The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within is a book by author, actor, comedian, and directorStephen Fry about writing poetry. Fry covers metre, rhyme, many common and arcane poetic forms, and offers poetry exercises, contrasting modern and classic poets.
An author is the creator or originator of any written work such as a book or play, and is also considered a writer. More broadly defined, an author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility for what was created.
An actor is a person who portrays a character in a performance. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. The analogous Greek term is ὑποκριτής (hupokritḗs), literally "one who answers". The actor's interpretation of their role—the art of acting—pertains to the role played, whether based on a real person or fictional character. Interpretation occurs even when the actor is "playing themselves", as in some forms of experimental performance art.
A comedian or comic is a person who seeks to entertain an audience by making them laugh. This might take many forms including jokes, satirical observations, amusing situations, acting foolish or employing prop comedy. A comedian who addresses an audience directly is called a stand-up comedian. Other practises include the sitcom, sketch comedy and improv genres.
Fry's starting point can be summed up by the quotation with which he heads Chapter One: 'Poetry is metrical writing./If it isn't that I don't know what it is.' (J. V. Cunningham.) In a 'rant' near the end of the book he states: "I think that much poetry today suffers from anaemia. There is no iron in its blood, no energy, no drive".
James Vincent Cunningham was an American poet, literary critic and teacher.
Fry sets out to explain the many tools available to a poet in order to organise writing, noting poetry's essential metrical basis and introducing the many technical terms, with explanations and exercises. The book offers twenty 'Poetry Exercises', with one or two in each chapter.
The first main section, 'Metre', has six chapters, introducing the natural rhythm of spoken English and many forms of metre. In fact, 28 are listed in the 'Table of Metric Feet' which concludes this major section of the book. The next section, 'Rhyme' has three chapters, explaining the 'basic categories', 'rhyming arrangements' and discussing what is good or bad rhyme. Eleven chapters follow on 'Form', starting with a chapter on 'The Stanza. What is Form and Why Bother with It?' Closed and open forms, heroic verse, forms of ode, ballads, comic verse, sonnets, shaped verse; these and several more are explained along with examples. The book's final section is entitled 'Diction and Poetics Today'. There is also a 600 (approx) word 'Incomplete Glossary of Poetic Terms'.
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In poetry, metre (British) or meter is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study and the actual use of metres and forms of versification are both known as prosody.
Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
A sestina is a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern.
Prose is a form or technique of language that exhibits a natural flow of speech and grammatical structure. Novels, textbooks and newspaper articles are all examples of prose. The word prose is frequently used in opposition to traditional poetry, which is language with a regular structure with a common unit of verse based on metre and/or rhyme. However, as T. S. Eliot noted, while "the distinction between verse and prose is clear, the distinction between poetry and prose is obscure"; developments in modern literature, including free verse and prose poetry, have led to the two techniques indicating two ends on a spectrum of ways to compose language, as opposed to two discrete options.
A strophe is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in Ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line-by-line non-stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English blank verse, to which the term stichic applies.
In prosody, alliterative verse is a form of verse that uses alliteration as the principal ornamental device to help indicate the underlying metrical structure, as opposed to other devices such as rhyme. The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. The Old English epic Beowulf, as well as most other Old English poetry, the Old High German Muspilli, the Old Saxon Heliand, the Old Norse Poetic Edda, and many Middle English poems such as Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Alliterative Morte Arthur all use alliterative verse.
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role — or no role at all — in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as Japanese or modern French or Finnish — as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common.
Norman Alexander MacCaig FRSE FRSL ARSA DLitt OBE was a Scottish poet and teacher. His poetry, in modern English, is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity.
A dactyl is a foot in poetic meter. In quantitative verse, often used in Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, often used in English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables—the opposite is the anapaest.
Welsh poetry may refer to poetry in the Welsh language, poetry in English from Wales, or other poetry written in Wales or by Welsh poets.
Iambic pentameter is a type of metric line used in traditional English poetry and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm, or meter, established by the words in that line; rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables called "feet". "Iambic" refers to the type of foot used, here the iamb, which in English indicates an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. "Pentameter" indicates a line of five "feet".
New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
Timothy Steele is an American poet, who generally writes in meter and rhyme. His early poems, which began appearing in the 1970s in such magazines as Poetry, The Southern Review, and X. J. Kennedy's Counter/Measures, are said to have anticipated and contributed to the revival of traditional verse associated with the New Formalism. He, however, has objected to being called a New Formalist, saying that he doesn't claim to be doing anything technically novel and that Formalism "suggests, among other things, an interest in style rather than substance, whereas I believe that the two are mutually vital in any successful poem." Notwithstanding his reservations about the term, Steele's poetry is more strictly "formal" than the work of most New Formalists in that he rarely uses inexact rhymes or metrical substitutions, and is sparing in his use of enjambment.
Annie Finch is an American poet, writer, and performance artist. Central themes of her poetry and nonfiction include feminism, witchcraft, abortion, and women-centered spirituality. Her critical writings center on women's poetry, poetic meter, and poetic form. She is the editor of the first major anthology of literature on abortion.
A hymn metre indicates the number of syllables for the lines in each stanza of a hymn. This provides a means of marrying the hymn's text with an appropriate hymn tune for singing.
A line is a unit of language into which a poem or play is divided, which operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or single clauses in sentences. Although the word for a single poetic line is verse, that term now tends to be used to signify poetic form more generally.
Aeolic verse is a classification of Ancient Greek lyric poetry referring to the distinct verse forms characteristic of the two great poets of Archaic Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed in their native Aeolic dialect. These verse forms were taken up and developed by later Greek and Roman poets and some modern European poets.
The French alexandrine is a syllabic poetic meter of 12 syllables with a medial caesura dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each. It was the dominant long line of French poetry from the 17th through the 19th century, and influenced many other European literatures which developed alexandrines of their own.
Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in poetry. A poem engages our responsiveness as it is created out of poetic devices composite of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal, and visual elements. They are essentially tools that a poet uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.
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