Customer Reviews

Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I can hardly contain myself. After reading through several books about how to write poetry I came to this one. Though I am almost jumping for joy, I have a soupcon of sadness, because I wish I had started here. Hollander's book is like a good poem: concise, entertaining, and ultimately full of wisdom. Just compare Hollander's examples on forms (in the forms!) to the lackluster examples in The Book of Forms by Lewis Turco.

Don't be fooled by the title. This book is about all aspects of poetry, including free verse (and even 'concrete' poems). While Rhyme's Reason has a smaller selection of forms than The Book of Forms and a shorter discussion of prosody than All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing, it had more than enough meat for me. And I can unhesitatingly recommend it for first forays into the appreciation and composition of poetry. Make sure to get the Third Edition, of the year 2000, which has a few added goodies. Enjoy!

In this day and age of free verse and English classes where almost no poetry is read, much less written or memorized, John Hollander's little book, "Rhyme's Reason," is a life-saver for all English majors, teachers, and wannabe poets. Teaching each and every poetic meter and form ever used in the English language, John Hollander creates a few lines of poetry that teach by their existence meter, rhythm, and poetics. Although I prefer the shorter first edition, the second edition will serve if that's all you can find. This book taught me everything my grandmother had learned about poetry by the time she was in third grade; even on her deathbed, she could run off lines of poetry she had memorized as a child, showing off various meters at the drop of a hat. Yet another skill we've lost in this modern age, prosody is an essential craft for any poet, songwriter, or lover of poetry. Find this book!

This little volume is the single most useful book on formal poetry I've ever owned. It explains the history and the rules of pretty much every verse form there is, with examples that make me want to run for my notebook to start playing with them myself. If you love formal poetry, you must own this book. (And if you don't, maybe it will change your mind...)

Clear, concise, informed, and witty. This guide to the forms of English verse from our greatest living verse technician goes beyond counting beats and diagramming rhyme schemes to discuss the formal aspects of rhetorical figures -- and how all these help create poetic meaning. All told, it's the most valuable book of its type I've ever read.

Contrary to one reviewer, I find the expansions of the second edition -- especially the analysis of verbal mimesis -- useful, and prefer this over the other editions. The third edition has added an anthology of examples taken from the wild, in addition to Hollander's well-bred examples, of forms discussed in the text. This is nice enough in its way, but not essential. Worse, it has (in the first printing at least) a large number of infuriating typographical errors, including incorrect page references.

For those who equate poetry with free verse, this book is a wonderful introduction to the rich variety of traditional English verse forms, a subject that doesn't seem to be taught in school any more. Hollander manages to make a potentially bewildering and dull corpus of material exciting and fun, through his well-chosen examples and delightful commentary. If you love poetry, if you want to learn more about poetry, or if you just want a good read, buy this book. You won't be sorry.

This is a clever and masterful book. The author demolishes the new fashional nonsense about rhyme being creatively passe. Rhyme is not necessarily restrictive or formulaic. It can still be powerful, enjoyable and richly expressive.

I was looking for some books that give examples of many of the poetic forms. John Hollander's Rhyme's Reason is spot on. There are indeed many examples with a brief explanation.

I bought this book for a class and it is my favorite of all our poetry texts. It is just plain fun to read. Hollander presents poetic forms by using them as he explains each concept. I noticed that some people thought this was "too witty" to learn from, but I found it helpful in that I forgot that I was trying to learn and simply just began playing with language. Which is as it should be when writing poetry!

Overall a great book, I recommend it for beginning poets especially. But I'm guessing it would be a fun refresher for veterans of word-craft as well.

Hollander's book is a solid little primer on some of the major issues of poetry. Using the technique of "formal self-description" Hollander provides examples of various meters, rhetorical figures, and forms of verse. The writing is clever, and the self-descriptions are insightful.

That said, I think the book is not super useful for teachers, as a textbook that is. Were I to teach a poetry or literature course, I would probably only copy those sections out of the book that cover specific rhetorical figures and stanzaic forms that I planed to teach in my class. Otherwise, a lot of the material will seem superfluous to the work you're doing.

This book helped me out a ton in my college literature classes. In high school we studied absolutely no poetry. So when I went to college I was a little lost, especially since my major is english. Anyways, I love this book and I frequently refer back to it not just for studying poetry but also for writing poetry.