The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
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The author and publisher acknowledge use of lines from the following works:
Simon Armitage, ‘Poem’, Kid, Faber, 1999
W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron, II’, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, ‘Meiosis’, ‘Precious Five’, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, ‘Miss Gee’, ‘Lullaby’, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson, Faber 1976, rev. 1991
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, ‘Rockin’ a Man Stone Blind’, Wild Meat, Lost Roads Publishers, USA, 1986
John Betjeman, ‘Death in Leamington’, Collected Poems, John Murray, 2003
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Sestina’, Complete Poems, ed. Tom Paulin, Chatto & Windus, 2004
Jorge Luis Borges, Haikus and Tanaka from Obras Completas (4 vols), Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires, 2005
Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. Kingsley Amis, OUP, 1978
Anne Carson, ‘Eros The Bittersweet’, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998
G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Ballade of Suicide’, The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton, Dodd Mead, 1980
Wendy Cope, ‘Valentine’, Serious Concerns, Faber, 1992
––– ‘Engineer’s Corner’, Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, Faber, 1986
Frances Cornford, ‘Fat Lady Seen From A Train’, Collected Poems, Enitharmon Press, 1996
Cummings, E. E., ‘1 (a’, ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’, Selected Poems, Liveright Books, 1994
Elizabeth Daryush, ‘Still Life’, Collected Poems, Carcanet, 1972
Hilda Doolittle, ‘Sea Poppies’, Selected Poems, Carcanet, 1997
Norman Douglas, ‘Wagtail’and Anacreontics from Norman Douglas: A Portrait, Edizioni La Conchiglia, Capri, Italy, 2004
Marriott Edgar, The Lion and Albert, Methuen, 1978
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’, Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, Faber, 1969
Robert Frost, ‘Spring Pools’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Mending Wall’, The Poetry of Robert Frost, Vintage, 2001
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the Titanic)’, ‘The Lacking Sense’, Collected Poems, Wordsworth Editions, 1994
Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry Picking’, ‘From the Frontier of Writing’, Opened Ground: Poems 1966–96, Faber, 1998
Michael Heller, ‘She’, Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems, Salt Publishing, 2003
A. E. Housman, ‘The Colour of his Hair’, Collected Poems, ed. J. Sparrow, Penguin, 1995 (By permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman)
Ted Hughes, ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, ‘Thistle’, ‘The Sluttiest Sheep in England’, ‘Eagle’, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan, Faber, 2003
Donald Justice, ‘The Tourist from Syracuse’, Collected Poems, Knopf, USA, 2004
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Tommy’, ‘If’, The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling, Wordsworth Editions, 1994
Carolyn Kizer, ‘Parents’ Pantoum’, Copper Canyon Press, USA, 1996
Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘Toads’, ‘For Sidney Bechet’, ‘The Trees’, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, Faber, 2003
Derek Mahon, ‘Antarctica’, Collected Poems, Gallery Press, 1999
Marianne Moore, ‘The Fish’, The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman, Penguin, 2005
Ogden Nash, ‘The Sniffle’, Best of Ogden Nash, ed. Smith and Eberstadt, Methuen, 1985
Dorothy Parker, ‘Rondeau Redoublé (and Scarcely Worth the Trouble at That)’, ‘Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals’, The Collected Dorothy Parker, Penguin, 2001 (By permission of Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd)
Ian Patterson, ‘Sestina’, Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969–2002, Salt Publishing, 2003
––– ‘Shakespeare Cento’ and ‘A. E. Housman Cento’ are previously unpublished and are reproduced with the author’s permission
Ezra Pound, ‘In A Station of the Metro’, ‘The Sea Farer: from the Anglo Saxon’, ABC of Reading, Norton, 1960
––– ‘Apparuit’, Personae:The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, Faber, 2001
Robert Service, ‘Dangerous Dan McGrew’, The Best of Robert Service, A. & C. Black, 1995 (first English edition edited by Ernest Benn, 1978) ©1960 Germaine Service
Wallace Stevens, ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, The Complete Poems, Vintage, 1990
Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, ‘In My Craft and Sullen Art’, Collected Poems, Everyman Edition, Phoenix, 2000
R. S. Thomas, ‘The Welsh Hill Country’, Everyman Selected Poems of R. S. Thomas, ed. Anthony Thwaite, J. M. Dent, 1996
W. B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, ‘The Choice’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘When You Are Old’, The Poems, ed. Richard Finneran, Macmillan, 1983
Benjamin Zephaniah, ‘Talking Turkey’, Talking Turkeys, Puffin Books, 1995
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.