Comedian and actor Fry explains the various elements of poetry in simple terms in his witty and practical guide, giving the aspiring poet the tools and confidence to write and understand poetry.

Reviews

In this delightfully erudite, charming and soundly pedagogical guide to poetic form, British actor (narrator of the Harry Potter movies, among other roles), novelist and secret poet Fry leads the reader through a series of lessons on meter, rhythm, rhyme and stanza length and reveals the structural logic of every imaginable poetic form, including the haiku, the ballad, the ode and the sonnet. Writing poetry, like any hobby, should be fun, Fry claims, and while talent is inborn, technique can be learned. Inviting readers to study the wealth of choices of form available in the world's major poetic traditions, Fry himself pens intentionally vapid yet entertaining poems that demonstrate each form's rules and patterning, and ends each lesson with wittily devised exercises for readers. Fry rails against the dumbing down of verse in a section subtitled "Stephen gets all cross": "It is as if we have been encouraged to believe that form is a kind of fascism and that to acquire knowledge is to drive a jackboot into the face of those poor souls who are too incurious, dull-witted or idle to find out what poetry can be." Fry has created an invaluable and highly enjoyable reference book on poetic form, which deserves to achieve widespread academic adoption, despite or even because of its saucy and Anglocentric tone. (Aug. 17) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

"While Mr. Fry''s book is aimed at a general audience, it seems particularly well-suited to the lawyer or Web-site designer or homemaker or medical technician whose daily life feels distant from poetry and yet who remembers, with a yearning fondness, the joys of reading Shakespeare or Keats or Frost as an undergraduate. ... Fry understands the saving role that humor can play in any discussion of poetry''s mechanics."
uBrad Leithauser, "The Wall Street Journal"
Fry is "spot on in his assessment of the allusion-packed, overcooked, dead-on-arrival poems that are often passed of as high literature these days. ...While the comic relief is mostly welcome, Mr. Fry truly shines when ardently defending and explicating the virtues of form ... "The Ode Less Travelled" is something more than a solid and engaging how-to book. ''Verse is one of our last stands against the instant and the infantile, '' Mr. Fry writes in the introduction, and this book is his impassioned, worthy contribution to the cause."
uClaudia La Rocco, "The New York Times"
""The Ode Less Travelled" is at once idiosyncratic and thoroughly traditional-- it''s filled with quips, quirks and various Fry-isms, yet still manages to be a smart, comprehensive guide to prosody. ... The key to the book''s success is its tone, which is joking, occasionally fussy, sometimes distractingly cute, but always approachable. This book works because it gives us a strong perspective without sounding pinched or dogmatic."
uDavid Orr, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Of all the poetry guides you''re likely to read, this one''s probably the most entertainingly written and downright useful. The book is full of technical terms-- spondee, enjambment, trochee-- but these are explained so clearly that we very quickly can use them as though we''ve been doing so all of our lives. The book is an education not only in the mechanics of poetry, but also in its history. An, naturally, it''s full to bursting w