Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse

by Mary Oliver

Overview

Pulitzer-prize winning poet and National Book Award winner, Mary Oliver, provides a graceful manual on the mechanics of poetical composition.

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance,” wrote Alexander Pope. “The dance,” in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert Frost. With a poet’s ear and a poet’s grace of expression, Mary Oliver helps us understand what makes a metrical poem work—and enables readers, as only she can, to “enter the thudding deeps and the rippling shallows of sound-pleasure and rhythm-pleasure.”

With an anthology of fifty poems representing the best metrical poetry in English, from the Elizabethan Age to Elizabeth Bishop.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780395850862
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/27/1998
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	447,328
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.53(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Mary Oliver (1935–2019), one of the most popular and widely honored poets in the U.S., was the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose. Over the course of her long and illustrious career, she received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive in 1984. Oliver also received the Shelley Memorial Award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Achievement Award; the Christopher Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for House of Light; the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems; a Lannan Foundation Literary Award; and the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence. She lived most of her life in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: THE RULES 1. Breath 2. Patterns 3. More About Patterns 4. Design: Line Length 5. Release of Energy Along the Line 6. Design: Rhyme 7. Design: Traditional Forms 8. Words on a String 9. Mutes and Other Sounds 10. The Use of Meter in Non-Metric Verse 11. The Ohs and the Ahs 12. Image-Making

PART TWO: THE DANCERS ONE BY ONE 13. Style

PART THREE: SCANSION, AND THE ACTUAL WORK 14. Scansion: Reading the Metrical Poem 15. Scansion: Writing the Metrical Poem 16. Yourself Dancing: The Actual Work

PART FOUR: A UNIVERSAL MUSIC 17. Then and Now Envoi

PART FIVE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF METRICAL POEMS Permissions Index

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From the Publisher

"What good company Mary Oliver is!" The Los Angeles Times

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"What good company Mary Oliver is!" The Los Angeles Times —

From the Publisher