I’ve just finished reading John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason. A Guide to English Verse in the first edition, published by Yale University Press in 1981. The latest edition was published in 2001. According to Yale, the book won the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Medal for an outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language and literature.
After the pattern of Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” this slender volume (52 pages) illustrates the forms of verse in very witty verse. For example:
Verse called skeltonic
Is not cacophonic;
Jiggly and jumpy,
Loose, somewhat lumpy,
Pleasing or prating,
Graceful or grating,
It’s always elating . . .
Or
Couplets can be of any length,
And shorter size gives greater strength
Sometimes—but sometimes, willy nilly,
Four-beat couplets sound quite silly.
This book is amusing and easy to read and it is a great book to have around for reference, especially, as indicated, if you’re teaching. He even covers concrete poetry (with concrete).
What it doesn’t give you is much in the way of prosodic theory, the history of forms, or the problems inherent in forms, etc. Hollander does give fairly extensive “Suggestions for Further Reading,” including a list of poets who have written poetry about poetry:
Readers who are not already familiar with my great original should acquaint themselves with Pope’s heuristic, self-descriptive verses in An Essay on Criticism, lines 337-83. Spenser, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Robert Bridges all woret metrical experiements and examples, which can be found in their collected works. Wordsworth, Keats, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti have sonnets on the subject of the sonnet. Karl Shapiro’s An Essay on Rime is in verse, with some self-descriptive bits. In French, Vincent Voiture (1598-1648) wrote a famous rondeau on how to write a rondeau.
