The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

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.