Arrow Books Ltd The Ode Less Travelled: A guide to writing poetry

I know essentially nothing about poetry. We never really studied it at school, and I was never the least bit interested in what little we did do. I do remember one occasion when we were asked to write a poem for homework. I had no idea what to do, so I wrote some flowery prose, and broke the lines up arbitrarily. My homework was returned with the ominous words SEE ME scrawled in red at the bottom. I went up to the teacher, who looked at me in some bemusement, and said “this is really rather good”: words never said to me in an English lesson before, or after, for that matter. I went back to my seat with my opinion of poetry, and my teacher, confirmed. I suppose it could have been worse: it might have encouraged me and set me on the road to doggerel. Since then my only excursion into that realm has been to compose a couple of limericks for a competition at the 1995 Z User Meeting, held in Limerick; I didn’t win.Stephen Fry, however, is in love with poetry, and that love permeates this book. But he does something my English teachers never did; he describes the mechanics: the nuts and bolts of metre and rhythm, rhyme and structure. Now this is interesting.Fry wants to teach you how to write poetry, so there are exercises throughout. I confess, I didn’t do any of these; I’m a theoretician, not an experimentalist, and have no desire to start writing poetry. However, I can see how they would help get someone writing. And they’re not all “write a poem about beauty”, they are “write something in iambic pentameter” (I now know what that means!), or “write something in the form of a sonnet”: exercises in structure, not in some airy fairy aesthetics that I could never grasp. And even when he does suggest a subject, it is some prosaic everyday thing, like a headline from today’s news website, or daytime television programmes.This book would make a wonderful school book for someone like me, more interested in the mechanics of things than in, well, poetry. It could make the whole enterprise a complicated word game, which would definitely appeal to nerds; then meaning, feeling, and emotion could be snuck in later, if necessary.On second thoughts, it might not do well as a school text. Some of the examples in the limericks section are extremely obscene.On third thoughts, that would probably make it popular with school children, if not their parents (those who fail to recall what they themselves heard in their school playgrounds).The whole book is written with a lightness of touch, and a love of language. It is peppered with lovely little historical, geographic, and linguistic tidbits, and some great rants (especially the section "Stephen gets all cross"). I particularly like the way Fry writes little example poems to describe a particular structure in that very structure. He continually says his poems aren’t good, though they seem fine to me. But then, what do I know? Well, even I can tell that two examples of poems to written commemorate disasters, McGonnagal’s infamous “The Tay Bridge Disaster” and Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, are at opposite ends of the quality spectrum. Fry explains why one works so much better than the other.So although I still know essentially nothing about poetry, I know a good deal more than I did before reading this very enjoyable book.Oh: a useful glossary. But no index.

Read this twice now. It's brilliant. The teaching profession's loss is a comedy panel show's gain. National treasure Stephen Fry takes you humourously and modestly through his voluminous knowledge of poetry. He's never condescending or presumptive about prior knowledge. There are exercises to complete, should you feel inclined, and loads of examples that illustrate his lessons. The hook in this book, however is Fry's enthusiasm which is as contagious as the French Pox that most of his poetic heroes probably carried. A thoroughly enjoyable and informative read you can dip back into time and again, whether you write poetry or not.

I bought this because I'm doing a course on Creative Writing at the Open University and the section on poetry in the course book wasn't really stimulating. In the Ode Less Travelled, Stephen Fry writes entertainingly and is very funny in places. This provides welcome light relief whilst one is trying to understand the complexities of the different forms of poetic metre. Although I can't claim to understand everything Stephen Fry says in the book, I find his clear explanation of the basic metres very helpful - it's always useful to know when it's OK to insert a trochee into a line of iambic pentameter. There are plenty of examples to illustrate his points. For instance when Shakespeare wrote: To be or not to be, that is the question (iambic pentameter but 11 syllables in the line) Stephen provides an analysis and explanation as to why Shakespeare got it right and how the line should be read correctly. Excellent stuff. I don't think I'll ever become a good poet, but at least I now appreciate the subtleties of writing good poetry.A word of warning - if you like your poetry to be unstructured and without rules, this may not be the best book for you. Stephen Fry errs on the side of traditionalism.

I love the conversational tone and set exercises in this book. I was working my way through it during lunchtimes at work a couple of years ago and wrote several pieces I was quite pleased with, using the descriptions and exercises in the chapters that inspired me.Then I changed jobs and had shorter lunch breaks and so much less time for writing. I've now bought the book again, as I can't find my old copy and wanted to take up the challenge again of improving both my poetic writing and my knowledge of the various set forms. I'm now looking forward to receiving regular inspiration once again.

Just about anything goes for poetry these days. It is all about the emotion people say, you must write what you feel and do not worry too much about structure and form. This may be true in some cases (in fact one of my favorite poets ever: Edward Field: check him out writes in free form) but it was not the way I was taught at school. My English teacher was a firm believer in poetry as craftsmanship with words and structure, rhyme and metre being an art that, while being hard to master, gives endless delight and a sense of achievement once mastered. In fact he was a contemporary of Stephen at Cambridge and often boasted during our study of Pope's "Rape of the Lock" as an A level text that he had had a go at writing something similar at university (though I never did see it).Part of the pleasure of this book is that it took me back to my lessons in poetry writing at school. My teacher was a charismatic and inspiring man who took the drudge and intimidation of writing crafted poetry away and this is something that Stephen does. He does not have much time for free form in this book. What you get is chapters that deal with all the major metrical forms with solid advice, instruction and exercises. If you are to get the benefit of this work you will need to put in some work (take a notebook, preferably moleskine, and a pencil "more aesthetically pleasing" wherever you go and practice says Stephen) but you will come out of the instruction with a major sense of achievements at achieving mastery of all the major forms. Of course you can still write free form if you want to (I most certainly do) and you may not even feel that your poetry is any good. However the writing of poetry is often a release for the soul which never goes beyond one's private notebooks and journals. This guide will help you try to put some polish to these outpourings.I am not a sycophantic Fry fan (indeed I didn't give him that great a review for his last installment of biography) but I would say this book is one of the best practical writing books that I have come across alongside Roy Peter Clark's "Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for every writer". I am very pleased to see that Stephen is making his love for poetry clear. It may not sell (something Norman Douglas mentioned 100 years ago when he was deputy editor of the English Review) but it is something life affirming. The encouragement to write poetry is therefore a wonderful thing: thank you Stephen.