Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical VerseHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998 - 194 pages Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition. "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance," wrote Alexander Pope. "The dance," in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet's ear and a poet's grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work--and enables readers, as only she can, to "enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure." With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop. |
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A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse Mary Oliver. By the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and the author of A POETRY HANDBOOK Mary Oliver RULES for the DANCE A HANDBOOK FOR WRITING AND READING ...
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... writing and reading metrical verse / Mary Oliver . p . cm . " A Mariner original . ” ISBN 0-395-85086 - x 1. English language - Versification . 2. English poetry - History and criticism - Theory , etc. 3. Poetry - Authorship . I. Title ...
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Contents
Breath | 3 |
Patterns | 6 |
More About Patterns | 19 |
Line Length | 29 |
Release of Energy Along the Line | 36 |
Rhyme | 40 |
Traditional Forms | 50 |
Words on a String | 57 |
Mutes and Other Sounds | 60 |
The Use of Meter in NonMetric Verse | 62 |
The Ohs and the Ahs | 65 |
ImageMaking | 67 |
Reading the Metrical Poem | 87 |
Then and Now | 103 |