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An accessible introduction to poetry's unusual uses of language that tackles a wide range of poetic features from a linguistic point of view. Equally appealing to the non-expert and more experienced student of linguistics, this book delivers an engaging and often witty summary of how we define what poetry is.
A straightforward and practical introduction to rhythm and meter in poetry in English.
Demystify and appreciate the pleasures of poetry Sometimes it seems like there are as many definitions of poetry as there are poems. Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” St. Augustine called it “the Devil’s wine.” For Shelley, poetry was “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” But no matter how you define it, poetry has exercised a hold upon the hearts and minds of people for more than five millennia. That’s because for the attentive reader, poetry has the power to send chills shooting down the spine and lightning bolts flashing in the brain — to throw open the doors of perception and hone our sensibilities to a scalpel’s edge. Poetry For Dummies is a great guide to reading and writing poems, not only for beginners, but for anyone interested in verse. From Homer to Basho, Chaucer to Rumi, Shelley to Ginsberg, it introduces you to poetry’s greatest practitioners. It arms you with the tools you need to understand and appreciate poetry in all its forms, and to explore your own talent as a poet. Discover how to: Understand poetic language and forms Interpret poems Get a handle on poetry through the ages Find poetry readings near you Write your own poems Shop your work around to publishers Don’t know the difference between an iamb and a trochee? Worry not, this friendly guide demystifies the jargon, and it covers a lot more ground besides, including: Understanding subject, tone, narrative; and poetic language Mastering the three steps to interpretation Facing the challenges of older poetry Exploring 5,000 years of verse, from Mesopotamia to the global village Writing open-form poetry Working with traditional forms of verse Writing exercises for aspiring poets Getting published From Sappho to Clark Coolidge, and just about everyone in between, Poetry For Dummies puts you in touch with the greats of modern and ancient poetry. Need guidance on composing a ghazal, a tanka, a sestina, or a psalm? This is the book for you.
In June 1792, amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, two intrepid astronomers set out in opposite directions on an extraordinary journey. Starting in Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre would make his way north to Dunkirk, while Pierre-François-André Méchain voyaged south to Barcelona. Their mission was to measure the world, and their findings would help define the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator—a standard that would be used “for all people, for all time.” The Measure of All Things is the astonishing tale of one of history’s greatest scientific adventures. Yet behind the public triumph of the metric system lies a secret error, one that is perpetuated in every subsequent definition of the meter. As acclaimed historian and novelist Ken Alder discovered through his research, there were only two people on the planet who knew the full extent of this error: Delambre and Méchain themselves. By turns a science history, detective tale, and human drama, The Measure of All Things describes a quest that succeeded as it failed—and continues to enlighten and inspire to this day.
A groundbreaking study of the connections among meter, the poetic unconscious, and wider literary and cultural forces
Music is surrounded by movement, from the arching back of the guitarist to the violinist swaying with each bow stroke. To John Paul Ito, these actions are not just a visual display; rather, they reveal what it really means for musicians to move with the beat, organizing the flow of notes from beat to beat and shaping the sound produced. By developing "focal impulse theory," Ito shows how a performer's choices of how to move with the meter can transform the music's expressive contours. Change the dance of the performer's body, and you change the dance of the notes. As Focal Impulse Theory deftly illustrates, bodily movements carry musical meaning and, in a very real sense, are meaning.
What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.
A major new guide to writing and understanding poetry