The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
THE LIFE OF A POEM IS MEASURED IN REGULAR HEARTBEATS. THE NAME FOR THOSE HEARTBEATS IS METRE.
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
It is never too late. We are all opsimaths. Opsimath, noun: one who learns late in life.
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
It is useful and pleasurable to have a special vocabulary for a special activity.
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
In both examples each line contains a single thought that finishes with the line. This is called end-stopping, which we could mark like this. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall ⊡ I haven’t time to take your call right now ⊡
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
The point is this: poetry is all about concentration, the concentration of mind and the concentration of thought, feeling and language into words within a rhythmic structure. In normal speech and prose our thoughts and feelings are diluted (by stock phrases and roundabout approximations); in poetry those thoughts and feelings can be, must be, conce
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TAKING YOUR TIME. You can never read a poem too slowly, but you can certainly read one too fast.
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
The rhythms of English poetry are ordered by SYLLABIC ACCENTUATION, those of French more by QUANTITATIVE MEASURE.
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
The word for a rising-rhythm foot with a ti-tum, ￮●, beat like those above is an iambus, more usually called an IAMB.
Stephen Fry • The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within
Look closely at those two examples above. Not only do they feature these run-ons or enjambments, which allow a sense of continual flow, they also contain pauses which break up that flow; in the examples above it happens that these pauses are expressed by commas that serve the office of a breath, or change of gear: I shall render them like this ¶. H
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