On rereading this book, I'm upgrading it to 5 stars. (Although I should note I'm a pathetic Stephen Fry acolyte, so you should hold my judgment to be as something written on water.)

Fry carefully takes the reader through essentially all the key concepts to understand poetry. Metre, looking at poetic feet, enjambment, caesura, sprung rhythm and syllabic poetry among others; Rhyme, exploring types of rhyme including feminine, triple, and rich; Form, in which he interrogates everything from the Pindaric ode to the Villanelle, from the Limerick to the Tanka; and Diction, a brief epilogue on the art of poetry in the 21st century. It is all written in his distinctive style, passionately erudite one second, cheeky the next.

Along the way, Fry includes 20 exercises designed to help the novice poet experiment with forms and styles, while also including plenty of excerpts from poetry dating back to the ancients and forward to the present - as well as his own (deliberately low-key) efforts. For the most part, Fry avoids breathtakingly contemporary styles and blank verse. He notes that these styles are just as important and powerful, but that any artist must begin with an understanding of the basics and the existing work that has been built up over millennia before "breaking free of the pan and doing their own thing", as Elaine Benes would put it.

For some budding poets, this will be rich material. For others, you may not connect with Fry's tone or his focus on the "nuts and bolts" of writing. (I, like Fry, would caution you to reconsider your beliefs!)

Speaking for myself, I don't have any intention of writing poetry, and so I did not do the exercises. For me, the joy of this book was simply in revisiting the breadth of poetic styles in the hands of a master storyteller and armchair academic. With helpful charts, tables, and practical examples along the way, The Ode Less Travelled shines for those of us who still keep bookshelves of reference books. The final 22 pages are a glossary of poetic terms from abecedarian to zeugma (well, there's a couple of joke entries after the latter, but that's for you to enjoy), which will prove equally useful. ( )

Fry explains how poetry works, the technical stuff, quoting classical poetry and giving poetry exercises ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3412087.html

An enjoyable book by Stephen Fry about how poetry works and how to write it. There are a lot of exercises inviting the reader to try their own; I did about half of them and then ran out of energy. I'm not as much into poetry as some people, but this was a nice re-introduction to enjoying it. ( )

An exhortation to everyone that anyone could - and everyone should - write poetry. Fry sets out a course on the various meters, styles, and techniques, including brief histories, a scattering of close readings for snippets of poems, and exercises for the reader to try. He does it all with his usual wit and charm and gleeful cleverness.
I admit that Fry would likely be annoyed with me, because I didn't follow along as I was meant to do: I didn't do any of the poetry-writing exercises, because 1) despite the title, I wasn't expecting a crash course on actually creating poems, and 2) I completely enjoyed thinking about poetry from a different approach. I love reading what people have to say *about* poetry (close readings and such, discussions of how the conjunction of meter and word choice flavor meaning,...), and I was absolutely giddy at the prospect of reading what Fry has to say about those things. Reading his approach to how to *write* the stuff (which includes significant bits of those things I love mentioned above) was absolutely enjoyable without me even touching a pencil. As someone with a degree in English and also a more-than-average knowledge of how to write poetry in Latin (no, really, I have the grad school course work to prove it), most of the technical bits on the various meters and how they work wasn't news, but he does such a lovely job of it that I enjoyed the review. So, maybe I didn't do the book properly, but I still loved it and I definitely recommend it, either for folks like me, who just like reading about poetry and what others think about it, or for those wanting to learn how the innards of poetry work, or for those who want to try their hand at creating the stuff. ( )

An approachable and amiable lesson in the principles of English-language poetry. The inimitable Stephen Fry goes through all the different features of poetry – from the overarching principles of metre, rhyme and form to the smaller techniques like caesura and enjambment, and through different poetic styles like the sonnet and the villanelle – with all the ease of a good English teacher, but with none of the sternness of a high-school lesson, nor the sense of fear that Teacher will single you out in a class of thirty and ask you to point out the uses of assonance in today's poem on the board.

In this book, Fry is concerned with the linguistic structure of poetry rather than any sense of artistic inspiration (read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet if you want that), but he never devolves into anorakish condescension. He does criticize the 'arse-dribble' poems that seem to pass for poetry nowadays (pg. 177), but this only serves to enliven his lesson, for his love of the art form is evident. Furthermore, he believes it is relatively simple to start writing half-decent poetry if you only show some commitment; "taste and concentration" is what he boils it down to (pg. 316), and he wrote the book with precisely this humble aim in mind.

He is not looking to 'make learning fun', as a more misguided English teacher might; rather, he says poetry does not have to be 'cool' or 'relevant', "it is quite enough for me that it astonishes with its beauty" (pg. 313). This honest and unapologetic earnestness is what makes Fry so likeable, and he is on characteristically great form here. The call to write poetry is an embarrassingly common one, but Fry goes further than our half-baked doggerel dreams. He actually makes you want to do it right. ( )