The Ode Less Travelled
Speaking of Stephen Fry… I will take this opportunity to push his book The Ode Less Travelled. We have several copies in the bookroom that deserve to be read. To entice you further here is a little more information.
Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled provides us with a witty and entertaining guide to the mysteries of writing poetry. His book will give everybody the tools to write poetry; covering the full spectrum of the different poetic forms, structures and techniques. According to Stephen, it will make writing poetry fun, easy, satisfying, fulfilling and delightful.
From the Inside Flap
Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don’t know where to start or have been led to believe that Anything Goes.
Stephen, 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.
From the Back Cover
Example a
Let’s hear it for the Sapphic Ode
An oyster bed of gleaming pearls
A finely wrought poetic mode
Not just for girls.
From Amazon.
David Orr from The New York Times has reviewed the book and I have put a little of it below:
“The Ode Less Travelled” is at once idiosyncratic and thoroughly traditional – it’s filled with quips, quirks and various Fry-isms (sestinas are “a bitch to explain but a joy to make”), yet still manages to be a smart, comprehensive guide to prosody. It’s organized in three main sections – meter, rhyme and form, with exercises suggested for each – and a smaller concluding section in which Fry gives some general thoughts about contemporary British poetry. It also has a practical, good-natured glossary (a choliamb is a “kind of metrical substitution, usually with ternary feet replacing binary. Forget about it.”) The key to the book’s success is its tone, which is joking, occasionally fussy, sometimes distractingly cute, but always approachable. If Fry thinks the meter of a Keats couplet doesn’t work, he’ll tell you so, and he’s more than happy to admit his own effort at a ghazal is “rather a bastardly abortion.” As is to be expected in any book taking on such a complicated subject, there are a few minor errors. For instance, in a discussion of hendecasyllabic (11-syllable) lines, Fry includes Frost’s “And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver.” (Unlike Fry, Frost is American, and would have pronounced “flower” with two syllables.) But such mistakes are negligible. On the whole, the book is ideal for anyone who’s interested in learning more about poetic forms but doesn’t have an obsessive assistant professor living next door.
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