At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.
Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.
One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.
Considering the wealth of poetic drama that has come down to us from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, it is surprising that so little of any value has been added since.
Oh let us not be condemned for what we are. It is enough to account for what we do.
Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world.
It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees.
The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.
My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost – that it is born again.
When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadn’t told me.
Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle – it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.
Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.
The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: ‘lane’ rhymes with ‘pain,’ but it also rhymes with ‘urbane’ since the last syllable of ‘urbane’ is stressed. ‘Lane’ does not rhyme with ‘methane.’
The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where ‘open form’ or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term ‘heightened speech.’
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
Hearing that the same men who brought us ‘South Park’ were mounting a musical to be called ‘The Book of Mormon,’ we were tempted to turn away, as from an inevitable massacre.
What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.
A cabaret song has got to be written – for the middle voice, ideally – because you’ve got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don’t regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects – love, death, war.
A nasty surprise in a sandwich.