The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

²¹ After all, in French (as opposed to Spanish, say), a diacritical mark (a written accent) is not about syllabic emphasis: ecole is evenly stressed, the accent is just there to modify the vowel sound, not impart extra stress to it.

²² Dickinson’s works remain untitled: the numbers refer to their order in the 1955 Harvard variorum edition.

²³ At first attempt I mistyped that as ‘A Robin Red breast in a Cafe’, ‘Makes Heaven go all daffy’, I suppose…

²⁴ A common but metrically meaningless convention.

25 Including Sir Geoffrey Keynes’s definitive 1957 edition.

²⁶ It was T. S. Eliot.

²⁷ ‘But that’s just plain silly’ is amphibrachic: these feet can get into your system.

A quintain or cinquain being a five-line verse.

²⁹ But not Oxford Street, which would be more of a dactyl, this is an oddity of English utterance.

³⁰ ‘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’ is how the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics puts it, with trademark elegance and concision.

³¹ Pronounced scissor-gee: ‘a pair of connected or corresponding things’.

³² From the C text: shorn of its yoghs and thorns, thanks to Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall’s invaluable edition, published by Edward Arnold for York Medieval Texts.

³³ A work-shy monk, not attached to any monastic order. Like Chaucer, Langland was very down on the species.

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.