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.
1 Pitch
2 Unless otherwise stated, I use ‘English’ here and throughout the book to refer to the English
3 ‘Convenient and innocuous nomenclatorial handles,’ as Vladimir Nabokov calls them in his
4 He sat up without another word and split the rope in two with his axe.
5 From
6 Caesuras have a more ordered and specific role to play in French verse, dramatic or otherwise. French poems, like their geometrically planned gardens, were laid out with much greater formality than ours. They are more like regular rests in musical bars. We need not worry about this formal use.
7 Hence too, possibly, caesarean section, though some argue that this is named after Julius Caesar who was delivered that way. Others claim that this was why Julius was called Caesar in the first place, because he was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. We needn’t worry about that, either. Incidentally, in America they are spelled ‘cesura’.
8 Wordsworth, sonnet: ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room.
9 There are metrists who would argue that there are more caesuras than that: there may be ‘weak’ breaks in some of the other lines, but my reading stands, so there.
10 A
is a
12 T. Steele.
13 ‘Nature so spurs them on that people long to go on pilgrimages.’
14 Milton, like many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century exponents of iambic pentameter, seemed very reluctant to use feminine endings, going so far as always to mark ‘heaven’ as the monosyllable ‘heav’n’ whenever it ended a line. Finding two hendecasyllables in a row in
15 Ditto: Pope took great pride in the decasyllabic nature of his rhyming couplets. This is one of only two feminine endings in the whole (over 1,500 line) poem, the other being a rhyme of ‘silly’ with ‘Sir Billy’: it seems it was acceptable to Pope so long as the rhyming words were proper names. Maybe here he hears Cowards as Cards and Howards as Hards…
16 The Prelude Wordsworth’s hero was, poetically and politically, Milton and W shows the same disdain for weak endings. I’m fairly convinced that for him ‘being’ is actually elided into the monosyllable ‘beeng’!
17 Many prosodists would argue, as I have said earlier, that there is no such thing as a spondee in English verse, partly because no two contiguous syllables can be pronounced with absolute equal stress and partly because a spondee is really a description not of accent, but of
If you already know your feet and think that this is really an amphibrach, a dactyl and two iambs, I’m afraid I shall have to kill you.
19 When I wrote this, we had just lost the first Test against Australia and I was pessimistic…
20 Named from a twelfth-century French poem,
