The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

³⁴ My edition of Gawain was edited by Tolkien, who did much to popularise Middle English verse, through his scholarship as much as through his Middle Earth fantasies.

³⁵ Derived from the theology of Duns Scots, whom Hopkins revered.

From the French vers libre, coined in Paris in an 1886 edition of La Vogue, which included excerpts of Whitman among the Laforgue and Rimbaud.

³⁷ A reading of those poets will of course reveal much in the way of metrics, form and rhyming, but the generality of their work escaped into free verse.

³⁸ A Filipino language.

³⁹ Technically a mora-timed language: morae being phonological units of duration.

⁴⁰ The longest syllabic verse poem in the language, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia. I tried–for your sake, dear reader, I tried–but gave up after line 23.

¹ Named after Leo, the twelfth-century Canon of Saint Victor’s in Paris.

²Near rhyme and off rhyme are terms used too.

³ Presumably this is what a poetaster does: give poe-a-try…

⁴Aphaeresis means the dropping of a first letter or letters of a word: in poetry it refers to ’neath, ’twas, ’mongst–that kind of thing. It’s also something to do with separating plasma from blood cells, but that needn’t worry us.

⁵ Or ‘bachelor’ with ‘naturaler’ as Ogden Nash manages to do…

⁶ From the Italian word meaning ‘slippery down-slope’ and used for a kind of glib Italian dactylic rhyme. There is a Sdrucciolo dei Pitti in Florence, a sloping lane leading down to the Pitti Palace. I once ate a bun there.

⁷ From the French rime riche.

⁸Hight is an archaic word for ‘called’, as in ‘named’: ‘a poet hight Thomas Hood’.

⁹ Anthony Burgess wrote a novel Abba Abba which imagines a meeting between Keats and the Italian sonneteer Belli: the title is a pun on the Petrarchan rhyme-scheme and the Hebrew for ‘father’. Not sure where the Swedish popsters got their name.

¹⁰Sir William ‘Topaz’ McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burma, a title conferred by King Thibaw of Burma and the Andaman Islands in 1894

¹¹ Despite Tennyson writing a poem about their charge too: ‘The charge of the gallant three hundred, the Heavy Brigade!’ Don’t milk it Alfie, love…

¹² Having said which I have invented a poetic method that utilises the provokingly silly incompetence of Voice Recognition Software, allowing its mistakes to furnish interesting poetic ideas. It gave me ‘power monkey’ for ‘poet manqué’ recently. Such aleatory assistance can be suggestive.

¹ Although, to be fair, he did repent and write: ‘the worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.’

² Incidentally, on the off-chance that you have submitted a poem for any competition that I have judged, or plan to in the future, please don’t think that I will condemn a poem to the bin because it is in free verse or raise one to the top of the pile because it is formal. A good free verse poem is better than a bad sonnet and vice versa.

³ Actually, I have to confess I quite like ‘afterloved’…

⁴ You may think ‘forbade to wade’ is a clumsy internal rhyme–actually ‘forbade’ was (and still should be, I reckon) pronounced ‘for-bad’.

⁵ Mind you, at the time of going to print the website advertising these glories had not been updated since 2004. I do hope the competition hasn’t been stopped.

⁶ Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds produced their album Murder Ballads in 1996.

⁷ Written at the time of the trial but published posthumously. Another wonderful Housman tirade against sexual intolerance is to be found in ‘The Laws of God, the Laws of Man’.

⁸ A dithyramb is a kind of wild choral hymn (usually to Dionysus, the Greek God of wine–Bacchus to the Romans). It now often refers to any rather overblown, uncontrolled verse style.

⁹ Someone told me they saw a grave to one John Longbottom, who died at the age of ten. His gravestone read ars longa, vita brevis: a rude epitaph for a churchyard, but witty. Works especially well if you remember that in Latin the ‘s’ is always unvoiced…

¹⁰ I don’t want you to go thinking that this is the usual kind of conversation I have, least of all my friends.

¹¹ Not triplets, which are three-line groups that rhyme with each other aaa, bbb etc.

¹² In its strictest form, the word Sestina should also appear in the envoi. Crazy, huh?

¹³ Anthony Holden, in The Wit in the Dungeon, his masterly biography of Leigh Hunt, has this to say about the incident: ‘Whether or not Carlyle’s crusty old wife actually had given Hunt a kiss, let alone leapt from her chair to do so, we will never know; no such unlikely moment is documented in any of the relevant parties’ letters or journals.’

¹⁴ See if you can get hold of ‘A Platonic Blow’ for example.

¹⁵ I mean exotic in its original sense of ‘from far away’ not in the travel brochure sense.