The Ode Less Travelled

Author: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101216824
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Comedian and actor Stephen Fry's witty and practical guide, now in paperback, gives the aspiring poet or student the tools and confidence to write and understand poetry. Stephen Fry believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. In The Ode Less Travelled, he invites readers to discover the delights of writing poetry for pleasure and provides the tools and confidence to get started. Through enjoyable exercises, witty insights, and simple step-by-step advice, Fry introduces the concepts of Metre, Rhyme, Form, Diction, and Poetics. Most of us have never been taught to read or write poetry, and so it can seem mysterious and intimidating. But Fry, a wonderfully competent, engaging teacher and a writer of poetry himself, sets out to correct this problem by explaining the various elements of poetry in simple terms, without condescension. Fry's method works, and his enthusiasm is contagious as he explores different forms of poetry: the haiku, the ballad, the villanelle, and the sonnet, among many others. Along the way, he introduces us to poets we've heard of but never read. The Ode Less Travelled is not just the survey course you never took in college, it's a lively celebration of poetry that makes even the most reluctant reader want to pick up a pencil and give it a try.

The Ode Less Travelled

Author: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781592402489
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
A guide to writing poetry covers different poetic forms, structures and techniques.

The Ode Less Travelled

Author: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407088432
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
If you can speak and read English, you can write poetry. The trick is knowing where to start. Stephen Fry, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms. Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday, an epithalamion for your sister's wedding or a villanelle excoriating the government's housing policy, The Ode Less Travelled will give you the tools and the confidence to do so. Brimful of enjoyable exercises, witty insights and simple step-by-step advice, The Ode Less Travelled guides the reader towards mastery and confidence in the Mother of the Arts.

Rules for the Dance

Author: Mary Oliver
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395850862
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
For both readers and writers of poetry, here is a concise and engaging introduction to sound, rhyme, meter, and scansion - and why they matter. "The dance, " in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work - and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure."

Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems to Ease the Mind

Author: Jonathan Bate
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008168164
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Can you be re-lit by poetry? This little book offers everyone one of the oldest of all remedies for stress: the reading of poetry.

Beautiful & Pointless

Author: David Orr
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062079417
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
"David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.

Coming of Age as a Poet

Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674010246
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
With characteristic precision, authority, and grace, Vendler helps readers to appreciate the conception and practice of poetry as she explores four poets and their first "perfect" works. 4 halftones.

Poetic Designs

Author: Stephen Adams
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551111292
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
There are numerous introductions to poetry and prosody available, but none at once so comprehensive and so accessible as this. With the increasing emphasis on free verse, the past generation has developed a widespread impression that the study of poetic meter is old fashioned—or even that form ‘doesn’t matter’ in poetry. It is an impression that has not been dispelled by the emphasis of some of the existing texts in the area on forms that are now rare or outmoded. The irony is that simultaneously in the past decade interest in formal matters among many poets and literary scholars has been on the increase; the reality is that prosody is today on the cutting edge of literary studies. Stephen Adams’ text provides a full treatment of traditional topics, from the iambic pentameter through other accentual-syllabic rhythms (trochaic, dactylic and so on) and covering as well other metrical types, stanza structure, the sonnet and other standard forms. Adams also includes a variety of topics not covered in most other introductions to the topic; perhaps most significantly, he provides a full chapter on form in free verse. Moreover, he treats rhyme extensively and includes a comprehensive chapter on literary figures. Poetic Designs is thus much more that an introduction to prosody; it is a concise but comprehensive introduction to the nature of poetry in English. It is a book for the general reader and the aspiring writer as well as for the student, a book intended (in the words of the author) to help ‘heighten the experience of poetry.’

Revenge

Author: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588363430
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
A distinct departure from his popular comic novels, this haunting, provocative tale of wrongful imprisonment and violent retribution is Stephen Fry’s first thriller. A brilliant recasting of the classic story The Count of Monte Cristo, Revenge crackles with the wit and intelligence readers have come to expect from this hugely talented author, actor, and comedian, yet it reveals an intriguingly deep, much darker side of his imagination. Ned Maddstone is a happy, charismatic Oxford-bound seventeen-year-old whose rosy future is virtually preordained. Handsome, confident, and talented, newly in love with bright, beautiful Portia, his father an influential MP, Ned enjoys an existence of boundless opportunity. But privilege makes him an easy target for envy, and in the course of one day Ned’s charmed life is changed forever. A promise made to a dying teacher combined with a prank devised by a jealous classmate mutates bewilderingly into a case of mistaken arrest and incarceration. Drugged and disoriented, Ned finds himself a political prisoner in a nightmarish, harrowing exile, far from home and lost to those he loves. Years pass before an apparently mad, obviously brilliant fellow inmate reawakens the younger man’s intellect and resurrects his will to live. The chilling consequences of Ned’s recovery are felt worldwide. While Revenge breaks new ground with its taut plotting, exhilarating pace, and underlying air of menace, its sophistication and irreverent humor are vintage Fry—a gloriously rich mix that only he could deliver. His first novel in four years is a dramatic, powerful tour de force that is sure to enlarge the American audience for this singularly talented author’s work.

The Sounds of Poetry

Author: Robert Pinsky
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466878495
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Book Description
The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works. "Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is as physical or bodily an art as dancing." As Poet Laureate, Pinsky is one of America's best spokesmen for poetry. In this fascinating book, he explains how poets use the "technology" of poetry--its sounds--to create works of art that are "performed" in us when we read them aloud. He devotes brief, informative chapters to accent and duration, syntax and line, like and unlike sounds, blank and free verse. He cites examples from the work of fifty different poets--from Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to W. C. Williams, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, C. K. Williams, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart. This ideal introductory volume belongs in the library of every poet and student of poetry.