The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within is a book by author, actor, comedian, and director Stephen Fry about writing poetry. Fry covers metre, rhyme, many common and arcane poetic forms, and offers poetry exercises, contrasting modern and classic poets.
Fry's starting point can be summed up by the quotation with which he heads Chapter One: 'Poetry is metrical writing./If it isn't that I don't know what it is.' (J. V. Cunningham.) In a 'rant' near the end of the book he states: "I think that much poetry today suffers from anaemia. There is no iron in its blood, no energy, no drive".
Fry sets out to explain the many tools available to a poet in order to organise writing, noting poetry's essential metrical basis and introducing the many technical terms, with explanations and exercises. The book offers twenty 'Poetry Exercises', with one or two in each chapter.
The first main section, 'Metre', has six chapters, introducing the natural rhythm of spoken English and many forms of metre. In fact, 28 are listed in the 'Table of Metric Feet' which concludes this major section of the book. The next section, 'Rhyme' has three chapters, explaining the 'basic categories', 'rhyming arrangements' and discussing what is good or bad rhyme. Eleven chapters follow on 'Form', starting with a chapter on 'The Stanza. What is Form and Why Bother with It?' Closed and open forms, heroic verse, forms of ode, ballads, comic verse, sonnets, shaped verse; these and several more are explained along with examples. The book's final section is entitled 'Diction and Poetics Today'. There is also a 600 (approx) word 'Incomplete Glossary of Poetic Terms'.
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Famous quotes containing the words ode, unlocking and/or poet:
“The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The poet is like the prince of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant’s wings prevent him from walking.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)