, reek, stink, stench, whiff, nose and bouquet all denote smell, but they by no means connote that meaning in the same way. The more aware you are of the origins, derivations, history, evolution, social usage, nuances and character of words the better. Their physical qualities are as important to a poet as their meaning–their weight, density, euphony, quantity, texture and appearance on the page. Their odour, in fact. And as with odours, notice what physically occurs when words are combined. Not just the obvious effects of alliteration, consonance and assonance (my ‘occurs’ being close to ‘words’ just now is a rather infelicitous assonance, for example. Perhaps I should have used ‘happens’ instead) but be alive to more subtle collisions too: ‘west’ and ‘side’ are easy words to say, but who doesn’t say ‘Wesside Story’ dropping the ‘t’? ‘Black glass’ takes extra time to say because of the contiguity of the hard ‘c’ and ‘g’–this kind of effect, whether euphonious or cacophonous, is something you should always be aware of. You cannot pay too much attention to every property of every word in your poems.

Imagine the intensity of painters’ understanding and knowledge of all the colours in their paintbox. There is no end to the love affair they have with their paints, no limit to the subtleties and alterations achieved by mixing and combining. Just because we use them every day, it is no reason to suppose that we do not need to pay words precisely the same kind of attention. I believe we have to be more alert. Colours have a pure and absolute state: cerulean is cerulean, umber is umber, you can even measure their frequency as wavelengths of light. Words have no such purity or fixity. So be alert to poetic diction past and present, but be no less alive to the language of magazines, newspapers, radio, television and the street.

I do not mean that in your engagement with language you should become the kind of ghastly pedant who writes in to complain about confusions between ‘fewer’ and ‘less’, ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and so on. Irritating as such imprecision can be, we all know perfectly well that when we see or hear letters damning them they only make us think how sad the writers of them are, how desperate to be thought of as knowledgeable and of account. No, I certainly do not mean to suggest that you need to become a grammarian or adopt an academic approach to language. Keats and Shakespeare were far from academic, after all. Keats left formal studies at fourteen and trained for a career in medicine. Wordsworth did go to university, where he studied not classical verse and rhetoric, but mathematics. Yeats went to art school. Wilfred Owen as a boy worked as a lay assistant in a church and had no further education at all. Tennyson was educated till the age of eighteen by his absent-minded clergyman father. Browning, too, was educated by his father and left university after one term. Edgar Allan Poe managed a year at his university before running off to join the army. Shelley was expelled from Oxford (for atheism, rather splendidly) and Byron was more interested in his pet bear and his decadent social life at Cambridge than in his studies. But they were all passionately interested in the life of the mind and above all in every detail and quality of language that could be learned and understood.

English is a language suited to poetry like no other. The crunch and snap of Anglo-Saxon, the lyric romanticism of Latin and Greek, the comic, ironic fusion yielded when both are yoked together, the swing and jazz of slang…the choice of words and verbal styles available to the English poet is dazzling.

Think of cityscapes. In London, thanks to a mixture of fires, blitzes, ludicrous mismanagement and muddled planning, the medieval, Tudor, Georgian, Victorian and modern jostle together in higgledy-piggledy confusion. The corporate, the ecclesiastical, the imperial and the domestic coexist in blissful chaos. Paris, to take the nearest capital to London, was planned. For reasons we won’t go into, it managed to escape the attentions of the Luftwaffe. It remains a city of grand, tasteful boulevards laid out in a consistent style where, with the exception of a few self-consciously designed contemporary projects, the modern, commercial, vulgar and vernacular are held at bay beyond the outer ring of the city, like barbarians at its gates.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane: each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.

This is partly what is meant by the flexibility of English: it is more than a question of the thousands more words available to us, it is also a question of the numberless styles, modes, jargons and slangs we have recourse to. If by poetry we mean something more than the decorative, noble and refined, then English is a perfect language for poetry. So be alert to it at all times.

II

Poetic vices–ten habits to acquire–getting noticed–Poetry Today, a final rant–goodbye

Poetic Vices

LAZINESS is the worst vice a poet can have. Sentimentality, cliché, pretension, falsity of emotion, vanity, dullness, over-ambition, self-indulgence, word-deafness, word-blindness, clumsiness, technical ineptitude, unoriginality–all of these are bad but they are usually subsets and products of laziness. Laziness in prose you can get away with. There are, it is true, Flaubert-style novelists who search for ever for le mot juste, but they take their inspiration from poets and try to claim for novels precisely the same linguistic diligence and perfectionism that is an absolute essential in poetry. The real reason why McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge’ is such a disaster is that he did not have the first idea how much labour goes into the making of a poem. I do not believe that he was even dimly aware of the extremes of effort and concentration that poets a hundred thousand times more talented poured into their work. Much easier to indulge in the belief that the world is against you, that everyone else is a member of some club whose doors are closed to you because you didn’t go to the right school or have the right parents, than to realise that you simply do not work hard enough.

The first Golden Rule you signed up to when you started to read this book emphasised the necessity of taking time with poetry, as a reader and a maker of it. I emphasise that rule again with redoubled force.

I have shown you some techniques and forms of poetry, and discoursed a little on diction, but I am in no position to tell you how to write poetry that will provide you with an audience for your work. Beyond technique, the call to concentration, linguistic awareness, hard toil and the taking of time, with all the benefits of developed taste and judgement that these will bring, there is, of course, such a thing as talent. I cannot give you that and only you can judge whether you possess enough of it to make poems that others will want to read. For me, the pleasure of the thing is enough. Here, though, for what little they are worth, are a few more things to consider before we say goodbye.TEN HABITS OF SUCCESSFUL POETS THAT THEY DON’ TTEACH YOU AT HARVARD POETRY SCHOOL, OR CHICKENVERSE FOR THE SOUL IS FROM MARS BUT YOU ARE WHATYOU READ IN JUST SEVEN DAYS OR YOUR MONEY BACK

Concentration and total commitment to language are far and away the most important qualities needed for poetry writing. These other pieces of advice I have for you, hedged about with ifs and buts as they are, offer little more than obvious common-sense observations. They may seem too simple to be attractive. A complicated regimen is easy and (for a while) fun to follow, but the plain dictum don’t eat so much, while an infinitely better way of losing weight than any diet ever devised, is much harder and usually less fun.

1. CONSIDER YOUR READERS: it is only good manners to do so. Are you giving them a good time? Are you confusing them, upsetting them, boring them? Maybe you are and this is part of a deliberate poetic strategy. Just be sure you know what you are doing. This leads to my next suggestion…

2. KEEP A JOURNAL: sometimes only by talking to ourselves do we discover what we are up to. ‘Today I wrote a poem that was confusing and incoherent. But it was what I meant. Or was it? Hm. I must go back to it.’

3. CONSIDER THE VOICE OF YOUR POEM: who is speaking? You or a pretend authorial version of you?

4. READ POETRY: I did warn you that I was going to be obvious. Most popular musicians I know are fans first and foremost, owners of enormous record collections. I do not know of any poets who are not readers of poetry. You are allowed to hate some poets and be indifferent to others. But get to know as many as you can. Variety is important or you end up as an imitative shadow of your favourites.

5. TRUTHFULNESS: are the emotions (disgust, joy, anger, terror and so on) in your poem really felt, or are you feigning them for effect? Readers can tell bullshit and pretence as easily as we can detect it in someone we meet at a party. Of course, artifice is a part of poetry but again, be sure you know what you are doing.

6. CONTROL: ‘All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,’ Oscar Wilde wrote. Which is absolutely not the same as saying that all genuine feeling produces bad poetry, or that all good poetry springs from false feeling. But genuine feeling is not enough in poetry any more than it is in painting or music. Genuine feeling which isn’t pressed into some sort of shape is a tantrum or a sentimental mess. Negative capability and the objective correlative are (rather hackneyed) phrases you may want to check out, via the glossary and your own researches.

7. ENJOY YOURSELF: poetry might be a need in you, but it should not be a penance. Unless you believe yourself to be cursed by an unwanted vocation, the labour involved should be one of love.

8. FORGIVE YOURSELF: everyone writes shit from time to time. Don’t get all hysterical about it. Keep your poetic toys in the pram and start again when you feel better. Write some light and stupid verse to take the taste away. 9 THE MUSE IS CAPRICIOUS: the Greek idea of a real, living Muse whispering in your ear is a good one and it works quite well. Sometimes it truly is as if we are inspired. The work flows, we concentrate yet we are supremely relaxed, beta and theta waves are active in the brain. We are in a true creative state–the Muse is at our shoulder. BUT: next morning we may well discover that she has poured not wine but ullage into our ears. You never know with her. Our own judgement cannot go to sleep. It is the same with writing when under the influence of drugs or alcohol: we may think they are giving us poetic nectar but it can turn out next morning to be prosaic arse-gravy.

9. SAY IT OUT LOUD: however much your poetry is meant for the page, most readers will say it, out loud or in their heads. Read your work to yourself all the time, even as you are composing it.

Well, I did warn you that the points would be obvious. Suppose you have learned all you have learned from my book, read all you have read, followed all the precepts and avoided all the vices? Suppose you now have a body of work, however small, that languishes unread and suppose you wish to do something about this. What to do?

GETTING NOTICED

Most people who paint and play musical instruments do so at home, not for profit or attention but for their own pleasure. This is how I write my poetry, entirely for myself. I am therefore not qualified to enlarge upon ways to get yours noticed, published and talked about. There are many competitions, poetry clubs and societies, not to mention thousands of websites, chat-rooms and online bulletin boards which offer net-based or face-to-face advice, workshops and courses. Poetry Slams and public reading events of a similar nature have migrated from the United States and appear to be growing in popularity here. There are outlets and venues for performance poetry not unlike, and often connected to, the standup comedy circuit. New poets can be heard, applauded or gonged off like comics if they have the courage. I must add the obvious caveat that such outlets tend to promote a rather crowd-pleasing line in off-the-peg wit and ready-made satire, but this may suit your ambitions.

The first opinion you should trust, I believe, is your own, so long as it is pitilessly honest. Ask yourself, through your journal or face to face with yourself in a mirror, whether you think what you have written truly deserves a readership or audience. If the answer is an absolutely honest yes–then you will already have the confidence to proceed. If you are sincerely unsure, find someone you trust and who is patient enough and kind enough to look at your poetry or have it read to them and offer a serious and unconditionally candid response. Choose such a person well.

POETRY TODAY

Sounds like the title for a quarterly magazine, doesn’t it? Poetry Today. Well, in what kind of condition is poetry today? How is its circulation? Aside from the big guns–Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine, Alan Brownjohn, Simon Armitage, Wendy Cope, Peter Porter, Carol Ann Duffy, Tony Harrison, Les Murray and others, there are hundreds and hundreds more published poets who continue to furrow their brows and plough their furrows in the service of the art. Are there ‘schools’ of verse; is there a distinctive voice that in fifty years’ time we will know speaks in unmistakable early twenty-first century tones? If there is, I have yet to hear it. I am not sure that any poem written now, social references and changes in language aside, could not have been written fifty years ago. Perhaps this is just my own deafness or ignorance.

I am aware that much in this book will enrage or stupefy some. The very idea of clinging to ancient Greek metrical words for the description of rhythm, the use of such phrases as ‘poetic taste’ and ‘diction’, the marshalling of so many lines from dead poets–all these will cause expostulations of contempt or slow shakings of the head from those with very certain ideas about where poetry should be going and how it should be written about. If we lived in a rich time of bountiful verse and a live contemporary poetics then I would agree with them. Allow me to become a little heated and unreasonable for a moment and see if you agree with anything I am saying.

I think that much poetry written today suffers from anaemia. There is no iron in its blood, no energy, no drive. It flows gently, sometimes persuasively, but often in a lifeless trickle of the inwardly personal and the rhetorically listless. This lack of anima does not strike me as anything like the achieved and fruitful lassitude of true decadence; it is much more as if the volume has been turned down, as if poets are frightened of boldness. Lots of delicate miniatures, but few gutsy explosions of life and colour. That, perhaps, is why the colour and life in the work of poets like Armitage stand out so brightly in a dull world. The poet and critic Ian Patterson, who was kind enough to correct some of the more egregious errors in the first draft of this book, points out that there are of course many contemporary poets writing ‘terrific poetry with amazingly live (and literary) engagement with contemporary language in the UK.’ He cites John James, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley, Jeremy Prynne, John Wilkinson and the tragically short-lived Veronica Forrest-Thomson, but is (wrongly) too modest to include himself. I concede that I may have exaggerated this epidemic of pernicious anaemia, but cling to my view that far too many practising poets default to a rather inward, placid and bloodless response to the world.

The Victorians, for all their faults, had energy to spare. We see it clearly in the novel with Thackeray and Dickens and in the verse of Browning, Tennyson and Whitman. The Augustans, too, for all their grandeur, had a real charge running through their couplets. Virtuosity, strength and assurance seem not to be qualities of our age. There are obvious reasons for this, doubt, relativism, social sensitivity, blah, blah, blah. The short bursts of twentieth-century experimentalism (Dadaist aleatory verse, Ginsberg and chums up at Big Sur with their acid-induced Automatic Writing and cut-up poetry) are now all older than the hat Tristan Tzara drew his random words from. There is some electricity in the verse that takes its language and attitude from the streets,² certainly, but is literary poetry, ghastly as the phrase may be, all played out? Is it a kind of jingoistic fascism to bemoan the failure of nerve of our distinctive cultural voice? Fuck me, I do hope not.

For my own taste, I would rather read the kinds of often extreme and technically flawed but always dynamic verse of a Blake, a Whitman or a Browning than the tastefully reined in works that seem to be emerging today. It may appear contradictory of me to write a book that concentrates on metrics and form in some detail, and then argue the case for wildness. Perhaps this is the most valuable and poetically fruitful paradox of formal writing–technical perfection may be the aim, but it is out of the living and noisy struggle to escape the manacles of form that the true human voice in all its tones of love, sorrow, joy and fury most clearly emerges. ‘So free we seem, so fettered fast we are,’ says Browning’s Andrea del Sarto, before adding the now well-worn cri de coeur I have already quoted.Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,Or what’s a heaven for?

Or what’s a poem for?

GOODBYE

We have come to the end of The Ode Less Travelled. I hope you have enjoyed the journey and that you will write and read poetry with a new energy and commitment, and with deep, deep pleasure. Please do not send me your poems. I am horribly poverty-stricken when it comes to time. Before it was ever announced in any public arena that I was writing this book, word somehow got out and I have already been flooded with more unsolicited verses than I can cope with. If you were to send samples of your work to me it is possible that I might skim through one or two lines, but it is desperately unlikely that I could ever give them the concentration they deserve or be able to write back to you. It is all I can do to find time to go to the lavatory these days.

As for my poetry. I have already said often enough that I do not write for publication or recital. This is partly cowardice and embarrassment, partly a problem connected to the fact that I am well-known enough to feel that my poems will be given more attention than they deserve, whether negative or positive makes no difference, they cannot be read without the reader being likely to hear my voice not as an individual poetic voice, but as the voice of that man who publicly disports himself in assorted noisome ways. My poems come from another me, a me who went down a road I did not take. He never entered the loud public world but became, I suspect, a teacher and eventually, in his own small way, a poet.

Incomplete Glossary of Poetic Terms

I hope I haven’t left out anything vital: not all terms for metric feet are here, since they are gathered in the table of metric feet at the end of Chapter One.

abecedarian Pointless style of acrostic q.v. in ABC order.

acatalectic Metrically complete: without clipping or catalexis, acephalic or hypermetric alteration q.q.v.

accent The word used for the natural push given to words within a sentence. In poetry, accent is called stress. q.v.

accentual Of verse, metre that is defined by stress count only, irrespective of the number of weak syllables. Comic and non-literary ballads and rhymes etc. accentual-alliterative Poetry derived from the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English traditions of four-stress alliterated lines divided into two, where the first three stressed syllables alliterate according to the bang, bang, bang–crash rule, q.v.

accentual-syllabic Poetry ordered by metre and syllabic count. Iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter etc.

acephalous Lit. ‘headless’. A line of poetry lacking its initial metrical unit. Same as clipped, q.v.

acrostics Kind of verse whose first letters, when read downwards, spell out a name, word or phrase: What A Nonsensical Kind, you might think.

Adonic line The final short line of a Sapphic (Ode). Classically, the dactyl-trochee (named after Sappho’s line ‘O for Adonis’).

alba Alt. name for an aubade q.v.

alcaics Named after Alcaeus, another poet from Lesbos, greatly admired by Horace. Some English versions of his rather complex metre have been attempted, Tennyson’s ‘Milton’ being a well-known example. Alcaics now seem to be settled as a quatrain form. I will leave you to discover more.

aleatory Lit. ‘of dice’–a. verse uses chance (drawing of words from a hat, sticking a pin in a random word from a dictionary etc.) to determine word choices.

alexandrine A line of iambic hexameter, typically found in English as the last line of a Spenserian Stanza or similar pentametric verse arrangement.

allegory, allegorical The device of using a character or narrative element symbolically to refer to something else, either abstract (the quest for the Holy Grail is an allegory of Man’s search for spiritual grace), or specific (Gloriana in the Faerie Queen is an allegory of Elizabeth I).

alliteration, alliterative 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.

amphibrach, -ic A ternary metrical unit expressed as , romantic deluded etc.

amphimacer A ternary metrical unit expressed as , hand to mouth, packing case etc.

anacoluthon Change of syntax within a sentence.

anacreontics Short-lined (often seven-syllable trochaics), celebrating erotic love, wine and pleasure.

anacrusis Extra weak syllable(s) at the start of a line.

anadiplosis Repetition of the last word of one clause or line as the first of the next, e.g. Keats’s use of ‘forlorn’ in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

anapaest, -ic A ternary metrical unit expressed as , unconvinced, in a spin.

anaphora Rhetorical or poetic repetition of the first word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or stanzas.

anceps A metrical unit that can be either short or long, stressed or unstressed according to the poet’s whim. Only really found in classical verse, such as quantitative imitations of Sappho etc.

anthology Collection of poems, literally of flowers–a posy of poesy, in fact.

antimetabole Rhetorical repetition by inversion and chiasmus q.v.–e.g. ‘I pretty and my saying apt? or ‘I apt and my saying pretty?’ from Love’s Labour’s Lost.

antiphon Sung verse. antistrophe The ‘counter-turn’, used as the second part of a triad in Pindaric Odes.

aphaeresis, aphaeretic The omission of a syllable at the beginning of a word: ’gainst, ’neath etc.

aphorism Wise saying, often witty. Like an epigram but with a more universal truth. An epigram could be made about the appearance of a particular bride at a wedding, say, but this would not be an aphorism unless its wit and truth held for any occasion.

apocope, apocopation An elision or omission of the final letter or syllable of a word, ‘i’the’ for ‘in the’, ‘seld’ for ‘seldom’ and the Chaucerian ‘bet’ for ‘better’ etc.

apostrophe Aside from the obvious reference to a punctuation mark, a moment when a poet turns to address some person, object or principle, often preceded by a (pro)vocative ‘O’, as in ‘O attic shape!’ as Keats liked to say to his favourite Grecian urns.

apothegm A short aphorism, q.v.

assonance, assonantal A repetition of vowel sounds either used internally, or as a partial rhyme q.v. ‘Most holy Pope’, ‘slurred first words’, etc.

asyndeton, asyndetic The omission of conjunctions, personal pronouns and other particles: ‘hoping see you tomorrow’, ‘not fond turkey, prefer goose,’ etc.

aubade A poetic celebration of dawn or a lament at daybreak’s interference with lovers and their private bliss e.g. Romeo and Juliet: ‘But soft what light at yonder window breaks?’, Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’ etc. Also called an alba.

ballad Traditional verse form, often sung, usually in four-stress cross-rhyming quatrains, often alternating with three-stress lines. Not to be confused with ballade or salad q.v.

ballade Verse form of three stanzas, three rhymes and envoi: ababbabA ababbabA ababbabA babA.

bang, bang, bang–crash! Michael Alexander’s phrase describing the alliterative principle behind Anglo-Saxon verse. Three alliterated stresses followed by a non-alliterated one.

bathos, bathetic A (comic or pathetic) failure to achieve dignity, a banal anticlimax.

binary A metrical foot of two units: iambic, trochaic, spondaic or pyrrhic.

blank verse Non-rhyming verse: most often applied to iambic pentameter, such as that found in Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

burden A refrain, q.v.

cadence Lit. ‘falling’, the natural rhythm derived from accentuation, i.e. the rise and fall of stress. The sound that precedes a pause. caesura Of metrical verse: a pause or breath in mid line.

canto A series of long poems.

canzone A lyric poem, usually with envoi.

catalexis, catalectic Truncation: the docking of a final metrical unit, such as the last feminine syllable of a trochaic line.

cataplexis, cataplectic Hardly relevant, but a fun word. It means a poetical or rhetorical threatening of punishment, horror or disaster. Like King Lear’s ‘I will do such things, What they are, yet I know not; but they shall be The terrors of the earth’.

cauda, caudate sonnet Lit. tail. A three-line coda to a sonnet, consisting of a trimeter and two pentameters.

cento A collage poem made up of lines of real verse from different poems.

chant royal A sixty-line poem with envoi. I spared you it in Chapter Three out of care for your sanity.

chiasmus From the Gr. letter chi, meaning a ‘crossing’ of sense. A common rhetorical figure, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men’, ‘one should eat to live, not live to eat’, ‘Real pain for sham friends, Champagne for real friends’ etc.

choliamb A scazon q.v.–kind of metrical substitution, usually with ternary feet replacing binary. Forget about it.

chronogram A gematric q.v. poem or motto whose letters when added as Roman numerals make up a significant number, such as a date: e.g. Lord have mercie vpon vs = 1666 (or 1464 or permutations thereof ).

cinquain A stanza of five lines. Esp. in reference to the verse of Adelaide Crapsey.

clerihew From Edmund Clerihew Bentley. A non-metrical comical and biographical quatrain whose first line is the name of its subject.

clipped As acephalous q.v., omission of the first metrical unit in a line of verse.

closed form Any form of verse whose stanza length, rhyme scheme and other features are fixed.

closet drama Not, as you might think, the hysterics attendant upon coming out, but a play written to be read, not performed. A genre invented by the Roman playwright Seneca.

Cockney School Blackwood (of Magazine fame) and the Quarterly Review q.v. used this snobbish and wholly inappropriate appellation to describe the ‘bad’ poetic diction of Keats and Leigh Hunt and their circle. Byron, too, ‘disapproved of that School of Scribbling’ and believed Keats guilty of wasting his talents in ‘Cockneyfying and Suburbing’ (letter to John Murray, 1821).

common metre ballad metre, i.e. 4-3-4-3, rhyming abab or abcb

conceit An extended metaphor or fanciful image.

connotation The associative, implied meaning of a word, as opposed to its denotation q.v.

consonance A loose or exact repetition of consonant sounds either used internally, or as partial rhyme. ‘And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old’, fuck/fork, pushing/passion, past the post etc.

corona sequence A sonnet sequence where the last line of a sonnet is used as the first line of the next. The final sonnet will end with the opening line of the first in the sequence.

coronach A threnody or funeral dirge.

counter-turn Ben Jonson’s word for antistrophe q.v.

couplet A pair of rhyming lines.

cretic Alternative name for the amphimacer q.v., after the Cretan poet Thaletas.

cross-rhyme End-rhyming of alternate lines: abab cdcd etc.

curtal Name for a sonnet that falls short of the usual fourteen lines, if such a thing can be said to exist. Properly speaking, the Hopkins stanza with an octave reduced to a sestet.

cynghanedd From Welsh poetry, a style of interlaced alliteration: as employed by Hopkins.

dactyl Ternary foot., or long-short-short in classical prosody.

denotation The strict, literal meaning of a word, stripped of its connotation q.v., colour, suggestion, implications etc.

diacritic -al A sign, such as an accent or cedilla, that goes above or below a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.

diamante Wretchedly silly diamond-shaped verse form in which one word becomes its opposite or antithesis according to pointless rules that I can’t be bothered to go into again.

diction In poetry, the choice of words. The discourse, frame of reference, atmosphere, coloration and other aspects of word choice are all elements of poetic d.

didactic Lit. ‘teaching’–writing that intends (usu. moral) instruction.

dieresis Diacritical mark–the two dots used to show that a diphthong’s vowel sounds should be pronounced separately, ‘Noël’, ‘naïve’; etc. In metre, a word meaning a natural caesura (i.e. one that does not break a word or clause).

dimeter A verse line of two metric feet.

diminishing rhyme A rhyme scheme where each new rhyme takes a syllable or letter less than its predecessor: promotion, emotion, motion, ocean and passing, arsing, sing etc.

diphthong Two vowels together.

dipodic Composed of two feet (as most humans are).

dirge A mourning, wailing lament.

dithyramb, dithyrambic Wild choral Dionysiac celebratory verse. Often used to describe overblown poetic diction q.v.

divine afflatus (Now mock comic) phrase used to describe poetic inspiration.

dramatic monologue (Non theatrical) verse in the voice of a character, often addressing another imaginary character or the reader him/herself. ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Andrea del Sarto’, sections of The Waste Land etc.

eclogue From Virgil, pastoral poem.

elegiac Of mourning. The elegiac quatrain abab in iambic pentameter was developed by Thomas Gray for his country churchyard.

elision The omission of words or parts of words.

encomium Praise song or ode for a (usu. living) person.

endecasíllabo Italian name for a hendecasyllabic line of iambic pentameter.

end-rhyming The rhyming of final words, or final stressed syllables in lines of verse. Usual rhyming, in fact.

end-stopped Lines of verse which do not run on in sense, but whose thought ends with the line. Lines without enjambment q.v.

enjambment The running-on of sense over the end of a line of verse. Verse that is not end-stopped q.v.

entry Just testing to see whether you had got to q.v. q.v. yet.

envelope rhyme A couplet nested in two outer rhymes, as in abba.

envoi A short stanza of summation or conclusion at the end of a poem. Found in certain closed forms, such as the sestina and ballade q.q.v.

epanalepsis General word for repetition or resumption of a theme.

epanaphora Extreme anaphora q.v. As in Wendy Cope’s ‘My Lover’ in which every line begins with the word ‘For’.

epanodos Recapitulation and expansion of an image or idea.

epigram Memorably witty remark, saying or observation.

epistrophe Repetition at the end of clauses or sentences: ‘When I was a child, I spake as I child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child’ etc.

epithalamium A poem celebrating a wedding: nuptial or hymeneal verse. No specific formal requirements. Much the same as prothalamium to be honest.

epode The third part of the Pindaric Ode’s triad. Called by Jonson the stand.

esemplastic Rather fine word coined by Coleridge to describe an unlike imaginative union of two qualities or things.

expletive A word or words used to fill the metrical requirements of a line. The iambic pentameter ‘He thus did sit him down upon the rock’, is saying no more than ‘he sat on the rock’, the other five words are expletives.

fabliau A (sometimes comic) tale, originally medieval French, now applied to any short moral fable in verse or prose.

falling rhythm Metre whose primary movement is from stressed to unstressed, dactylic and trochaic verse, for example.

false friend Word or phrase whose meaning is confused with other words or phrases (often from another language) which sound similar. ‘To meld’ is used often to mean to ‘fuse’ or ‘unite’ through false friendship with ‘melt’ and ‘weld’–it actually means ‘to announce’. Similarly ‘willy-nilly’ is used to mean ‘all over the place’ where in reality it means ‘whether you like it or not’, i.e. ‘willing or unwilling’. Only sad pedants like me care about these misuses which are now common enough to be almost correct.

feedback See loop.

feminine ending An unstressed ending added to an iamb, anapaest or other usually rising foot. Hanging, waiter, television etc.

feminine rhyme The rhyming of feminine-ended words. The rhyme is always on the last stressed syllable. Rhymes for the above could be banging, later, derision.

fescennine Indecent or scurrilous verse.

filidh An Irish bard.

foot A metrical division: five feet to a pentameter, four to a tetrameter etc.

fourteeners Iambic heptameter. Seven iambs make fourteen syllables.

free verse Verse that follows no conventional form, rhyming scheme or metrical pattern.

ghazal Middle Eastern couplet form following special rules as described in Chapter Three.

gematri-a, -ic (Originally Kabbalistic) assignation of numerical value to letters–as in chronogram q.v.

glyconic Latin style of verse usu. with three trochees and a dactyl.

haijin A haiku practitioner.

haikai (no renga) The ancestor of haiku. Playful linked Japanese verse developed from the waka in the sixteenth century.

haiku Three-line verses (in English at least) with a syllable count of 5-7-5 and adhering to certain thematic principles.

hemistich A half-line of verse: the term is most often found in reference to Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry.

hendecasyllabic Composed of eleven syllables.

hendiadys Lit. ‘one through two’: a trope where a single idea is expressed by two nouns where usually it would be a qualified or modified noun: ‘nice and warm’ for ‘nicely warm’, ‘sound and fury’ for ‘furious sound’. Also phrase where ‘and’ replaces infinitive ‘to’ as in ‘try and behave’ for ‘try to behave’.

heptameter A line of verse in seven metrical feet. Fourteeners, for example.

heroic couplets Rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter.

heroic line Iambic pentameter.

heroic verse Poetry cast in heroic couplets.

hexameter A line of verse in six metrical feet.

hokku The opening verse of haikai, from which the haiku is descended.

homeoteleuton Repetition of words ending in like syllables: e.g. ‘readable intelligible syllables are horrible’, ‘a little fiddle in a pickle’ etc.

homostrophic Arrangement of identically structured stanzas, esp. as in Horatian and other ode forms.

Horatian Ode Ode in the manner of the Roman poet Horace, adopted, adapted, translated and imitated in English verse esp. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Hudibrastic Used to describe the kind of tortured polysyllabic rhyming found in Samuel Butler’s mock-epic Hudibras.

hypermetric A line with an extra syllable. Technically, a hendecasyllabic line of pentameter is hypermetric.

hypermonosyllabic Optional synaeresis q.v. A word that can be sounded with either one or two syllables, i.e. ‘réal’, ‘flówer’ and ‘líar’ (can be said as ‘reel’, ‘flour’ and ‘lyre’).

ictus The unit of stress within a foot. The second element in an iamb, the first in a trochee, the third in an anapaest etc.

idyll A short pictorial poem, chiefly lyrical or pastoral: ‘idyllic’ is often now used to mean ‘ideal’ and ‘perfect’.

internal rhyme Oh for heaven’s sake it’s obvious, isn’t it? inversion Reversal of usual sentence structure. ‘Happy am I’, etc.

jeu d’esprit Merry word play or similar gamesome larkiness.

kenning A Norse and Anglo-Saxon metaphorical or metonymic yoking of words, such as ‘whale road’ for sea.

kigo The ‘season word’ placed in a haiku to tell the reader in which time of year the verse is set.

tomato A red savoury fruit sometimes known as a love-apple which has a place in many sauces and salads but none whatever in a glossary of poetical terms. Especially when it has not been inserted in the correct alphabetical order.

kireji The caesura that should occur in the first or second line of a haiku.

kyrielle A refrain verse form descended from an element of Catholic mass.

lay Narrative poem or short song.

leonine rhyme Internal rhyming in verse of long measure where the word preceding the caesura rhymes with the end-word.

limerick You know perfectly well.

lineation The arrangement of lines in a poem, how they break and how their length is ordered. Prescribed in metrical verse but at the poet’s discretion in free verse. See stichic.

lipograms Verse or writing where for some reason best known to himself the poet has decided to omit one letter throughout. As I have unquestionably done with the letter q here. Damn.

litotes Understatement for comic effect, often cast in negatives to indicate a positive: ‘a not unsatisfactory state of affairs’ for ‘a splendid outcome’ etc. Same as meiosis q.v.

loop See feedback.

luc bat A Vietnamese form described in Chapter Three.

lyric ode An open form of rhymed, stanzaic verse, usually in iambic pentameter, descended as much from the sonnet as from the Horatian Ode. Used to describe the odes of Keats and other romantic poets.

majuscule Capital letters. Upper Case.

masculine ending A stressed word end.

masculine rhyme The rhyming of same.

meiosis Cell division to a biologist, understatement to a grammarian. Often comical. See litotes.

melon Sweet pleasant fruit. What possible reason can it have for being in this glossary? Andrew Marvell stumbled on them as he passed, but otherwise they have no business being here. Please ignore this entry.

melopoeia Word coined by Ezra Pound to describe the overall soundscape of a poem.

mesostich Halfway point of a line–used to apply to acrostics that descend therefrom.

metaphor Figurative use of a word or phrase to describe something to which it is not literally applicable. ‘The ship ploughed through the waves’, ‘Juliet is the sun’, ‘there’s April in her eyes’ etc.

metonym A metaphoric trope in which a word or phrase is used to stand in for what it represents: ‘the bottle’ is a metonym for ‘drinking’, ‘the stage’ for ‘theatrical life’, ‘Whitehall’ for the civil service etc. Kennings q.v. and synecdoche are often metonymic.

minuscule non capital letters. lower case.

molossus A ternary foot of three long, or stressed, units. ‘Short sharp shock’, etc.

monody Ode or dirge sung or declaimed by a single individual.

monometer A metric line of one foot.

monosyllable Let me say this in words of one sill ab uhl.

mora From Lat. for ‘delay’. In syllable-timed languages the duration of one short syllable. Two morae make a long syllable. Equivalent of crotchet and minim in music.

Muses Nine multi-domiciled girls (the daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory) who shuttle between Pieria, Parnassus and Mount Helicon and give poets and others inspiration. Erato helps us with our Love Poetry, Calliope with our epics, Melpomene with our tragedies, Polyhymnia is good for sacred verse and Thalia for comedy. For non-poets Clio looks after History and Renault motor cars, Euterpe is in charge of music, Terpsichore is the dance mistress and Urania teaches astronomy.

near rhyme Echoic devices such as assonance, consonance and homeoteleuton q.q.v

negative capability Keats’s phrase (used in a letter of 1818 and referring to Shakespeare after being inspired by Kean’s performance as Richard III) ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. A phrase now used to describe the poetic ability to efface self and take on the qualities being described.

nonce word A word coined for use on one occasion: not a nonsense word–that would be a false friend q.v.

nonet No, no. Silly verse form of ascending or diminishing syllabic count.

numbers A now archaic word for lines of verse.

objective correlative Phrase coined by T. S. Eliot in a 1919 essay on Hamlet to refer to the context of an emotion, the pattern of events, diction etc. leading to an emotional response. Now often used to mean the poet’s intended emotional effect. Eliot felt that Hamlet lacked an o. c.

octameter A metric line of eight feet.

octave The first eight lines of a (usually Petrarchan or Petrarchan variant) sonnet.

ode Verse form on one theme, now usually applied to lyric poems.

Old English Anglo-Saxon (approx. fifth–twelfth century). Applies to four-stress hemistichal alliterative accentual verse, e.g. Beowulf.

onomatopoei-a, -ic Of words whose sounds imitate their meaning: e.g. ‘click’, ‘hiss’, ‘susurration’ etc.

open form Metrical rhymed verse where issues like the number of stanzas are not fixed, but up to the poet.

ottava rima An open form of eight-line verse rhyming abababcc. Byron’s Don Juan, late Yeats etc.

oxymoron Lit. ‘sharp blunt’ a contradictory phrase: as in Romeo and Juliet’s ‘O loving hate! O heavy lightness!’, or a paradoxical phrase such as ‘eloquent silence’, ‘living death’ or ‘military intelligence’ (ho-ho).

paean A song of praise, encomium.

palilogy Repetition–what a lot of words for it there are.

panegyric Writing in praise of a character’s specific qualities or achievements.

pantoum Malayan closed form with refrained lines. See Chapter Three.

paragram To hide a name or word inside text. ‘A cut and paSTEPHENomenon’, or’ Sui TablE Poetic HiddEN word’.

paralepsis To say something while pretending not to: ‘I shall not mention his appalling table manners’ etc.

para-rhyme Partial rhyme, assonance or consonance rhyming, for example, head/bet, foul/stout, feel/full. Also called slant-rhyme or off-rhyme.

parody Imitation of the style of another.

paronomasia Wordplay, punning.

particle Small word like a conjunction (and, or, but), preposition (for, of, with, by), pronoun (they, his, me, who, that) and so on.

pathetic fallacy John Ruskin’s term for the romantic attribution of life and a soul to inanimate objects or principles, Nature esp.

pattern poem A poem whose physical shape on the page represents an object of some kind. Same as shaped poetry.

pentameter A metrical line of five feet.

periphrasis A roundabout way of speaking, circumlocution.

Petrarchan sonnet A sonnet form adapted from Petrarch’s original cycle of poems to his Laura: the octave rhymes abba abba and the sestet in English can be anything from the original cdecde to cdcdcd, cdcdee and other variations.

phaleucian A Greek metre consisting of a spondee, dactyl and three trochees.

phanopoeia Name Pound gave to Imagism in action–a revelatory or reified image.

phoneme Base unit of sound.

Pindaric Ode From the Greek poet Pindar; celebratory or praise songs that developed into formal triadic odes in English.

pleonasm Tautology, use of redundant words, unnecessary repetition–as in this entry. Not to be confused with ‘neoplasm’ which means a morbid new growth or tissue.

poesie, poesy Now poncey word for poetry.

polyptoton Repetition of the same word, but using different endings and inflexions e.g. ‘It’s socially unacceptable in society to socialise with an unsociable socialist’ etc.

prosody The art of versification: the very subject of this magnificent little book.

prothalamium An epithalamium, specifically one to be recited before entry into the bridal chamber (Spenser).

pyrrhic A binary foot of two unstressed units.

quantitative Of quantity. A word’s quantity is the sum of its vowel lengths. In quantitative verse, feet are not elements of stress but of sound duration (morae q.v.). ‘Smooth’ is long, ‘moth’ is short and so on. The stuff of classical verse, quantitative poetry was never much more than an experiment in the stress-timed English language. Longfellow’s Evangeline and Southey’s dactylic hexameters remain possibly the best-known examples.

Quarterly Review Tory magazine begun in 1809. Shelley held a ‘homicidal article’ in it responsible for Keats’s early demise: ‘Who killed John Keats? I, said the Quarterly, So savage and Tartarly, ’Twas one of my feats.’ Byron adapted S’s squib in Don Juan (but see under Cockney School).

quaternary Divided into four: in prosody this refers to metrical feet that have four units, such as the choriamb and the antispast.

quatorzain Name given to a fourteen-line poem that is not considered by the prosodist or critic using the term to be a ‘true’ sonnet. A subjective matter, to be honest.

quatrain A four-line stanza.

quintain A five-line stanza, or cinquain.

q.v. From Latin quod vide meaning ‘which see’ or ‘take a look at that one’, used in fancy glossaries like this to follow a word in the body of a definition which has its own entry q.v.

rann A quatrain in Irish verse.

redondilla Spanish verse cast in octosyllables.

refrain Line repeated at set intervals within a song or poem.

reify, reification To concretise the abstract, to embody an idea.

rentrement Refrain, burden or single-lined chorus.

repetend Any word or phrase that is (to be) repeated.

rhadif The refrain line of a ghazal.

rhapsody The sung part of an epic or saga. Applied to moments of lyricism in otherwise non-lyric verse, i.e. the ‘Isles of Greece’ section in Byron’s Don Juan.

rhopalic Progression of words whereby each word is longer by one syllable than its predecessor.

rhopalics Too silly to bother with.

rhyme royal, rime royal An open stanza form following the scheme ababbcc. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ are written in this form.

rhyme-scheme The pattern of rhyming in a stanza or passage of verse, abba abab, aa etc represent various examples of r. s.

rich rhyme The rhyming of words that either look and sound the same but have a different meaning (homonyms), ‘the sound is very sound’, or words that sound the same but look different, (homophones) like blue/blew or praise/preys, gt;or words that look the same but sound different, ‘he wore a bow and made a bow to the audience’ etc.

rictameter See rhopalics.

rime en kyrielle Used to describe any rentrement q.v. or poetic refrain.

rime retournée Backwards rhyme, but of sound not spelling: i.e. not emit and time, Eros and sore but mite or might and time, Eros and sorry etc.

rising rhythm Metre whose primary movement is from unstressed to stressed, iambs and anapaests for example.

rondeau Closed French form with various English guises. R-aabba aabR aabbaR seems to be the most common form, where R is the first half of the opening line. ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrea is a well-known example of this kind of r.

rondeau redoublé Variation of rondeau q.v. where the last lines of each stanza become refrain lines for the following stanzas. See the ‘More Closed French Forms’ section of Chapter Three.

rondel Another French rentrement form. Check it out in Chapter Three, as above.

rondel prime Ditto basically.

rondelet And again.

rondine The name of Shiraz’s sister in Footballer’s Wives. No, but shush at once.

roundel Swinburne’s name for his adaptation of one or other of the French letter-R forms.

roundelay Refrained verse of some bloody kind.

Rubai, ruba’iat, ruba’iyat At last, sense. Quatrain verse of Persian origin, rhyming aaba, ccdc etc.

salad Summery vegetable assemblage not to be confused with ballad or ballade q.v. Often contains tomatoes q.v.

Sapphic metre In classical verse, a hendecasyllabic line composed of a trochee, an anceps, a dactyl, a trochee and a spondee.

Sapphic Ode A stanza of three lines in Sapphic metre as above, followed by an Adonic line. The English stress-based adaptation as seen in Pope and others is usually in iambic pentameter or tetrameter with an iambic dimeter instead of a true Adonic.

Satanic School Southey’s petulant name for poets like Byron, Shelley and Leigh Hunt who were better than he was and had more integrity.

scazon Substitution of a ternary foot for a binary. See choliamb.

schwa The phonetic character that stands for a scudded uh sound, as in the weak vowel sounds in words like act and commn and gramm.

scop Old English or Nordic storyteller, bard or poet.

Scriblerus, Martin Group pseudonym under which satirical verses were published in the eighteenth century. Prominent members included Swift and Pope. Also known as the Scriblerus Club.

scud To skip lightly over a syllable imparting no stress.

sdrucciolo Cool word for triple-rhyme.

semantics The study of linguistic meaning.

semeion A basic metrical unit, either stressed or unstressed.

semiotics, semiology The study of linguistic (and by extension social, cultural etc.) signs. The base study in structuralism, formalism, Saussurian linguistics, Lévi-Strauss-style social anthropology etc.

senryu, senriu A haiku that is more about people than nature.

septain A stanza of seven lines.

sestet A stanza of six lines; also the final six lines of a (usually) Petrarchan sonnet.

sestina A closed verse form in six stanzas and an envoi determined by rules of some complexity. See the section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

Shakespearean sonnet The native English sonnet form adapted by Drayton, Sidney and others which found its apotheosis at the hands of Will. It rhymes abab cdcd efef gg.

shaped poem See pattern poems.

shasei The ‘sketch of nature’ that a haiku is supposed to render.

Skeltonics Merry, rather clumsy subversive and scurrilous irregular verses, named after John S. (fifteenth–sixteenth-century English poet). Sometimes called tumbling verse.

slam Originally Chicagoan poetry contests or public recitals of verse held as entertainment events.

slant-rhyme See partial rhyme.

song that luc bat A version of luc bat.

sonnet A poem of fourteen lines, usually following a particular scheme, e.g. Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian or variations thereof.

sonnet of sonnets A sequence of fourteen sonnets.

sonnet redoublé A fifteen-poem corona sequence in which the fifteenth is made of the last lines of the previous fourteen. Something to do between lunch and tea.

Spenserian sonnet Close to Shakespearean s., but with vestigial Petrarchan internal couplets: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Spenserian stanza An open stanzaic form in iambic pentameter developed by Spenser for The Faerie Queen and later used by Keats and Tennyson. It rhymes ababbcbcc and features a final line in iambic hexameter, an alexandrine.

spondee A metrical unit of two stressed feet. Or long feet if you’re an ancient Greek.

sprung rhythm A phrase coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to describe verse in which only the stresses are counted. See the section on it towards the end of Chapter One.

stand A place to put a cake. Or, Ben Jonson’s word for epode.

stanza, stanzaic What a verse is to a hymn or song, so a stanza is to a poem.

stave Sometimes used to refer to a stanza.

stichic Of or in lines: how a poem is presented as distinct to prose. Christopher Ricks once said the real defining difference between prose and poetry was that whereas prose has to go to the end of a line, with poetry it’s an option. Reductive logic at its best.

stichomythia Verse presented as dialogue, often rapidly alternating between speakers. In verse drama refers to dialogue of single lines rather than speeches.

stress The feeling that comes upon an author when he knows he must deliver a book to his publisher when it isn’t quite finished yet and there’s a glossary to be completed.

strophe The first part of a Pindaric Ode’s triad. What Jonson called the turn.

substitutions The use of an alien metric foot in a line of otherwise regular metrical pattern. Pyrrhic and trochaic substitutions are common in iambic verse, for example.

suspension of disbelief Term coined by Coleridge to describe a reader’s willingness to accept as true what clearly is not.

syllable, syllabic The basic sound unit of a word. Come on, you know perfectly well. Of poetry it refers to forms that are predicated on their syllabic count rather than any metric considerations. The haiku and the tanaga, for example.

syllepsis Kind of zeugma q.v. where a verb governs two unlikely nouns or phrases: as in ‘he left in a cab and a temper’, and Pope’s ‘Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade’.

synaeresis A gliding of two syllables into one: in the opening line of Paradise Lost ‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit’ d becomes the four-syllable ‘disobedyence’. Also called synaloepha.

synaloepha Look up at the preceding entry.

syncope The elision of a syllable from a word: ‘prob’ly’ for ‘probably’ etc.

synecdoche A figure of speech in which the part stands in for the whole or vice versa: e.g. ‘England won the Ashes’ where ‘England’ means the English Cricket XI, ‘twenty hands’, where ‘hand’ stands for a crewman etc.

syzygy High score at Scrabble that means a pair of connected or corresponding things. Two hemistichs make a syzygy, you might say, or a plug and a socket together. In poetics also refers to multiple alliteration and consonance, as in the Ms in Tennyson’s ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms/And murmuring of innumerable bees’ (from ‘The Princess’).

tanaga A syllabic Filipino verse form.

tanka A syllabic Japanese cinquain form of verse. The count is 5-7-5-7-7.

telestich An acrostic where it is the last letters that do the spelling out.

teleuton The terminating element of a line.

tercet A three-line stanza.

ternary A foot composed of three metrical elements. Anapaest, dactyl, amphimacer etc.

terza rima An open stanzaic form with interlocking cross-rhyming. Used by Dante for his Inferno.

tetractys Bizarre form of syllabic verse developed by Mr Stebbing.

tetrameter A four-stress line.

transferred epithet Illogical (often comic) use of image, transferring meaning from mood of person to object: ‘I lit a moody cigarette’, ‘sad elms’ etc.

triad, triadic The three-part structure of Pindaric Odes. Each triad consists of strophe, antistrophe and epode or turn, counter-turn and stand as Ben Jonson dubbed them. Originated as actual physical movements in Greek choric dances.

tribrach Ternary unit of three unstressed syllables. Forget it.

trimeter A three-stress line.

triolet A closed French form of some sweetness. Or perhaps it’s just the name. It rhymes ABaAbbAB where A and B are rentrements.

triple rhyme Tri-syllabic (usually dactylic) rhyme, merited/inherited, eternal/infernal, merrier/terrier etc.

triplet Three-line couplet, aaa, bbb etc. Augustan poets braced them in a curly bracket.

trochee A binary metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables:

.

trope Any rhetorical or poetic trick, device or figure of speech that changes the literal meaning of words. Metaphor and other common figures are tropes.

tumbling verse See Skeltonics.

turn Ben Jonson’s word for a strophe.

twiner Term used by Walter de la Mare to describe a kind of double limerick form.

ubi sunt Lit. ‘where are they?’ Poetic formula addressing something vanished: ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ (Keats, ‘Ode to Autumn’), ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?’ (Ballade by François Villon).

vatic A poetic prophecy.

Venus and Adonis Stanza A six-line stanzaic form of iambic pentameter that takes its name from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. It rhymes ababcc. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ etc.

vers libre French for free verse.

vignette In poetry, a delicate but precise scene or description.

villanelle See section devoted to it in Chapter Three.

virgule In metrics, the mark used for foot division.

volta The ‘turn’ marking the change of mood or thought between the (Petrarchan) sonnet’s octave and sestet q.q.v.

Vorticism Word coined by Pound for British phalanx of the modernist movement. Most often used to refer to work (in paint and verse) of Wyndham Lewis. They had their own fanzine–Blast!. Rejection of sentimentality and verbal profusion.

waka Original Japanese verse from which haikai and haiku descended.

weak ending See feminine ending, but take no offence therefrom.

wrenched accent Sound and sense of words vitiated by the need for them to fit the metre.

wrenched rhyme A word forced out of its natural pronunciation by its need to rhyme.

wretched rhyme Bad rhyme.

wretched sinner Me.

zeugma Lit. ‘yoking’: ‘she wore a Chanel dress and an expression of disappointment’. Essentially the same as syllepsis q.v. The differences between them are trivial and undecided.

zymurgy Word that always tries to get into glossaries and dictionaries last but is often beaten by zythum, which, ironically perhaps, it helps create. Something to do with fermentation. More connected to Yeast than Yeats.

zythum Ancient Egyptian beer.

APPENDIX

Arnaut’s Algorithm

The line-ends of the first stanza (A, B, C, D, E and F) are chosen for the second and subsequent stanzas according to a ‘spiral’ algorithm illustrated in Figure 1. It can be seen that the position and relative order of the line ending alters in a complex manner from stanza to stanza.

Figure 1: The ‘spiral’ algorithm

Consider line-end A: it moves down one line for the second stanza and then down two lines for the third stanza, down one line again for the fourth stanza and so on. The algorithm can therefore be considered as the sequence of displacements from the starting position, namely, +1; +2; +1,–2; +3;–5. The last displacement returns the first line-end (A) from the last line of the last stanza to the starting position.

Defining the sequence of translations as a we see that:

How do the other line-ends behave after six iterations? Well, consider the situation after the first iteration; line-end A now occupies the position previously occupied by line-end B. Now carry out six iterations, namely +2; +1;–2; +3;–5 and finally the first of the next cycle: +1. This sequence also sums to zero, meaning that the line-end returns to where it was. In general therefore we can say for all line ends in the first stanza corresponding to the position of line-end A after interation m;

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.