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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

Originally published: London: Hutchinson, 2005

Includes bibliographical references

pt. 1. Metre. -- How we speak ; Meet metre ; The great iamb ; The iambic pentameter -- End-stopping, enjambment and caesura ; Weak endings, trochaic and pyrhhic substitutions ; Substitutions -- More metres : four beats to the line ; Mixed feet -- Ternary feet : the dactyl, the molossus and tribrach, the amphibrach, the amphimacer, quaternary feet -- Anglo-Saxon attitudes ; Sprung rhythm -- Syllabic verse ; Coleridge's 'Lesson for a boy' -- Table of metric feet -- pt. 2. Rhyme. -- The basic categories of rhyme ; Partial rhymes ; Feminine and triple rhymes ; Rich rhyme -- Rhyming arrangements -- Good and bad rhyme? ; A thought experiment ; Rhyming practice and rhyming dictionaries -- Rhyme categories -- pt. 3. Form. -- The stanza ; What is form and why bother with it? -- Stanzaic variations ; Open forms : terza rima, the quartrain, the rubai, rhyme royal, ottava rima, Spenserian stanza ; Adopting and adapting -- The ballad -- Heroic verse -- The ode : Sapphic, Pindaric, Horatian, the lyric ode, anacreontics -- Closed forms : the villanelle ; The sestina ; The pantoum, the ballade -- More closed forms: rondeau ; rondeau redoublé, rondel, roundel, rondelet, roundelelay, triolet, kyrielle -- Comic verse : cento, the clerihew ; The limerick ; Reflections on comic and impolite verse ; Light verse ; Parody -- Exotic forms : haiku, senryu, tanka ; Ghazal ; Luc bat ; Tanaga -- The sonnet : Petrarchan and Shakespearean ; Curtal and caudate sonnets ; Sonnet variations and romantic duels -- Shaped verse ; Pattern poems ; Silly, silly forms ; Acrostics -- pt. 4. Diction and poetics today. -- The whale ; The cat and the act ; Madeline ; Diction ; Being alert to language -- Poetic vices ; Ten habits of successful poets that they don't teach you at Harvard Poetry School, or chicken verse for the soul is from Mars but you are what you read in just seven days or your money back ; Getting noticed ; Poetry today ; Goodbye -- Incomplete glossary of poetic terms -- Appendix : Arnaud's algorithm

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