Learning the Secrets of English Verse: The Keys to the Treasure Chest

Description

This textbook teaches the writing of poetry by examining all the major verse forms and repeating stanza forms in English. It provides students with the tools to compose successful lines of poetry and focuses on meter (including free verse), rhythm, rhyme, and the many other tools a poet needs to create both music and meaningfulness in an artful poem. Presenting copious examples from strong poets of the past and present along with many recent student examples, all of which are scanned, each chapter offers lessons in poetic history and the practice of writing verse, along with giving students a structured opportunity to experiment writing in all the forms discussed. In Part 1, Rothman and Spear begin at the beginning, with Anglo-Saxon Strong Stress Alliterative Meter and examine every major meter in English, up to and including the free verse forms of modern and contemporary poetry. Part 2 presents a close examination of stanza forms that moves from the simple to the complex, beginning with couplets and ending with the 14-line Eugene Onegin stanza. The goal of the book is to give students the essential skills to understand how any line of poetry in English may have been composed, the better to enjoy them and then also write their own: the keys to the treasure chest. Acknowledgments Contents Part I: Metrical Forms 1 Anglo-Saxon Strong-Stress Alliterative Meter 2 The Ballad 3 Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Quantitative Meters: The Sapphic and the Catullan Hendecasyllable Interchapter 1: An Explanation of Scansion 4 Iambic Tetrameter Couplets 5 Blank Verse/Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter Interchapter 2: Classical Meters Revisited 6 Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests 7 Free Verse Interchapter 3: The Battles of Schools 8 Nonce Meters Interlude Part II: Stanza Forms 9 Couplets 10 Terza Rima 11 Quatrains 12 Quintains, Limericks, and Venus and Adonis Stanzas 13 Rhyme Royal 14 Ottava Rima 15 Spenserian Stanzas Coda: The Eugene Onegin Stanza, the Nonce Stanza and an Ending and a Beginning Appendix: The Craft of Poetry: A Bibliography of Resources in English