The Road Now Travelled

I've retained a soft spot for poetry for a long time now, since I first bought my Everyman edition of the works of John Keats. The first verse in the collection, a sonnet entitled Written on the day Mr Leigh Hunt left Prison, sent shivers down my spine and I've never looked back (although it's also due in part to the relative cost of poetry publications versus fiction). Our new mentor Stephen Fry has written a terrific book on poetry, The Ode Less Travelled, and it's only now that I've come to dedicate my efforts to reading it; it contains various exercises that punctuate each chapter, encouraging you to forge poetry for yourself, mixing styles and revising your own scribbles in order to produce something close to the real thing. Indeed, he too has recognised how poetry becomes a conduit for teenage angst, yet riddled with social unease in later life due to the proliferation of the novel: a seemingly more worthy form of literature (who, for example, blushes when admitting to playing the piano at home, or painting, or gardening - but poetry?) He's a wonderful teacher who seems to have the library of written verse at his fingertips at all times, able to delve into Paradise Lost or Don Juan at will, drawing out the relevant couplet, perfectly encapsulating and demonstrating the point he wishes to make. I'm only toes deep into the book, but I'm already scratching iambs and feet onto my copy of Othello, annotating the line, dissecting the implications of pyrrhic substitution and trochaic reversal, feminine stress and spondee inversion. What a wonderful resource. For those of us besotted with language, itching to uncover more and more of a great thing, Fry's book is magnificent. Prepare yourself, dear reader, for a torrent of self-possessed verse. I fear my Moleskin notebook will be filled with poetic genius very quickly.