The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

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

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

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–––‘Shakespeare Cento’ and ‘A. E. Housman Cento’ are previously unpublished and are reproduced with the author’s permission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.