The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

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.