Stephen Fry on Form, Part 1
As I mentioned previously, I’m working through Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled very slowly to absorb as much wisdom as I can about writing poetry. This week’s post covers Chapter 3, Section 1, on form.
The first section on form introduces the idea of the stanza, including its origin, but the bulk of the chapter focuses on why poets should learn to use form. And the simplest answer seems to be “so you can subvert it.” There’s more to it than just that, having to do with form being a better gateway to free verse than vice versa, but again it seems to lead to learning form and mastering it so that you can set it aside when it doesn’t suit, but also to avoid the pretension with which much free verse comes.
Of course, I’ve done exactly the opposite when I stumbled into writing poetry, only tackling forms much later. But I’m hoping that the future sections of this chapter will help me get better at form poetry and then use that to get better at free verse as well!
The next section of this chapter gets into stanzaic variations, including a variety of specific forms that fall into that category!
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