The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

by Stephen Fry

  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’T TEACH YOU AT HARVARD POETRY SCHOOL, OR CHICKEN VERSE FOR THE SOUL IS FROM MARS BUT YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ IN JUST SEVEN DAYS OR YOUR MONEY BACK

  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.

  10 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 stand-up 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 t
rue 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?

  GOOD BYE

  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.

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

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

  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.